Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Patricia Gowaty were pioneers. Yet their work is still contentiousand their contribution all too often ignored by Angela Saini / July 6, 2017 / Leave a comment

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 womena topic as controversial as it is vastthere was one person I knew I had to meet. So I found myself on the sun-drenched road to Winters, a town in Californias 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, its 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 its also no accident.

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Bluebirds, babies, and orgasms: the women scientists who fought Darwinism's sexist myths - Prospect