Bluebirds, babies, and orgasms: the women scientists who fought Darwinism’s sexist myths

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Patricia Gowaty were pioneers. Yet their work is still contentious—and their contribution all too often ignored

by Angela Saini / July 6, 2017 / Leave a comment

Published in August 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (left) and Patricia Gowaty (right) corrected myths about female animals. Photo: courtesy of the author/Hrdy/Gowaty

When I set out to write a book on what science tells us about women—a topic as controversial as it is vast—there was one person I knew I had to meet. So I found myself on the sun-drenched road to Winters, a town in California’s western Sacramento Valley. Here, a picturesque walnut farm is home to one of the most incredible women in science, a thinker whose work one researcher told me reduced her to tears. Anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, now professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, can reasonably be credited with transforming the way biologists think about females.

“Everything I am interested in, initially, it’s personal,” she told me as we parked ourselves in deep couches outside her study. Now in her seventies, Hrdy came from a conservative American family which made its money from oil. “I grew up in South Texas, a deeply patriarchal, deeply racist part of the world.” The juxtaposition between this and her current liberal Californian life could not be starker. But it’s also no accident.

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Comments

Mike Ballard
July 9, 2017 at 00:46
Legalise polyandry now! That would be my personal slogan. However, I realise that this is a cultural change most people would not support at this point in history. La luta continua. I do think that the whole cultural rumbling and grumbling about gay marriage contributes to the general historical transition social relations are undergoing nowadays, the transition from the monogamous (and polygamous) family, private property and the class dominated political State towards a free association of human beings who hold the social product of their labour in common and administer their collective wealth in grassroots, democratic ways, leaving their personal lives as a matter for individuals to design for themselves. Monogamy for most humans will ever lead to, "leading lives of quiet desperation" for the biological-evolutionary truth is that humans have an urge to satisfy their sexual needs within the variety of others they find around themselves. Thus, class dominated civilisation has become a fetter on freedom, an outmoded necessity worthy of sublation.
Lauren
July 11, 2017 at 21:30
" Just recently, a paper appeared in a journal claiming that women are less intelligent than men. " -- source please? Thanks!
1. Ben
  July 13, 2017 at 21:54
  I would also like to know the source, as the father of a future scientist I need to know what my daughter will be fighting

Angela Saini

Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist. Her new book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, is out now from Fourth Estate (£12.99)