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7. The Lady Trimates and Feminist Science?: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birut
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We think of science as manipulation, experiment, and quantification done by men dressed in white coats, twirling buttons and watching dials in laboratories. When we read about a woman who gives funny names to chimpanzees and then follows them into the bush, meticulously recording their every grunt and groom, we are reluctant to admit such activity into the big leagues. We may admire Goodall’s courage, fortitude, and patience but wonder if she represents forefront science or a dying gasp from the old world of romantic exploration. . . . The conventional stereotype is so wrong. . . . Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements. —Stephen Jay Gould, Introduction to the revised edition of In the Shadow of Man1 Often I think of science in technological terms—of the cold machinery, the devices, and accelerators, the weapons that science makes possible— all the things that modern science creates and utilizes. However, one day, I thought of science and appreciated its intent to look more closely into the beauty and mystery of nature. I had a glimpse of science in a different light, and at that moment the image of the woman in my dream came to mind. In one view of science the image exists of the male scientist exerting power and control over passive female nature. In this view the practice of science is seen as a violation of the natural world. However, my dream image raised the possibility of an alternative view. I began to consider another generative impulse of pure science—one born of curiosity and the love of nature. Then the woman becomes an intriguing symbol of a new way for me to think about the practice of science and its nature. She embodies the sense of science as the desire to understand nature, pursued in a rational and imaginative way. . . . Science is then not about the power of (male) intellect over passive (female) embodied nature. Rather science is a marriage, the relationship between human intellect and the intelligibility of a dynamic nature—nature which is both mysterious and knowable and in whose knowing we learn something about ourselves. —Mary Palevsky, Atomic Fragments, April 19972 in 1982 three women convened at an explorers club reception in New York City. From outward appearances, they were in their thirties and forties. One was a dulling blond, the other two brunettes; one towThe Lady Trimates and Feminist Science?: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas 7 253 254 ered overtheothertwo, whoappeared to beof average height. Eachwore an informal print cotton dress, though one filled hers out with a clearly pregnant belly. From the pleasant, relaxed expressions on their faces, one might have thought they were wives of important scientists being honored for their research in the field, when in fact the three women were themselves the most famous experts in the world on wild primates. Men in universities on nearly every continent had read as much, if not more, than they on chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans; but no one had logged more than a fraction of their hours in live observation of the animals in their natural habitats. Collectively, the women had spent more than forty years in the forest, and they had only just begun. Jane Goodall, the first of this scientific triumvirate, was a soft-spoken Englishwoman who had studied the chimpanzees of the Gombe River Reserve of Tanzania since 1960. A forty-eight-year-old divorcée and recent widow, she had lost some of the youthful glow that had drawn the attention of more than three million people to pictures of her in National Geographic in 1963. Nearly twenty years later, she was still slim and dignified, her hair tied back in the same loose ponytail. Initially, academics had written her off as a National Geographic cover girl. She was referred to in newspaper articles as the blonde who “preferred chimps to men,” but her life in Africa had not been a publicity stunt after all. Throughout her girlhood, animals had consumed her interest, and she became inexhaustibly curious and patient observing them. At the age of four she waited for hours to witness chickens laying eggs; by nine she was riding horses, by eleven drawing pictures highlighting the differences between green loopers and caterpillars that turned into lime hawk moths. When most adolescent girls were writing to friends about high school crushes, she sat with her nature log classifying bullfinches and hedge sparrow babies. Her fascination with animals did not...