The Jane Goodalls: Women in Science Defying the Odds

Erika Lorraine Milam

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Introduction

In the last forty years, Jane Goodall has become a saint of modern environmentalism, an unwavering voice calling for the protection of the fauna and flora of Earth’s endangered ecosystems. Goodall’s message of spiritual hope in the face of biodiversity loss and habitat destruction has brought courage and comfort to millions. When she was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2021, Goodall spoke of her turn to conservation as part of a dawning appreciation of the sentience of chimpanzees, insight gained from close observations of generations of individuals in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.

Over these decades, Goodall’s very name has become a trope. “P. Dee Boersma, a University of Washington conservation biologist, is the Jane Goodall of penguins,” reads the byline of a 2009 interview with Boersma in the New York Times. Anne Innis Dagg was once called “Canada’s ‘Jane Goodall of giraffes’” by the Toronto Star. There is also a Jane Goodall of bears, and of trees; a Jane Goodall of ducks, dolphins, wolves, even of “the sea.” Goodall is so well known that her name conveys authority, expertise, and a single-minded, career-long devotion to a single species. 

Other scientists have earned this kind of nomenclatural celebrity, too, centuries before Goodall. Isaac Newton, for example, held a powerful iconic status that started during his life and extended far beyond his death. When a gentleman was called the Newton of an intellectual field—and it was always a man—it meant he had quantified a domain of knowledge or at least identified a natural law or two. Jean-Philippe Rameau became the Isaac Newton of music; Montesquieu of the moral world; Claude Bernard, physiology; Charles Darwin, biology; Robert C. Merton, finance. Over the centuries, the exact meaning became unstuck from more general connotations of Newtonian science. By the time Arnold Schwarzenegger was identified as the Isaac Newton of bodybuilding in 2015, the comparison conveyed a vague scientization of the profession.

Goodall’s immense name recognition belies the initial skepticism she received at the hands of the established scientific community. When she first ventured into the wooded hills of Gombe, anyone with scientific training would not have gambled their promising career on so risky a venture. Goodall had none and so went with great anticipation. It took time for the chimpanzees to habituate to her presence and longer for her to observe them stripping the leaves from sticks and using the bare rods to fish for termites. Her mentor, Louis S. B. Leakey, famously quipped, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.” Always quick to spot an opportunity, Leakey spun this initial success into more funding for the project and a spot in graduate school for Goodall at the University of Cambridge, where she would enter without a bachelor’s degree and earn her Ph.D. in Ethology under the tutelage of Robert Hinde. When Goodall has reflected on those years, she remembers the skepticism of the scientific community regarding her naming of the individuals she watched and learning how to record data according to methods deemed more objective by her peers.   

As a phrase, “the Jane Goodall of…” beckons curious readers to learn more about the scientist and the subjects of their years of devoted attention, conveying respect for the long temporality of expertise, especially in the face of relative neglect from her scientific peers. (And yes, the comparators are typically women.) There is honor, in short, to devoting one’s life to the pursuit of singular knowledge, especially without public recognition. Underneath this lies a complicated narrative about the imperfect safeguards of the scientific enterprise premised (by the final decades of the twentieth century) on meritocracy without regard to sex. Together, the biographies of the Jane Goodalls convey a sense, too, that support for science at the fringes of professional recognition could be obtained by direct appeals to the public, as Goodall’s initial successes were widely circulated through the pages of National Geographic Magazine.

In short, each invocation of “Jane Goodall” as a comparator reinforces a shared set of moral lessons about science. Devotion to one’s research is necessary but unfortunately not sufficient in carving out a career. Given this, it is best to start when you are young, when research can provide a scholarly reason to travel, see the world, and learn new things about how it works. Over time, this sense of adventure can shift into a form of devotion, both to the natural world and to the project of sustaining other women in science.

The Jane Goodall of Magellanic Penguins

Dee Boersma knows the world would be less interesting if it did not contain penguins, lions, or baboons. She has spent her career studying animal behavior and conservation, including forty-two years documenting the nesting sites of Magellanic penguins in Punta Tombo. She calls penguins “sentinel species”—living, charismatic indicators of ecosystem health—and first ventured to Patagonia in the early 1980s. She had studied penguins in the Galápagos for her dissertation research and was keen to get back out into the field.

The Argentinian study was supposed to last for only a few years, complementing her research on the penguins who breed in the Ecuadorian islands, but the longer Boersma stayed, the more questions she had. She returned every season for decades, resulting in a long-term study on the distribution and habits of this squat, charismatic bird. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, Boersma was still returning to Punta Tombo each breeding season, to count, to observe, to analyze.

Boersma’s research on the Magellanic penguins has led to important policy changes, such as moving the oil shipping lanes further offshore, which has prevented thousands of penguins each year from being drenched in crude as they embark on long trips to forage for themselves and their nesting young. Despite this, the penguin population in Punta Tombo—the largest colony of Magellanic penguins found anywhere—has declined by over forty percent since Boersma’s first total census of the site in 1987. Long-term studies such as Boersma’s on penguins and the project Goodall started on chimpanzees in Tanzania have been crucial for understanding how animal populations are changing over time and where they are moving as a function of changing global climates.

When Boersma began her research in Argentina, however, all of that was in the future. There was no paved access to the colony, so she walked kilometers over rough ground to reach the small trailer in which she lived during the season. The trailer had been set in the midst of the colony and the penguins nested around and even underneath it. The quietest time, she recalled fondly, arrives in the middle of the day when the adult penguins are out at sea or sleeping. At night there was plenty of chatter. Over the decades that she has returned to Argentina, access to the site has become easier, not just for her but also for the 100,000 tourists each year who now flock to see the nesting grounds. Punta Tombo has become a major stop in the growing business of ecotourism.

Many of the significant dangers facing the long-term survival of the Magellanic penguins are caused by humans. Oil from tankers floats on seawater from the shipping lanes. Human populations actively inhabit and utilize more land, too, which leaves fewer alternatives for the penguins as local climatic conditions change. Tropical storms are increasing in frequency and strength, swamping the nests and killing young birds before they can grow the adult feathers that would keep them insulated when wet. More immediately, greater numbers of tourists has meant increased disruptions to shore life—more frequent human-penguin interactions, more human sewage, and a greater number of penguins killed by moving vehicles. After the park service paved a road to the nesting grounds, tourist numbers ballooned and now reach one person for every two penguins, a ratio that remains in flux. 

Funding research in conservation biology and animal behavior has never been easy, forcing Boersma to be creative. She spent several years as a naturalist on high-end cruise ships, giving lectures about conservation and animal behavior in general, and penguins in particular. Tourists might cause logistical problems, but they can also bring money in the form of park entrance fees and donations to conservancies. Sometimes tourists also make individual donations to the research projects they encounter in their travels, like Boersma’s penguins. One of Boersma’s most unintentionally canny plans, however, came from following a friend’s suggestion that they enroll in a financial investment course. It was 1987, early in her career. She says that she has forgotten most of what she learned but as part of the course each person bought stock in a company: Apple. This happenstance investment later funded the creation of the Boersma Endowed Chair in Natural History and Conservation at the University of Washington, a post currently occupied by Briana Abrams, perhaps a “Jane Goodall of wild dogs” in the making.  

Goodall too has had to rely on private philanthropy throughout her career, both before she had proven results, and later, when financial support for research on chimpanzees was endangered by civil unrest in the area around Gombe. Because Goodall could not remain on-site permanently, this disqualified her from the many granting agencies in the US and UK. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1975, which facilitated private donations and has remained a substantial source of funding for research on chimpanzees. More recently the organization has also supported projects in the region that aim to reduce competition between humans and chimpanzees for the same natural resources by raising public awareness through environmental education and by creating sustainable livelihoods for communities that live in areas near chimpanzee habitats.

Boersma believes that coming to terms with the future of sentinel species on the planet, whether aquatic or terrestrial, necessitates such long-term investment. “We have to understand the places that they live, and all places are not the same,” she has said. “Fortunately, there’s crazy people like Jane Goodall who spent her entire life on chimps and me that spent my time on penguins.” Long-term studies like these, Boersma notes, require not just money but infrastructure to keep them running.

This kind of long-term continuity is often provided by universities, which play a crucial role in supporting research projects located at a great distance from their campuses. Universities are designed to educate generations of students and provide the kind of infrastructure that makes possible long-term studies by paying scientists a salary and allowing them to pursue whatever research projects they want, provided they can find funding. (On occasion faculty use their salaries to supplement their research funds, too. That is not how funded scientific research is supposed to work, but in the field sciences it is a surprisingly common practice.)

Universities are built to outlast any individual scientist, dean, or department, which makes them more reliable than many other forms of scientific infrastructure. Universities plant trees that bear fruit for future generations. This thinking undergirded Boersma’s decision to use the proceeds earned from her Apple stock to endow a professorship at the University of Washington, where she has spent her career. Her legacy will live on long after she retires. Yet universities have not always been easy places for women to navigate.

The Jane Goodall of Giraffes

In hopes of travelling to Africa to study giraffe behavior in the wild, in 1956 Anne Innis had written to everyone she could think of, especially the directors of wildlife departments in each country where she knew giraffes could be found. She was looking for a place to call home near where she could watch the animals every day.

Anne Innis Dagg in Africa, 2020 | Wikimedia Commons

This list of possible mentors included Louis S. B. Leakey in Kenya, a curator at the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi and already known by the mid-1950s for the fossil work at Olduvai Gorge with his wife and collaborator, paleontologist Mary Leakey. He responded thrice, saying that he had “insufficient funds and no vacancy,” nor would he be able to offer her a position at the museum. He wondered if she would be willing to work in Kenya’s Medical Research Laboratories and then study giraffe in her spare time. He did add, however, that if she were willing to come a little later, in the “middle of next year perhaps,” then he might be able to work something out. Innis was eager to start sooner, so she moved on. Goodall would meet Leakey in May of 1957—about the time he had told Innes he would have a position opening. Leakey gave Goodall a tour of the museum and, given her interest in animals, offered her a position as his secretary. His previous secretary, it turned out, had just left to “watch gorillas." In the meantime, every one of Innis’s initial letters was met with the same answer: no, or more politely, not now.

She then started to write using just her initials, concerned that people might be rejecting her inquiries because she was a woman. Alexander Matthew, owner of Fleur de Lys citrus farm and cattle ranch on the western edge of Kruger National Park in South Africa, responded positively. Innis immediately made plans. As she embarked on the first leg of her trip, a boat that would take her from her native Canada to England, she followed up with another letter to Matthew informing him of the fact that she was a woman and that she was on her way. At first he said it would be impossible—he was too old, she was too young, it would be improper—but then relented. Innis arrived in South Africa to study giraffes in 1956, four years before Goodall set foot in Gombe to observe the behavior of chimpanzees. 

To drive the thousand miles from Cape Town to Kruger, Innis purchased a second-hand Ford Prefect. She named it Camelo, short for camelopardalis, the species name given to the giraffe by Linneaus in 1758 (in fact, there are multiple species). Camelo was blue green and the license plate read CF 2808. She still remembers the first afternoon at Fleur de Lys when Matthew took her out to see the giraffes on his property. She was struck by the speed with which they pick their heads up after drinking from a small pool. In recalling the scene decades later, she still sometimes chokes up. “I was just completely in love with this giraffe. I thought it was the most amazing animal I had ever seen. It was a very moving moment for me.”

As she continued to watch the giraffes on future solo outings, Innis remained mesmerized. At the beginning she stayed in the increasingly sweltering car with the windows rolled down to admit any breeze. She drove to nearby water holes to observe giraffes if they were there and continued onwards if they were not. Depending on what they were doing, she would record their interactions as events unfolded and details like what they were eating. She also developed a habit of surveying at five-minute intervals the activities of each individual within sight. When Innis watched the males spar, she could hear the impact of their necks from over 100 meters away. She observed giraffes browse acacia trees. She came to recognize a few of the giraffes as individuals, having memorized their distinctive spot patterns. One day, to escape the oppressive heat of the metal car in the bright sun, she stepped outside do some ballet exercises and stretch her legs. The animals nearby were transfixed, observing her closely for a few minutes as she continued, and then turned to glide away. “That was the end of my ballet exercises,” she later remarked in an interview—she wanted to watch them, not vice versa.

Innis returned to Canada a year later, notebooks in hand, eager to pursue a career in science and marry her fiancé—physicist Ian Ralph Dagg—who had been working and waiting for her at home. She began her Ph.D. in biology just as he finished his. Within a few years, the rosy beginning of her career was mired in disappointment. Universities were complicated places for female scientists: more stable and long-term than other kinds of institutions and funding, to be sure, yet open in turn to their own biases and forms of discrimination. Innis Dagg completed her Ph.D. and even secured a faculty position at the nearby University of Guelph. When time came for tenure, however, the department voted against her case and the university refused her appeal.

Innis Dagg’s experiences in South Africa might have passed unnoticed to the historical record, as most things do. Innis Dagg never gave up her passion for animal behavior or giraffes. Yet her experience at Guelph provided an additional focus: documenting the systematic (if inadvertent) devaluation of women’s creative and intellectual work by men who served on granting agencies, tenure committees, and the editorial boards of academic journals. She kept publishing, some on natural history and some about the specific consequences for married women of anti-nepotism rules at universities. In 1977 she started publishing work by her husband as well as her own books as softcover typescripts under the imprint of the Otter Press. Her story periodically caught the attention of journalists.

A filmmaker heard one such interview with Innis Dagg on the radio and was intrigued. Matthew, it turned out, had owned a movie camera capable of making color films. He had been keen to generate footage of the giraffes, she recalled, as was she. The film they recorded captured both her and the giraffes during her year at the Fleur de Lys ranch. Scenes included Innis walking to Camelo carrying her gear, in the car quietly taking notes longhand in her journal, of the giraffes themselves moving through the savannah landscape, stooping to drink, and neck-boxing. Matthew had a creative eye and sought out artistic perspectives, including Dagg reflected in the side mirrors of the car or glimpsed through the windows. She made a good subject—as had Goodall herself in National Geographic film specials—a young woman joyfully going about the business of observing the behavior of animals. 

The filmmaker, Alison Reid, thought so, too, and crafted a film inserting this old footage into new, documenting Innis Dagg’s travels as she returned to South Africa for the first time since she was a young woman. The year after the film was released in Canada, the University of Guelph officially apologized and established a student summer research assistantship in her name. Innis Dagg appreciated the gesture but understood it as a little late to make any material difference to her abridged life as a scientist.

The Jane Goodall as Self and Other

The lives of Boersma and Innis Dagg reflect two essential threads woven into the trope of Jane Goodall comparisons: Goodall’s spiritual devotion to conservation and the difficulty female scientists faced when confronting the predominantly male scientific academy of the decades following the Second World War. Goodall never fit smoothly within traditional academia. She had ventured to Kenya and worked as Louis Leakey’s secretary before he secured money for her first six months in Tanzania. They both assumed Goodall’s study would last for only a short time. Almost all long-term projects start as small, pilot investigations, and most end that way. After a few years, it became clear that Goodall intended to keep working with the chimpanzees and Leakey was growing older: she needed a Ph.D. to secure grants in her own name. Another of Leakey’s protégés, Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorilla behavior, would follow her to ethological study at Cambridge, earning her own Ph.D. in 1976. Goodall later taught part-time at Stanford University for a few years (the rest of her time was spent in Tanzania), but when the political situation in the area worsened, resulting in the kidnapping of three students, a lasting arrangement with the university proved impossible.

By the mid-1980s, Goodall’s attention had turned from chimpanzee behavior to conservation. In writing about the experience, she remembers flying over Gombe and seeing that the edge of the forest favored by the chimpanzees had shrunk to the edges of the park that protected them. Only with the cooperation of the local community and concerted attention to conservation, she realized, would the population survive for her (or anyone else) to learn more about them. Behavioral biology required conservation, which in turn meant transforming the minds of the public, locally and globally.  

Goodall is now revered as a saintly scientific figure who has devoted her career to understanding and protecting the lives of the chimpanzees at Gombe. Goodall has leaned into this devotion, writing of her life and path to environmentalism as a spiritual journey. In 2002 the United Nations listed her as one of their Messengers of Peace and in 2004 she was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Her admirers think of her as “the closest thing to a saint that the environmental movement has today” and call her simply, Jane.

As a collective, the “Jane Goodalls” are inspiring because in accounts of their lives these women are portrayed as loving the animals they study. Their passion and drive are relatable, as are the infrastructural challenges they faced that nevertheless make it difficult to get the money, be taken seriously, book the trip, or receive the degree or award. Goodall’s public visibility was a negative when she was young; her celebrity made it more difficult for peers to accept her conclusions as serious contributions to the field. That very celebrity plays differently now. Goodall celebrated her nintieth birthday earlier this year and in the intervening time has become a devotional figure for girls interested in pursuing a life in science. Hers is a hopeful voice, fighting against climatological and academic odds—the stuff tropes are made of.

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Erika Lorraine Milam is the Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. Her work explores how and why scientists and public audiences have used studies of animal behavior to understand human behavior, from sex to aggression. She has published two books, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), as well as co-edited two major projects, with Suman Seth, Descent of Darwin: Race, Sex, and Human Nature (BJHS Themes 6, 2021) and with Robert A. Nye, Scientific Masculinities (Osiris 30, 2015).