Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution
Carole Jahme
Virago, £18.99, 320pp
Buy it at BOLRebecca Ham was gored by a wild buffalo, twice through her breast and once in her ankle. Jo Thompson caught the last boat out of the Congo when the region degenerated into civil war. Dian Fossey was kidnapped, raped repeatedly and urinated upon before being locked in a cage with 18 dead men.
Studying wild primates is fraught with difficulty and hardship: field work is frequently arduous and carried out in war-torn areas; it can take months for the animals to grow accustomed to a human presence; and the subjects can be violent - orang-utans, for instance, sometimes rape women. And yet primatology is the only area of science in which women outnumber men. Women make up 62 per cent of members of the World Directory of Primatologists; women run 90 per cent of primate sanctuaries.
Ironically, it was a man who was responsible for introducing women to primatology. Louis Leakey, a paleoanthropologist based in Kenya, selected and funded the three most famous female primatologists: Jane Goodall, who studies chimpanzees, Dian Fossey, who devoted her life to gorillas, and Biruté Galdikas, who works with orang-utans.
Leakey wanted primatology to be the study of the similarities between us and our nearest living relatives, the apes. A well-known womaniser, he was in love with Goodall and later Fossey. He chose naive women who were intellectual blank slates, often beautiful (Goodall was a 23-year-old blonde when they first met), and willing to live in remote areas of the jungle for at least five years while remaining totally reliant on him for academic guidance, support and money. Goodall called him "Fairy Foster Father"; his pet name for her was Mwendwa, Kikuyu for "My Most Beloved".
According to Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts, a discourse on women and apes, these women have come to represent three archetypal images, and have inspired legions of fans and a new generation of primatologists. Jane Goodall's supporters tend to be middle-class women who admire chimpanzees and believe them to be the most intelligent ape; Dian Fossey attracts women who are disappointed with mankind and idolise the natural world; and Biruté Galdikas's fans are spiritual conservationists who want to save the rainforest and the jewel in the jungle's crown, the orang-utan.
Their fame spread not through academia but via the media: Leakey persuaded National Geographic to feature his women and their apes in what are now landmark films. Naturally, the filmmakers portrayed the women in a particular light: Goodall and Fossey, both nubile white women, were shown reaching out and touching the black fur of our savage ape cousins in the dark heart of Africa. As Jahme says, "The published images of the vulnerable women 'alone' with their apes were so powerful that they captured the imagination of the general public."
But just what is it about women and apes? Why are so many female scientists drawn to this field? Jahme believes, like Leakey, that it is because women are better at picking up non-verbal cues. Primed to be able to "read" a baby's or a man's intentions and desires without words, women are better at understanding primate motivations. "When women choose to study and communicate with non-human primates they are effectively choosing to return to a time before language evolved." Jahme continues, "65% per cent of human language is non-verbal. Most of the time we instinctively communicate with one another by means other than the spoken word, using eye contact, facial expression and gesture." As, of course, do primates.
Leakey also thought that women were ideally suited to study primates because, as Jahme says, "women were inherently patient and silent observers, whereas men were ambitious hierarchical careerists. A life of near-poverty watching animals live out long lives for 10 hours a day, decade by decade, was not going to turn men on at all". Jahme thinks that it is the male ego that has prevented men from disappearing into the jungle for years, and that the women she describes do not seem to be looking for fame and fortune.
When Goodall first began to publish papers, the academic world was horrified that she assigned gender to her animals and called them by name instead of giving them numbers. It was pioneering work such as Goodall's that allowed scientists to recognise the role female apes play in primate societies, and that individuals do matter: some apes make good friends, while there are bullies, thugs, peacekeepers and troublemakers, high-rankers and no-hopers in every chimpanzee group.
The ability of female primatologists to sit and observe all day, to look at all individuals and their activities - not just the infrequent but dramatic incidents, such as fights - has led to insights that arguably only women would have had. For example, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature, has a theory that stems from her work watching male langurs killing infants and from seeing the obvious enjoyment female primates take in having sex. She thinks that the female orgasm originally evolved so that females would be encouraged to have sex with more than one mate, so that every male might think an infant was theirs and either care for the baby or, at the very least, not kill it (male primates will kill infants that are not theirs so that the female will come into season quickly and bear their offspring).
Jahme's book, while it is an interesting and insightful guide to "female" primatology, is not particularly well structured, and does not truly get to the heart of why women are interested in apes. Women may be better at understanding non-verbal cues and could be more patient than men, but if they are so skilled socially, then why do they abandon family and friends in pursuit of life in the jungle with only apes for company? In the past society would not allow them to pursue the kind of autonomy they have in the rainforest, but the situation has (hopefully) changed.
It is left to primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh to suggest fleetingly that women are successful in this field because it is a new one - yet so is nanotechnology. Arguably, many modern female primatologists do behave like men, spending one to two years in the field before publishing papers and launching their career. Frequently, papers published on ape psychology are by men (perhaps because this requires working with captive apes), and there are increasing numbers of men, such as Bill McGrew, Richard Wrangham and Christophe Boesche, who have been inspired by the three female pioneers to spend years in the field themselves. They and others like them now run extensive field sites.
As for women not being ego-driven, in any field where rewards are scarce there are intense rivalries and jealousies, and the sisterhood of primatologists is no exception. Jahme describes how one woman murdered a chimp another was introducing back to the wild, and the equivalent kind of career sabotage sometimes occurs in the "gentler" world of academia.
One of the strengths that women have brought to primatology is treating the animals as individuals and becoming involved not only in their lives, but in helping to conserve them. However, there is a fine balance between supreme involvement in an animal's life and rigorous scientific analysis unswayed by personal bias or gender; when one is studying a creature that seems to be so similar to oneself, it is easy to overstep this boundary - whether you are a man or a woman.
• Sanjida O'Connell's book Mindreading: How We Learn to Love and Lie (Arrow, £6.99) deals with how we develop an understanding of what people and animals might be thinking.
