Being a Woman Was Crucial to My Success in a Male-Dominated Field

By Dr. Jane Goodall, TIME

13 March 18

 

hen I was a little girl, I used to dream as a man, because I wanted to do things that women didn’t do back then such as traveling to Africa, living with wild animals and writing books. I didn’t have any female explorers or scientists to look up to but I was inspired by Dr. Dolittle, Tarzan and Mowgli in The Jungle Book — all male characters. It was only my mother who supported my dream: “You’ll have to work hard, take advantage of opportunities and never give up,” she’d tell me. I’ve shared that message with young people around the world, and so many have thanked me, and said, “You taught me that because you did it, I can do it too.” I wish mum was around to hear the way her message to me has touched so many lives.

I remember a very funny time in my life just before I got to Africa. My paternal uncle was Sir Michael Spens, son of Lord Patrick Spens. Michael was keen to present me at court as a debutante — in those days society girls had a season of dances and balls — a kind of marriage market. Obviously to me, this was completely absurd but I had to humor Michael, and so I lined up in Buckingham Palace to shake hands with the Queen. I remember being surrounded by girls who said to me, “Don’t you dream of being a lady-in-waiting?” I replied, “Absolutely not – I want to live among wild animals.” They recoiled in horror. They thought I was very weird, but then I thought they were very weird, too.

I couldn’t afford to go to university so I got a secretarial job in London. Opportunity came with a letter from a school friend inviting me for a holiday to Kenya. (I worked as a waitress to save enough money to go.) And it was in Kenya that I met the eminent paleontologist, Dr Louis Leakey. He was impressed by my knowledge of African animals (I had read every book I could find) and sent me to observe chimpanzees in what was then Tanganyika. He felt that a knowledge of the primate most like us would help him to better understand the probable behavior of our Stone Age ancestors whose fossilized remains he was excavating. He took me despite my lack of academic credentials — or even because of them as he wanted someone with a mind uncluttered by the reductionist scientific thinking of the time.

What an amazing opportunity. At first the chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me, but once I gained their trust I soon realized just how similar they are to us. It was an exciting day when I observed, for the first time, a chimpanzee using and making tools to “fish” termites from their nests. At that point, National Geographic offered to continue funding my research, and sent Hugo van Lawick, a talented film maker, to document the chimps’ behaviors. A year later Geographic wanted me to write an article for their magazine. And soon after that they made a documentary from Hugo’s film footage, narrated by Orson Welles.

I had to go to America, attend a press conference and give a few talks. The media produced some rather sensational articles, emphasizing my blond hair and referring to my legs. Some scientists discredited my observations because of this — but that did not bother me so long as I got the funding to return to Gombe and continue my work. I had never wanted to be a scientist anyway, as women didn’t have such careers in those days. I just wanted to be a naturalist. If my legs helped me get publicity for the chimps, that was useful.

After this Louis arranged for me to go to Cambridge University where I became the eighth person in their history to be admitted to work for a PhD without a BA. But to my dismay, I was quickly told that I had done my study all wrong. I should have numbered the chimps rather than given them names, and I could not talk about their personalities, minds or emotions as those features were unique to humans. I was told there is a difference between humans and all other animals. That way of thinking, of course, makes it easier to treat animals as things rather than sentient and sapient beings able to experience joy, fear, despair and pain. Easier to work in a factory farm or medical research laboratory and for us to enjoy the sport of trophy hunting.

But I understood the true nature of animals from my childhood teacher — my dog, Rusty. So I knew that in this respect the Cambridge professors were wrong — as does everyone who has shared their life in a meaningful way with a dog or a horse or a hamster or a bird. I stuck to my convictions and because the chimpanzees are so like us biologically as well as behaviorally, gradually scientists have become less reductionist. Indeed, animal personalities and emotions are now subjects for serious study, and there is a huge amount of research being conducted on the intelligence of animals ranging from chimpanzees, elephants and dolphins, to birds, octopuses and even some insects.

I was also told that scientists must be coldly objective and never show empathy for their “subjects.” But you can make observations that are absolutely scientifically accurate even while having empathy for the being you are studying. In fact, it can sometimes provide an intuition about the meaning of a certain behavior. You can then test your intuition with scientific rigor.

In chimp society there are good and bad mothers, and looking back over the years, we know that the offspring of mothers who were affectionate, protective but not over protective and, above all, supportive, tend to do better and to have more self-confidence. The males tend to rise to a higher position in their hierarchy and females are more successful as mothers – which is their main job. And throughout evolution this was important for the human female too – they needed to be patient, quick to understand the wants and needs of their infants before they could speak and good at keeping the peace between family members. If these qualities are, to some extent, handed down in our female genes, this may explain why women, so often, make good observers. This helped me, for Louis Leakey firmly believed that women made better field workers than men. 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.

Because I succeeded in a scientific world largely dominated by men, I’ve been described as a feminist role model, but I never think of myself in that way. Although the feminist movement today is different, many women who have succeeded have done so by emphasizing their masculine characteristics. But we need feminine qualities to be both accepted and respected and in many countries this is beginning to happen. I love that the new movement involves women joining their voices together on social media, thus giving a sense of solidarity.

There are indigenous people in Latin America who have a saying that their tribe is like an eagle: one wing is male and one wing is female, and only when the wings are equally strong will their tribe fly high. And this, indeed, is worth fighting for.

It's Too Late to Worry About 'Normalizing' Trump. Decades of Policy Did That for Him

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

13 March 18

The current president is just too stupid to be embarrassed about things his predecessors all did, too

ax Boot, the noted Washington Post columnist, and "Jeane Kilpatrick senior fellow for National Security Studies" at the Council for Foreign Relations, thinks Donald Trump is betraying American values by meeting with Kim Jong-Un.

Such a meeting, Boot says, would mean "giving the worst human-rights abuser on the planet what he most wants: international legitimacy."

Let's unpack that one for a minute. We're worried now about giving human rights abusers legitimacy?

The idea that we don't legitimize human-rights abusers is a laugh-out-loud joke everywhere outside America. You could fill a book chapter with the history of the friendly relations between American presidents and just the foreign dictators who are credibly reported to have eaten other human beings.

Here's a cheery letter from Gerald Ford inviting Central African Republic dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa (the remains of 30 people were found in his crocodile pond upon ouster) to Washington.

We helped install Idi Amin, too. He later denied rumors of cannibalism, saying human flesh was "too salty," but he had other equally upsetting hobbies. We've supported a couple of generations of Nguemas in Equatorial Guinea, both of whom – uncle Macias and nephew Teodoro Obiang – reportedly ate their political enemies.

This is in addition to the countless Batistas and Suhartos and Diems and Marcoses and Pinochets who were just murdering thieving monsters we legitimized not by sitting down with them at the negotiating table, but by making them allies we showered with things like arms and money.

The problem with Trump is that he's too stupid to be embarrassed by such relationships. He constantly makes all of Washington look bad by jumping too enthusiastically in bed with the blood-soaked juntas and anti-democratic governments we more quietly embraced in the past.

Over the weekend, for instance, Trump horrified progressives when he called for the death penalty for drug dealers, an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping. "I don't know if this country's ready for it," Trump moaned.

This is monstrous, of course, and God help us if we actually try to enact this policy.

But the fact that we're so tight with repressive China to begin with is on Trump's predecessors, who should have taken a harder line on human rights issues a long time ago.

For decades, American officials in both parties have overlooked China's horrific record on human rights. Both continually lobbied for China to keep receiving Most Favored Nation status and other trade benefits, largely because corporate donors wanted it.

The real measuring stick we use when it comes to determining whether a foreign regime is irredeemably monstrous or an important ally is whether the leaders we're talking about are our bastards, or their own bastards – puppets, or free-lancers.

Dictators who take the throne with our backing get weapons and cash. The ones who do it without our backing usually find themselves getting a nice healthy dose of regime change sooner or later.

Sometimes the offender starts out as an American lapdog only to leave the kennel and instantly become a Dangerous International Human Rights Offender.

Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll until 1988, but later became disobedient and found himself holed up in a nunnery listening to invading American troops blaring "I Fought the Law" (the Clash version, in a nice detail) as they waited for him to surrender.

Saddam Hussein was another friend-turned-target, as was Diem and a few others. The line between friend and pariah in our foreign policy is incredibly slim. It really has nothing to do with anything beyond the political utility, to America, of the regime in question.

This is why the debate over Trump meeting with Kim Jong-Un is so absurd. The crime here isn't meeting with a dictator – we snuggle up to worse creeps all the time – the crime is meeting with an out of pocket dictator.

Rachel Maddow last week struggled to articulate why she was so opposed to negotiations with North Korea. Her basic take seemed to be "Nobody has ever met with the dictator of North Korea, therefore nobody should ever meet with the dictator of North Korea."

A lot of self-described progressives seem to be agreeing with her. This is interesting, since the same idea was incredibly popular among the same audience not long ago.

On July 23rd, 2007, at the Citadel in South Carolina, Democratic presidential candidates held the first presidential debate of the 2008 election cycle. In it, an audience member asked if candidates would be willing to meet with leaders of countries like Syria, Iran, and North Korea.

"I would," Obama said. "And the reason is this: the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration, is ridiculous."

As a colleague pointed out to me over the weekend, this was one of the moments that first endeared progressives to Barack Obama, precisely because it defied bipartisan Washington consensus. True to form, after that debate, both Hillary Clinton and George Bush ("Some seem to think we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals") ripped Obama's naiveté.

The idea that the United States does not negotiate in public until the enemy has already surrendered in private has long been a bedrock principle in D.C.

It's one of the reasons why people in other countries hate us so much. It's also why our "peace proposals" so often read like ultimatums.

A classic example was the Rambouillet deal presented to Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic agreed to the key principle of an independent Kosovo, but didn't want the deal secured by NATO troops, as outlined. He preferred the occupying troops fly under a U.N. or an OSCE flag. We told him to take the deal or be bombed.

He wouldn't budge, we bombed him, and our news media consistently misreported this war-starting sequence of events. The New York Times went so far as to say Milosevic "absolutely refused to entertain an outside force in Kosovo."

The current consensus on North Korea is basically the same. It's said repeatedly we shouldn't countenance a meet with the mad dictator until the mad dictator agrees in advance to surrender. Doing anything else makes us look weak, and gives a PR win to a murderous autocrat. And we wouldn't want that!

The flamboyant horribleness of Trump is allowing warmongering, democracy-hating hacks on both sides of the aisle to rewrite history. They're penning a new creation story that dates America's embrace of murderous dictators to Trump's election.

"Another morning in America," sighed Paul Krugman, after Trump invited Egypt's ruthless Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to Washington last year, and called him a "fantastic guy." Politico chimed in: "Critics worry the president has a love for tyrants and little interest in promoting human rights and democracy."

What these people left out of their outrage is that we'd been supplying Sisi with jets and missiles since the Obama years. As The Intercept pointed out, exactly the same thing happened when Trump and Tillerson cozied up to the repressive Bahrain regime (who began receiving arms from us in 2015).

One of the constant themes we hear on social media and from pundits is that the press has to go the extra mile to avoid "normalizing" Donald Trump. The problem is that when it comes to embracing autocratic regimes, Trump actually is normal. We should be ashamed not just of him, but of the decades of votes we cast for politicians who did the same things.

We helped create the pre-condition for Trump by continually spreading the idea that it's OK to ally ourselves with leaders who abuse their subjects – who push dissenters out of airplanes, electrocute their genitals, bomb women and children, and so on – so long as our economic interests are protected.

I would love to be able to point a finger at Donald Trump and say, "The United States does not sit down with murderous dictators!"

But we can't say that, can we? Not with a straight face, anyway.