Goodall applied a sociologist’s empathy to her research on the chimps, giving them names and describing them as individuals, which was decried, at first, as unscientific. “I was told at Cambridge I shouldn’t have named the chimps and that they should have had numbers,” Goodall once told the Guardian. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about them having personalities, and certainly not about them thinking or having emotions.”
But it was this, dare I say, feminine approach which led to her groundbreaking discoveries. In getting so close, Goodall was able to observe one chimp, whom she named David Greybeard, fashioning a blade of grass into a tool. Before Goodall’s discovery, the use of tools was thought to be a purely human behavior. Goodall’s research described, for the first time, chimpanzees’s complex social relationships and other supposedly human behaviors like affection.
There were also ways in which being undervalued as a woman was, in itself, an unexpected boon. Goodall wrote in an essay for Time, “Being a woman helped me in practical ways, too. Africa was just moving into independence and white males were still perceived as something of a threat, whereas I as a mere woman was not.” And she told Chatham House, “Other scientists were grumpily saying, ‘She’s only getting this credit because she’s a National Geographic cover girl and she’s got lovely legs,’” but she could also reframe this blunt sexism into a sort of advantage. “I did think, if having lovely legs—which I did because I’ve looked at the film—helps to get money to do what I want to do, then thank you legs.”
Read the full article here
