HARAWAY

11WOMEN'S PLACE IS

IN THE JUNGLE[If] the rhetoric of conviction were to be replaced by therhetoric of mockery, if the topics of the patient constructionof the images of redemption were to be replaced by thetopics of the impatient dismantling and upsetting of everyholy and venerable image-oh, on that day even you, Wil-liam, and all your knowledge, would be swept away! (Eco1983: 476)

Rouse ye, my people, shake off torpor, impeach the dreadboss monkey and reconstruct the Happy Family. (MarkTwain)

T he first lines quoted here, from Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, were spatout by the aged and blind Medieval librarian, Jorge, who was desperatelytrying to prevent the discovery of the lost book of Aristotle's Rhetoric, on

laughter. Laughter, thought Jorge, was inimical to the salvation of the soul; it wasthe devil's work, leading the Christian away from serious contemplation of the truth.William thought rather that laughter was an indispensible tool in the pursuit ofunderstanding. Mark Twain and PT. Barnum would have agreed. The secondquotation is from "Barnum's First Speech in Congress." I Twain composed hisversion of what Barnum surely would have said, had he been elected in his bid forCongress. The tradition of hoax in American history is indelibly associated withP.T. Barnum. Hoax was a popular nineteenth-century form of entertainment thattested the intelligence of the audience; it was less a form of deception than a formof interrogation and an invitation to find the flaw in an apparent natural truth.Hoax assumed greater confidence in the active intelligence of the audience thandid the more reverent television nature special. The relation of hoax and popularnatural history is unnervingly close. A reminder of this relationship is particularlysalutary in approaching the political and biological science of being female. Hoaxand natural history both have deep roots in democratic and populist histories, butthe practice of hoax more seriously resists the closures of those hegemonic discourseson nature in which each being finds its ordained place. Ordination has been gener-ally bad for the health of females. Feminists-women and men-and women-feminist and not-trace a fine line as scientists drawing and redrawing the objects

279

280 / THE POLITICS OF BEING FEMALE

of biological and medical knowledge marked female. Females as natural-technicalobjects of biological discourse are not unlike the conundrum in P. T. Barnum'searly museum that tested the viewer's credulity and acuity-a mermaid composedof the head and torso of a mummified monkey stiched to the tail of a large fish.Our problem will be to find the evidence of stitchery without ripping out thepatterns in the lives of females-fish, monkeys, or scientists. Complemented bya ready suspicion for the flaw in apparent natural truths, laughter is anindispensable tool in deconstructions of the bio-politics of being female. Suspicionand irony are basic to feminist reinscriptions of nature's text.

Redrawing Sex: Ruby Tuesday Testifies onthe BBC

A personal interview and television documentary with an authentic witness of theape-to-human transition could only be imagined in America, with its extraordinarycultural appreciation of personal testimony about human potential. From the GreatAwakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the proliferationof human potential therapies of the twentieth century, Americans have knownhow to make experience talk. "Ruby" is a freeze-thawed woman of the Pliocene,fortuitously recovered for science by a team of paleoanthropologists, with the famil-iar names of John D. Hansom, Roderick Luckey, and Aaron Killjoy. A creation ofAdrienne Zihlman and Jerold Lowenstein (1983), Ruby makes a single appearance,an interview conducted in the British Museum, in which she makes her account ofher life available to an international public. (Zihlman and Lowenstein, her husband,are Euro-American evolutionary scientists, one a Ph.D specialist in primate compar-ative functional anatomy and the other an M.D. with interests in biochemical aspectsof fossil interpretation.) Ruby had learned enough modern language to make theinterview possible, although ambiguity about many key events at this fateful timeof transitions results from the difficulties of translation in this unique ethnographicencounter. But Ruby seemed reassuringly adaptable in the world in which she wokeup, even to seeing career possibilities in her status (as long as she stayed unmarried)and to getting around London on a moped.

What provoked this article, the interview with "Ruby"? That question cannotbe answered direcdy-a rhetorical problem structuring all of Part III because"the politics of being female" are at the origin of western order, includingscientific accounts of what it means to be human, to be female, and to be anorganism. But women's authorship of those politics is not, literally, "original."

\ \ Females and women have been sites for the construction of others' discourses\

I(Ma.ni1987). In the west-irichiding Westernsden~ein-~l-its foundational mythiCmoments of origin with "the Greeks" or at the great instauration of "the scientificrevolution" or at the moment of Darwin's trans formative account of "the originof species"-~o _beX~!I.lal_e__haLQ~~n~~be ~E~text, not an _::tuthor ~nd a subjectof history. Tooe female has been to e Woman, the plot space for male potency(de Lauretis 1987). Marked as female, the social group of women comesinto ascientific world already crowded with the presence of the word; women's storiesare perceived to begin in medias res, a rather difficult position for a putativeorigin account. Actual men's accounts, of course, also always begin in the middle,within a web of sustaining and limiting discourses. It is only Man's account which

WOMEN'S PLACE IS IN THE JUNGLE / 281

produces the illusion of the start of the conversation, and he is not real, despitehis world historical power. But actual men's accounts have been taken as thepremise for further discourse more easily than actual women's writing. This isnot a small matter. How may the people known simultaneously as women andas scientists-an oxymoronic social subject only beginning to break down-intervene in the construction of the potent natural-technical objects of knowledgecalled females?

I like to use the image of "Milton's daughters," borrowing from the feministliterary critics, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert (1979), because I am compelled bytheir account of the female children of John Milton, reading the Bible to their blindfather, the great Protestant poet of Paradise Lost and civil patriarch of the EnglishRevolution, participating in the seventeenth-century debates that founded the termsof male citizenship in much of the modern western world, while crafting the corres-ponding epic of female incapacity in his portrait of Eve. Who knows what storiesthose daughters were imagining? Gubar and Gilbert, painfully aware of the powerof Milton's writing in crafting the English language and bounding anglophoneimaginations of origins, set out to account for English-speaking women's literaryproductions in terms of alternate strategies available to Milton's daughters. Theycould attempt to ignore the father's story, starting completely anew; or they couldpretend to misunderstand, to remain faithful, but still to say something more freeingfor themselves in the structure of narrative. Either way, they risked looking foolish,as if they did not know the rudiments about human potential and had forgottenthat their role was to read the story, not write it.

Women practicing the highly narrative life sciences and human sciences of biologyand anthropology have been in a similar social and linguistic position.2 Some of thewomen practicing primatology who have contributed to this section and to otherparts of the book have objected to the image of "daughters," seeing their contribu-tion unmarked by gender and not derivative from the authorizing masculinistaccounts. I do not think scientific women have been that lucky. The law of the fathermight be a myth, but its very real potency is hard to deconstruct. Perhaps it is moreimportant to remember that the father was blind than that he bestowed the firstnames, or even the capacity to name, in the primate order. And perhaps thisgeneration of daughters and sons can shatter the logics and hoaxes of kinship sothat Ruby can move safely around the streets of London. But Ruby cannot comefirst; Zihlman's and Lowenstein's parodic construction was a response to a son whowas very faithful to the fathers. The tale begins with interpretations of the recentreappearance in the paleoanthropological field in Hadar, Ethiopia, of a diminutive,ancient (say 3 million-year-old) hominid grandmother-of erect and bipedal habit,but small mind-named by her adamic founders after Lucy in the Sky with Dia-monds Oohanson and Edey 1981). Lucy could be Lucien;-I)"ut1et's give her her sex,since it is crucial to the story at hand. The paucity of African names in paleoanthro-pological and primate literature speaks volumes about the limitations of Adam'sclaim to species fatherhood.

Lucy's nearly complete skeleton was dug out of the earth by the skilled hands ofa brotherhood that recognized in her and associated skeletons a resource for re-establishing potent masculinist versions of "The Origin of Man" (Lovejoy 1981).Lucy was quickly made into a hominid mother and faithful wife, a more efficientreproducing machine than her apish sisters and a reliable, if poorly upholstered,


/

sex doll. These are the qualities essential to the male-dominant, "monogamous,"heterosexual family, named "the family" with mind-numbing regularity. Lucy'sbones were incorporated into a scientific fetish-fantasy, dubbed irreverently the"love and joy" hypothesis in Sarah Hrdy's response (Hrdy and Bennett 1981: 7).What makes Lovejoy's interpretations of Lucy "masculinist," as opposed to simplydistasteful and controversial for his scientific opponents? Is the "masculinism" sim-ply shoddy science in this case? Or is the problem deeper? The answer lies inLovejoy's unwitting discipleship to the father of biology, Aristotle. Lovejoy's "Originof Man" is enmeshed in the narrative of active, potent, dynamic, self-realizingmanhood achieving humanity through reproductive politics: paternity is the key tohumanity.3 And paternity is a world historical achievement. Maternity is inherentlyconservative and requires husbanding to become truly fruitful, to move from animalto human. Standard in western masculinist accounts, disconnection from the category"nature" is essential to man's natural place: human self realization (transcendence,culture) requires it. Here is the node where nature/culture and sex/gender intersect.In the transition to a savannah-mosaic environment, the narrative of matrifocal,female-centered worlds of apes had to give way to the more dynamic "human"family. "In the proposed hominid reproductive strategy, the process of pair bondingwould not only lead to direct involvment of males in the survivorship of offspring[;]in primates as intelligent as extant hominoids, it would establish paternity, and thuslead to a gradual replacement of the matrifocal group by a 'bifocal' one-theprimitive nuclear family" (Lovejoy 1981: 347-8).

Nothing a female could do could lead the species across the hominoid-hominidboundary; she was already doing the best nature allowed. "She would have to devotemore energy to parenting: But natural selection has already perfected her maternalskills over the millions of years her ancestors have occupied West Africa. There is,however, an untapped pool of reproductive energy in most primate species-themale" (Lovejoy 1984: 26). After all, Tarzan was adequately mothered by an ape. InLovejoy's account, through provisioning his now pair-bonded and sedentary mateat a home base with the fruits of plant and small animal gathering, a male couldlead the species across the boundary to the origin of man in the assurance offatherhood. Lovejoy gave up hunting to mark manhood, but he could not dispensewith paternity. The species had reason to stand upright at last, even if not tooefficiently at the start. Man was on the long lonesome road.

And women's place in this revolution is where it was imagined cross-racially in afair section of U.S. 1960s politics-prone. As Lovejoy put it, women did not "lose"estrus; they constantly display its signs. For the new strategy to succeed, "the female

I

must remain constantly attractive to the male. . . . While the mystery of bipedalityhas not been completely solved, the motive is becoming apparent" (1984: 28). Males

, arose to stand upright so that this better success at provisioning would be rewardedby making them into Man, a father, desiring subject, and author. Small wonderthat Lovejoy cited his brother-colleague for evidence that "[human] females arecontinually sexually receptive" (Lovejoy 1981: 346). The footnote read "D.C. Johan-son, personal communication" (1981: 350).

" :::::)Whydid seriou~_s~ientists need to r~_~P!?~<!!2-~~is~ory? Zihlman was involved

with her own researcnand--puollcatT6n, attempting to establish the authority ofstories quite different from Lovejoy's, some of them involving Lucy. It took time towrite about Lovejoy, just as it took space in this book, and Lovejoy has not taken

-


the time to write in detail about the interpretations of Zihlman. His decision not tocite Zihlman's substantial and directly pertinent technical analyses, in a paper repletewith references, including the one cited above crediting his colleague's sexual boast-ing, effectively obscured from the readers of the 1981 Science featured story hersignificant work on bipedalism, sexual dimorphism, and reconstructions of hominidsocial and reproductive behavior at the crucial boundary. The Science article is thepoint: Lovejoy's story and his involvement with immensely important fossils cannotbe ignored. Milton's daughters do not have that luxury. But they do have a weaponmore potent than the undecidably lost or omnipresent signs of estrus. They write.

Zihlman responded with Jerold Lowenstein in the parodic, but seriously intendedinterview with the restored Australopithecus female fossil: "A Few Words with Ruby."Ruby got her name from the Ruby Tuesday of the Rolling Stones. She discussedthe social-reproductive lives of her group, as well as her relationship with herdiscoverers' scientific friend, Dr. Aaron Killjoy. "Ruby sighed, 'One thing hasn'tchanged in three million years. Males still think sex explains everything'

" (1983:83). Ruby was slated for a busy schedule under the patronage of science, includinga BBC documentary called Ruby, Woman of the Pliocene. But she took time to describeher life in terms reminiscent of a contemporary species, Pan paniscus, the pygmychimpanzee, Zihlman's favored model species for studying origins. The essentialsof Ruby's account include active, mobile hominid females, even when carryingbabies; food sharing patterns emerging from matrifocal social organization, withselection for more sociable males in that context; and open and flexible socialgroups. Food played a larger role than sex.

But aside from the specifics, there is a formal difference in the Zihlman story,both in the interview with Ruby and elsewhere.4 There is no origin of the family.There is no chasm, no expulsion from the Garden, no dramatic boundary crossing.The Miocene/Pliocene boundary is depicted as less hostile, more as an opening ofpossibility for which paniscus-like hominoids were ready, socially and physically.There is no narrative of a time of innocence in a forest, followed by a time of trialon the dry plain, calling out the heroics of reproductive politics. The basic narrativesof causality depend less on the antagonistic dialectic of nature/culture that generatesthe dramatic stories of the west and its others. In the western sense, there is simplyless drama. Zihlman's stories regularly do not generate "others" as raw material forcrucial transitions to higher stages. This is not a result of "moral superiority" or"genius"; it is an historical possibility made available by political-scientific struggleto generate coherent accounts of connection. One object of knowledge that fallsaway in these accounts is "the family." In a sense there is nothing to explain, no

I

primal scene, whose tragic consequences escalate into history, no civilization and its.discontents, no cascading repressions. No wonder the reproductive politics lookdifferent.

Coloring within the Lines: A Pedagogy ofPrimate Relationships

These basic narrative strategies constrain Zihlman's accounts of both physical andsocial parameters of human evolution. They are iconically represented in her HumanEvolution Coloring Book (1982a) illustration of Lucy and her relatives, the pygmychimp and a human. "Man" here is a female, literally standing for the general


condition, a visual jolt in the illustration, even allowing Lucy's probable sex. Theoutline of a tall human figure contains a twinned ape, one half of whom is a pygmychimp female; the other half, joined at the midline, is a reconstruction of Lucy. Thethree figures share several body boundaries, while differentiated in degrees ofbipedal specialization and other particulars that mark the boundary between homi-noid and hominid. There is a play of similarity and difference among the twogenera of hominids, Homo and AustraloPithecus, and the chimpanzee species, Panpaniscus. They model each other in an invitation to the student to color their commonspace. Boundaries in Zihlman's accounts suggest zones of transition rather than theinversions of dualist stories. [Figure 11.1]

The visual icon of Lucy, the paniscus female, and the modern human femaletorso is a play of spaces and boundaries, some of them shared, some of themdiscontinuous. The coloring book is a social object for teaching, just as the museumdiorama and National Geographic special were. In the act of coloring inside thelines set by the authority of the author, the medical or physical anthropologystudent gets a sense of the bio-politics of being primate. Zihlman's book scrupulouslyillustrates human, i.e., general, points with specific, i.e., marked bodies belonging toparticular sexes, species, cultures, and races. Her attention to representing some-thing of the diversity of primates, human and nonhuman, creates an odd book thatlooks cluttered with the particular. People looking through it for the first time havesometimes complained that it is a feminist polemic filled with only females. Exactlyone half the representations of the animal and human bodies where sex/gender canbe distinguished are female. Therefore, it looks like a new oppressive totality, notscience, but ideology. Learning a different way to see means starting again at the

. beginning, with a child's object, a coloring book. Color Lucy Ruby.IIllllyriad .Illundane ways, primatology is a practice fQr the negotiation of the

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sibilityof community, of a pub.

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orld,of rational action. It is the ne~tiation.

. . . .. ~._~ ._--()f the time of origins, the origin of the family, the boundary betweeIl selLand other,

hominid and hominoid, human and animal. Primatology is about the principle ofaction, mutability, change, energy, about the possibility and constraints ofj?olltlcs.The reading of Lucy's bones is about all those things. In other times and places,people might have cast Lucy's bones in the rituals of necromancy for purposeswestern observers called "magical." But western people cast her bones into "scien-tific" patterns for insight into a human future made problematic by the very materialworking-out of the western stories of apocalypse and transcendence.

The United Nations Decade for Women: AnInternational Field of Differences

Universal man walked out of UNESCO House in Paris in the early 1950s, left hisfootprints in the volcanic ash in his travels, and turned up fossilized in East Africaonly moments later, while his living descendents on the border between Botswanaand South Africa modeled the sharing way of life and hope for a future in nucleartimes. Others of his descendents left their footprints in moon dust. But the termsof existence of the western version of universal man came unraveled in globalprocesses of social transformation, including decolonization, women's movementsfor emancipation, and the stakes of Cold War projected into the Third World.Primatology was established as an international field in this global setting. With the


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Figure 11.1 Adrienne Zihlman's (1982a) concep-tion of the relations among a pygmy chimpanzee,the australopithecine fossil named "Lucy," and amodern human. This coloring exercise in an educa-tional publication teaches that the living species mostlike the human hypothetical ancestor is the pygmychimpanzee. Published by permission of AdrienneL. Zihlman. In a very different construction of ori-gins, the "discoverer" of the fossil Lucy, DonaldJohanson of the Institute of Human Origins, hasjoined with the designer of E.T., Jonathon Horton,and museum exhibit designer, Kevin O'Farrell, tocreate the prototypes for a line of rubber dolls-Lucy, her "husband" Lorcan, and their children Lon-nog, Lifi, and Liban. This "first family" will also starin a book of high adventure on the North AfricanSavannah, to be published by Villard Books. (TheScientist, 23 January 1989, p. 3)

other biologies and anthropologies, primate studies have been charged with theconstruction and reconstruction of the great marked bodies of western scientificnarratives. It is not simply coincidental that the reworkings of what counts as femalein primate studies since the early 1970s have been accomplished in concert withworldwide reworkings of what the differences and similarities within and among


women might be-and might mean for any practice enforcing what counts as humanand what counts as natural. A large part of the shared problematic has been theeffort to r~nstruct descriptive practices. Seeing women and females differently

~ome easily t~-those raIsed wlilithe visualizing technologies of universalman.

The United Nations had to respond to the manifestations of the revolution ingender that is occurring all over the planet in very inhomogeneous, contradictory,and internally contentious ways. The list minimally includes a global explosionof women's collective and personal agitation and self-expression; revolutions indemography; multiform crises in family and other forms of gender-structuredcollective life; deep questions about sexuality and structures of desire; vast scandalsin the sexual division of labor and in access to the goods of life, like food, credit,machines, and effective literacies; the intersections of race, gender, and class inestablishing the life chances of women and children; major new actors in theproduction of knowledge and culture; consequences of women's simultaneous cen-trality and official invisibility in subsistence work, including agriculture, and hightechnology work, including the communications industries; and the complex rela-tions of neo-imperialism, nationalism, radical and conservative revolutionary move-ments, and feminism. In many very different situations in the last twenty years,autonomous and self-conscious women's movements emerged to contest the termsof women's lives. Women both affirmed their heterogeneous selves as a world-changing reality and deconstructed Woman as a culturally parochial myth impli-cated in world systems of domination. Symbolic of the widespread emergence ofnew social subjects and collective organization, which had enabled the identificationof issues and needs previously invisible and unspeakable, the United Nations estab-lished 1975-85 as the Decade for Women.s The concluding meeting in 1985 was inNairobi, scene of the 1955 Pan-African Congress in physical anthropology thathelped institutionalize the man-the-hunter approach to scientific craftings of whatit means to be human. The 1955 Congress was dominated by Europeans and bydescendents of white settlers in the colonies from Africa to America. The meetingsin Nairobi in 1985, even the official U.N. meeting, not to mention the exuberantforums of the Non-Governmental Organizations, were quite another matter. Thecontradictions, tentative connections, analyses, and hopes among women globallyand locally were enacted in a world of palpable difference. No conception ofuniversal man could emerge. The U.N. Decade for Women perhaps should be readas a "post-modern" phenomenon, offering a vision of possible connection and hopefor global futures only on condition of accepting the permanent refusals of closureof identities, adequacy of descriptions, and master narratives about what it meansto be female, woman, and human.

The decade from 1975-85 was also a period of uneven discovery of that lessonin some of the strands of primate studies. I would like to interpret primatology'sscientific politics of being female from within the field of possibility that the womenin Nairobi in 1985 tentatively constructed by taking responsibility for power-chargeddifference and contradiction as the grounds for feminism. That is, I approach theupcoming analyses from a science-fictional standpoint, or a utopian moment ofhope. The hope is that in the de/reconstructions of woman and female going oninternationally in science and politics, there is emerging a field for envisioningfruitfully contradictory and multiple possibilities for new links between knowledge


and power, for new apparatuses of bodily production for craftily reinventing whatit means to be-always situated, always specified-human.

In that context, the use of primate studies by women in a multinationally authoredtext from the U.N. Decade for Women is emblematic (New Internationalist Cooper-ative 1985). Women, a W orid Report embodies in a particularly interesting way theproblematic and constructed connections, versus natural identities or unities, amongwomen as an emerging contradictory collective social subject: Buchi Emecheta, aNigerian, living and writing in London, wrote the section on women and educationin the United States; Angela Davis, a U.S. black and feminist theorist and activist,wrote on women and sex in Egypt; Nawal el Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist theoristand activist, wrote on women and politics in the United Kingdom; Elena Poniatow-ski, a woman of French-Polish and Mexican parentage who writes on Latin Americanpolitics and popular culture, did the essay on sex in Australia. The book was theresult of an international exc/:1ange of women writers, with women from poorcountries invited to write about women in the rich world and vice versa. DebbieTaylor's general introduction tries to tame the chaos of reports and data from theU.N. Decade for Women on the topics of family, agriculture, industrialization,health, sex, education, politics. The first citation in the section on sex was to MeredithSmall's edited volume on Female Primates (1984), to support the World Report'sreconstruction of the relation between female/woman in the context of the emer-gence of global feminism. The Small book was used to stress the active agency offemales, their self-organizing activity and social centrality. In this origin story,females are not resources for males, but organizers of action, sexual and otherwise.

Part III is about feminist contests for the meanings of primatology, embedded inthe enabling contradictions which structure feminist discourse in European andEuro-American, high-technology, capitalist culture in the late twentieth century.Pervaded by and reproducing the very logics of domination and appropriation itstruggles against, this feminism nonetheless resists, destabilizes, contradicts, andrestructures its generative discourses, including biology and anthropology. "Dis-course can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, astumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy"(Foucault 1978: 101). In an ironic twist on the logics of the life and human sciences,the marked body becomes the self-activating body; female/colonized/laboring/ani-mal bodies become citizen and the scandal requires theoretical and practical trans-formation.

My argument has several strands. First, European and Euro-American feminismand primatology are both western and sexualized discourses inheriting the structur-ing logics of hierarchical appropriation proper to "human" (western "man's") self-formation. Second, feminist theory and primatology are synergistically deeply impli-cated in the production of biology and anthropology, those discourses in which bothfemale and woman have been pivotal natural-technical objects of knowledge. Third,reconstructing primatology's technical and popular stories is a serious form offeminist practice, and stories are reconstructed in the elaboration of multiple kindsof stakes and practices in social life. And finally, primatology changes the possiblemeanings of many feminisms. All women's practice is not feminist, and men'spractice can be feminist. It is a logical mistake, a category error rooted in fundamen-tal repressions, to translate an exploration of gender and science into the sociologyof women and science (Keller 1985). Feminism and primatology are each science


and politics, producers of fact and fiction, technical and social disciplines. Theyare both social practices for writing stories about who "we" are and for policingboundaries and structuring fields for achieving that identity. The chapters of PartIII are about the intersection of feminism and the sciences of monkeys and apessince about 1970.

My contention is that the intersection-coupled with other aspects of the "decolo-nization of nature" that have restructured the discourses of biology and anthropol-ogy, as well as other practices of international politics-destabilizes the narrativefields that gave rise to both primatology and feminism, thereby generating thepossibility of new stories not strangled by the same logics of appropriation anddomination, but also not innocent of the workings of power and desire, includingnew exclusions. But the intervention must work from within, constrained andenabled by the fields of power and knowledge that make discourse eminentlymaterial.

Sex and the West

Time has been "other" in western primatology; the past, the animal, the female,nature: these are the contested zones in the allochronic discourse of primatology.But by the middle of the 1970s, that sense of time and place, which had beendependent on western hegemony for its maintenance, showed signs of crackingopen to allow a different scientific narrative structure. Part III will explore some ofthose cracks, and the fields of meanings and practices they generate, in the contextof the dense intersection of western feminism, multicultural and global feminism,decolonization, and multinational capitalism. The focus of the examination ofcracked and transformed narrative fields will be Euro-American women's construc-tions of what may count as female from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s-a potentversion of what may now count as nature for late industrial people.

Insight into the symbolic structure and social power of the western branch ofprimatology is to be gained by focusing an analytical lens on a particular pair ofintersecting axes, concerned with sex and the west, two story operators constitutiveof the origin stories told by the Judeo-Christian segment of the "peoples of theBook." These patriarchal, monotheistic children of the father-God learned toread the Book of Nature written in the ciphers of number in the founding timesof the Scientific Revolution. These are the people who transformed salvationhistory into natural history, and then constructed biology and anthropology onits stage. The life sciences have from their birth been inherently dramatic-story-laden, as well as theory-laden. Facts are always theory-laden; theories are value-laden; therefore, facts are value-laden (Young 1977). Scientific processes andproducts are value-laden in a particular way bound up with persistent storiesthat are themselves social-material forces, as well as responsive to other socialforces and relations. The human sciences have been the sciences of man-thenarratives of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress transmuted by capitalism's dynamicof accumulation. And western primatology has remained a discourse at theboundary between life and human sciences, a mediating discourse for establishingthe "human" place in "nature." First the sons told the stories, and then thedaughters. Both have been consumed with the topics-and tropes-of the originof the family, the state, and the individual.


Gender: The Sexual Politics of a Word6

Let us step back and re-Iook at meanings of sex and gender in order to be ableto evaluate what practices in primate studies might suggest for feminist theory.Although they are closely related, nature/culture and sex/gender are not identicalorders of difference in inherited western frames or in recent feminist innovations.Gender is the politics of sex, the ordering of sexual difference, just as culturedesignates the political realization of natural materials. But nature/culture and sex/gender are separate axes in a field. Their relationship to each other can and doestake many forms, generate many versions of stories, ground and legitimate manypolitical positions about the original questions.

The field organized by and around these mobile, dynamic, productive axes is adiscursive field; i.e., it is about language, especially writing and other forms ofsignification, such as filmmaking and museum display. It is a field of meanings.Such a field is not in opposition to "social" and "bodily" determinants; it is one kindof material determinant, influencing the course of people's lives and influenced bythem. Stories are material practices; boundary conditions are not just structuralistfantasies, but potent aspects of daily life. Discourses are not only social products,they have fundamental social effects. They are modes of power. The life and humansciences are powerful actors in an age of bio-politics, in which the management ofthe efficiencies of bodies is a major constructive practice. Scientific discourses bothbound and generate conditions of daily life for millions. To contest for origin storiesis a form of social action.

However, the argument of the upcoming sections of Primate Visions is not onlythat primatology is structured as western and sexualized discourse, with all theconsequent contradictions, limits, and possibilities for intervention and reconstruc-tion. I am also concerned to examine feminism in relation to these same complexhistorical, cultural logics and practices. Feminism as western political theory can besaid to begin at the same historical moment and for the same historical reasons asthe discourses of biology and anthropology, with roots in the eighteenth centuryand flowering in the nineteenth century. In this period the organism-animal,personal, and social-became the privileged natural-technical object of knowledge.Organisms were structured by the principles of the division of labor. The specialefficiencies derived from the separations and functional management of the newscientific entities called race, sex, and class had particularly strong effects.

The female animal emerged as a condensed focus of medical and other practicein the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as woman emerged as the nub ofsocial theory.7 The marked bodies of race, class, and sex have been at the center,not the margins, of knowledge in modern conditions. These bodies are made tospeak because a great deal depends on their active management. The biologicalbody is historically specific; the biological organism is a particular cultural form ofappropriation-conversation, not the unmediated natural truth of the body. Func-tionalism emerged as the ruling logic of the discourses of bio-politics. Primatologyis inconceivable without the logic of functionalism and its complex theories ofadaptation and specialization of the marked bodies. The mindlbody logic and itssocial dominations are old in western culture, but its specific bio-political forms arefound in modern discourses in biologies and anthropologies. The organism is thehistorically specific form of the body as scientific object of knowledge from the late


eighteenth century until the mid-twentieth century. That is a key reason why femalesand women, far from being ignored in biology and anthropology, became the locusof highly productive discourses and other social practices. One finds not the absenceof female/woman in the age of bio-politics, but their fruitful ubiquity, under thelogics and social conditions of masculinist appropriation, as a question of the en-hancement of social and organic efficiencies. How have those conditions changedin the last twenty years in the context of a worldwide revolution in the positions ofwomen and other "others" recasting the terms of marking bodies?

Gender is a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sexual differencein multiple arenas of struggle. Feminist theory and practice around gender seek toexplain and change historical systems of sexual difference, whereby "men" and"women" are socially constituted and positioned in relations of hierarchy and antag-onism. The complex analytical and political tension between the paired binaryconcepts of sex and gender ties feminist theories of gender closely to the construc-tions and reconstructions of the natural sciences, especially the life sciences. Thesediscourses are central to western social technologies for mapping the distinctionbetween nature and society, history, or culture. These fields of knowledge andpower map the scope for dreams and projects of social action. The biology of sexhelps construct a shared sense of possibility and limitation. Part of the reconstructionof gender is the remapping of biological sex. Biology is an historical discourse, notthe body itself.

Constructing Female

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Because it is a celebration of primate females and the women who made themvisible, i.e., a construction of a "we," Female Primates: Studies by Women Primatologists(Small 1984) deserves a full analysis, but I will look at only two pieces for theirstrategy in introducing subsequent papers and so framing the enterprise. Theseessays are cautionary examples of tempting but problematic narrative moves inrecasting~estern st()ries about females in primatology. [Figure 11.2] Each piecer<iise~sihe question of the di!!erenceit riiaK~'s'tnaI~2IlleI1g.!U~!:!.~.~5_<?!()~-f().~~edon female animals, but each also adopts a philosophy of science and an ideologyof progressive improvement of knowledge that block further invesiigal'lOn'of-anepistemic field structured by sex and gender. From the point of view oftheTramingpieces, "male bias" exists but can be corrected fairly simply. There is no need fordangerously political social relations within primatology and no need for the matterto challenge the practitioners' "native" account of how knowledge is made, at leastnot in public. Bias cancels bias; cumulative knowledge emerges. The root reasonsgiven, however, hint at a stronger position: only bias ("empathy") permits certain"real" phenomena to be knowable, or ()Illy exel~n.ation from tl1epoint of view ofone group, not the point of view' of an -iIlusory whole which actually masks aninterested part, gets at the "real" world. In this case, bias or point of view turn outto be the social and epistemic operator, sex-gender. The major scientific-politicalquestion is how such a potent point of view is constructed. In the construction ofthe female animal, the primatologist is also reconstructed, given a new genealogy.But the rebirth is within the boundaries of the "west," within its ubiquitous web ofnature-culture. Primatologyhen;~reII)i!ins simian orientalism.

Jane Lancaster~ a Ph.D. student of SherwoodWasn:burn at DC Berkeley in 1967

\


Figure 11.2 Portraits in the Primate Order. Draw-ing by Linda Straw Coelho. Published with permis-sion. This image appeared on T-shirts and on thecover of the official program of the IXth Congressof the International Primatological Society, Atlanta,Georgia, 1982. Part of the effort to provide non-conventional visual images of primates, Coelho'sdrawings illustrated the cover and chapters of Fedi-gan's Primate Paradigms (1982).

and a senior student of primate behavior from anthropological points of view,introduced the volume as a whole. The introduction is remarkable for its adherenceto sociobiological and socioecological perspectives; it is a sign of the triumphantstatus of those explanatory frameworks in evolutionary biology, including primatol-ogy in the mid-1980s. Within that frame, Lancaster looks at primate field studies tounderstand four areas of sexual dimorphism: "sex differences in dominance, matingbehavior and sexual assertiveness, attachment to home range and the natal group,and the ecological and social correlates of sex difference and body size" (Lancaster1984: 7-8). In each case, the point is that "females too do x." It turns out that I)females are competitive and take dominance seriously; 2) females too wander andare not embodiments of social attachment and conservatism; 3) females too aresexually assertive; and 4) females have energy demands in their lives as great asthose of males. Focus is on females and not on "the species as evolving as anamorphous whole. We explore the social world of females rather than that of the


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social group. . . . We learn to understand the reproductive strategies of females andto balance these strategies against those pursued by males of their social systems.

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. . . At last we are coming to a point of balance where the behaviors and adaptationsof the sexes are equally weighted" (1984: 8). Finding females means disrupting aprevious whole, now called "amorphous," rather than the achieved potential of thespecies. Feminism absolutely requires breaking up some versions of a "we" andconstructing others.

Lancaster's is a very interesting construction of a "we," where the boundarybetween female animal and woman primatologist is blurred, ambiguous. The delib-erately ambiguous title of the whole volume is echoed again and again: "we" are allfemale primates here, outside of history in the original Garden. That Gardennaturally turns out to be in the liberal "west." Competition, mobility, sexuality, andenergy: these are the marks of individuality, of value, of first or primate citizenship."Balance" is equality in these matters, hard-won from specific attention to thepoint of view not of the "amorphous whole" but of "the social world of females."Lancaster's is an origin story about property in the individual body; it is a classicentry in the large text of liberal political theory, rewritten in the language ofreproductive strategy. Sex and mind again are mutually determining. In the recon-struction of the female primate as an active generator of primate society throughactive sexuality, physical mobility, energetic demands on self and environment,and social competition, the woman "primatologist," i.e., female (human) nature, isreconstructed to have the capacity to be a citizen, a member of a public "we," onewho constructs public knowledge, a scientist. Science is very sexy, a question of erosand power. Appropriately, this "we" is born in an origin story, a time machine forbeginning history, therefore outside history.

,Thelma Rowell, a senior zoologist at the University of California at Berkeley whohas played a major role in disrupting stories about primate social behavior, especiallystories about dominance (Rowell 1974), was invited to introduce the first sub-collection of papers called Mothers, Infants, and Adolescents. Rowell's message, asalways, was about coIIlPlexity. She is not hesitant to point out the legacy of male biasin primatology, e.g., in-the classification offemales as juvenile or adult exclusively asa function of their capacity to breed, while males were categorized by a whole seriesof stages grounded in social as well as minimal reproductive functions. "For thatmatter, there is little recognition" of continued social development in human females,which for most purposes are also classified as either juvenile or old enough tobreed. In contrast, continued social development following puberty in males wasrecognized in the earliest studies of primate social behavior, just as the stages ofseniority are often formally recognized among men. This dual standard has, I think,delayed our understanding of primate social organization" (Rowell 1984: 14). Shepoints out the merit of the following papers in seeing the primate world from the"female monkey's point of view" and thereby "challenging accepted explanations."She goes further, writing, "I have a feeling it is easier for females to empathize withfemales, and that empathy is a covertly accepted aspect of primate studies-becauseit produces results" (1984: 16).

But she backs off from exploring unsettling implications of these positions aboutthe structuring of the observer determining the possibility of seeing. Instead, be-cause males identify with males and females with females and primatology attractsboth human genders, the result is additive, canceling out "bias" and leading toward


cumulative progress: "The resulting stereoscopic picture of social behavior of pri-mates is more sophisticated than that current for other grou ps [of mammals]" (1984:16). But the stories are not stereoscopic, where the images from separated eyes areinterpreted by a higher nervous center; they are disruptive and restructuring offields of knowledge and practice. The reader is not an optic tectum, but a party tothe fray, so hope for higher integration from that source is futile.

Further, "empathy" produces results in human anthropology as well, formingpart of a very mixed legacy that includes universalizing, identification, and denialof difference, as the "other" is appropriated to the explanatory strategy of thewriter. Empathy is part of the western scientific tool kit, kept in constant productivetension with its twin, objectivity. Empathy is coded dark, covert or implicit, andobjectivity light, acknowledged or explicit. But each constructs the other in thehistory of modern "western" science, just as nature-culture and woman-man aremutually constructed in a logic of appropriation and progress. When Lancasterwants to see "balance" and Rowell writes about a "stereoscopic picture," they simulta-neously raise and dismiss the messy matter of scientific constructions of sex andgender as objects of knowledge and as conditions of knowing. Official (or native)philosophies of science among researchers obscure the complexity of their practiceand the politics of "our" knowledge.

Counting

About how many women practice primatology for a living? That question isdifficult to answer for many reasons. My focus is primarily on field primatology,i.e., studies of wild or semi-free ranging but provisioned animals in an environmentthat can be epistemically constructed to be "natural," a possible sctne of evolutionaryorigins. But primatology is both a laboratory and field science that crosses dozens ofdisciplinary boundaries in zoology, ecology, anthropology, psychology, parasitology,biomedical research, psychiatry, conservation, demography, and so on. There arethree major professional associations to which primatologists from the United Statesare likely to belong, but many of the individuals who have made major contributionsand who allowed me to interview them and have access to their unpublished papersdo not appear on the membership lists ever or for several years at a time.

The membership lists from the American Association of Physical Anthropology(AAPA), the American Society ofPrimatologists (ASP), and the International Prima-tological Society (IPS) around 1980 suggest the level of participation of women infield primatology. These global disciplinary counts would give a minimum picture,because there is good reason to believe women are more heavily represented infield primatology than in exclusively laboratory-based practices, and they havebeen more authoritative in field primatology whatever their numbers. There is noabsolute division between field and lab, but there is a sometimes tense difference ofemphasis, despite the official doctrine that naturalistic studies require complemen-tary laboratory studies with their greater power of experimental manipulation. Iam here ignoring the large issue of skewed emphasis from concentrating on NorthAmericans. With a few important exceptions, the authoritative spokeswomen andthe largest numbers of women in primatology have been United States nationals,trained in U.S. institutions, and/or employed in U.S. institutions. The overwhelming


majority, relatively more than for other biological sciences, have been white, al-though that might be changing a bit.

In 1977-78, the IPS (founded 1966) roster listed 751 members, of whom 382listed U.S. addresses, 92 U.K. addresses, 115 Japanese, 14 African (10 from SouthAfrica), and 151 other locations. In the IPS, overall women were 20% of themembership: 22% of the U.S. total, 22% of the British, 9% of the Japanese, and24% of the "other." Many individuals could not be identified by gender from initials;they were left out of these calculations, probably resulting in understating therepresentation of women. By subdiscipline, women accounted for 22% of the an-thropologists, 12% of the medical researchers, 27% of the psychologists, 19% ofthose involved primarily with zoos or wildlife conservation, 19% of the zoologistsor ecologists, 25% in other categories. Percentages of total membership of both menand women that could be ascribed to these subdisciplines are 17% in anthropology,20% in medicine, 16% in psychology, 3% in zoos and wildlife, 9% in zoology orecology, and 25% in other areas. In the IPS, but not in life sciences as a whole inthe United States, women are strikingly disproportionately present in zoos andwildlife areas, as well as in zoology and ecology. If most people working in zoo andwildlife conservation were counted as environmental scientists in National ScienceFoundation statistics, the figure in the IPS is striking. The NSF's 1986 Women andMinorities in Science and Engineering shows that only 10% of all environmental scien-tists are women, while 2% of women scientists and engineers are environmentalscientists.

The 1979 roster of the AAPA (founded 1918) lists 1200 persons, about 26% ofwhom appear to be women. The 1980 roster of the ASP (founded 1966) lists 445individuals, of whom only 23 are other than U.S. citizens; these are largely Canadian.About 30% of the ASP in 1980 were women, including 45% of those who gave ananthropology-related address. Academic jobs for primatologists, whatever theirdiscipline of training, are often in anthropology departments. Most of these peoplehave done field studies of primates, although not necessarily outside a laboratorycolony. In the ASP, about 24% of the psychologists were women, 36% of those inzoos or wildlife conservation, 20% of the total in zoology/ecology, and 47% of thosewhose interests intersect with psychiatry (compared to 11% in the IPS). Womenprimatologists appeared to be trained in and/or have jobs in anthropology in higherproportions than their overall representation in the ASP, but not in a vastly higherproportion than their presence in anthropology as a whole in the U.S. While womenin the ASP were in zoology, ecology, zoos, and wildlife conservation at levels nearor below their total proportion in the society, again they were in these areas muchmore frequently than expected from national statistics covering all similar sciences.This statistical picture is consistent with the prominence of women authoring theliterature of field primatology, compared to related fields of zoology, mammalogy,and conservation. U.S. women primatologists appear to be more likely to join theAmerican society than the international association, compared to U.S. men. In 1984,the percentage of members of the ASP who were women had increased to about36% (Hrdy 1986: 136).

It is difficult to estimate how many primatologists from the U.S. about 1980 mighthave done field studies as a major part of their contribution to the discipline, andhow many of those might be women. But, using the specialty distributions fromboth the IPS and ASP in 1980, it seems safe to judge that not much more than a

~I WOMEN'S PLACE IS IN THE JUNGLE / 295

third of people who could call themselves primatologists have done field studies. Ifabout a third to a half of the members of the ASP did field studies, that would besomewhere near 150-225 people, including about 50-75 women. These figures areprobably high. The point is that around 1980, there were many fewer than 100women in the u.S. who could be called field primatologists. Discounting the pre-World War II studies by a handful of men, field work substantially began about1960. The original men and women were mostly alive in 1980, and many remainproductive and active members of the primate professional associations. There isnot much reason to suppose that the cumulative number of U.S. women who haveever published field studies in primatology reaches 100. Adding women from othernations would not be likely to increase that figure by as much as 50%. These crudeestimates are meant only to show that there cannot be more than a few dozenwomen, and maybe three times that many men, writing the publications in all ofmodern field primatology. There are many more people involved in producingmodern field primatology than in writing it; but the field is tiny compared to thebiomedical, biotechnological, and molecular biologies, not to mention psychologyor anthropology as a whole.

For comparison, the January 1986 National Science Foundation publicationWomen and Minorities in Science and Engineering notes that by 1984 in the U.S. womenrepresented about 25% of all employed social, life, physical, and mathematicalscientists; only 3% of employed engineers; and 13% of employed scientists andengineers overall (Contrast that with women's figure of 49% of all professional andrelated workers, disregarding stratification in what counts as professional, let alone"related.") In the U.S. in 1986, there were about 4.6 million employed scientists andengineers (NSF Data Book, 1987). About 11% of women scientists and engineershave a Ph.D., compared to 19% of the men. Partly because their rates of employmentin science and engineering have been increasing faster than men's, 60% of womenin 1984 reported less than 10 years of experience, compared to 27% of men. About85% of growth in employment of women doctoral scientists from 1973-1978 wasin life sciences, social sciences, and psychology; but from the mid-1970s the rate ofincrease of women in engineering and in computer sciences was much higher thanfor social sciences. Life sciences (16%), social sciences (18%), and psychology (17%)account for 51 % of women scientists and engineers, compared to 19% of men.Women comprise about 40% of all psychologists, 30% of social scientists, 25% oflife scientists, and 11% of environmental scientists. This is the pool from whichprimatologists come, and they come in numbers roughly characteristic of other lifeand social sciences. Compared to these unspectacular showings, women primatescientists stand out slightly overall, with intriguing differences in specialty choices.Judged by publications, women's impact in primate studies has been greater thantheir numbers, compared to most other areas of anthropology and possibly all otherareas of biology.

A statistical consideration of the intersection of gender and race in science andengineering complements earlier arguments in Primate Visions on the exclusion ofwomen of color from field biologies generally and primate studies specifically. Tosimplify, let me illustrate the point by looking only at life sciences and at figures forU.S. black women. Overall, black women make up 5% of all U.S. women in scienceand engineering; that adds up to about 25,000 black women compared to 512,000women of all races. Among doctoral women scientists and engineers, only 3% were


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black, totalling about 1,400 women. That is, black women are even less likely tosurvive than white women through the doctorate in the heavily race and gender-skewed upper levels of the science system. When they do survive and get jobs inacademic institutions, they achieve tenure at higher rates than white women. Womenmake up 12% of all white scientists and engineers, 25% of all black scientists andengineers, 7% of Native Americans, and 14% of Asian-Americans. The figure forHispanic women was reported differently in a separate discussion; Hispanic womenmake up 3% of women scientists and engineers; Hispanic men make up 2.1 % ofall men scientists and engineers. Black women scientists are about twice as likelycompared to white women to choose a mathematical specialty (7%, 4%); and whitewomen are almost twice as likely compared to Afro-American women to choose lifesciences (16%, 9%). In the entire U.S., there are about 2,500 black women lifescientists at all degree levels. Assuming that doctoral black women are in the lifesciences at the same percentage as black women with other credentials (9%), thereare fewer than 125 Ph.D.-holding black women in life sciences in the U.S. (9% of1400), compared to about 15,000 white women. That comes down to a greater than100: 1 chance that a particular woman doctoral life scientist will be white. It is notsurprising that doctoral women studying monkeys and apes for a living are white.These facts impoverish all of American science, but in a field as culture and story-laden as primatology, the implications are closer to the heart of the science. Thatfact must be kept in mind throughout "The Politics of Being Female." The figureswould be slightly different for psychology or anthropology, the other relevantdegree fields for recruiting primatologists. Even with these odds, there are U.S.black women publishing in field primatology, e.g., Clara Jones, who earned herPh.D. at Cornell in 1978.8

Gender also has intersected with class in determining access to crafting narrativesin primate studies. Among the women I interviewed, themes of class privilegepartially compensating for gender handicaps to give access to the practice of sciencesurfaced repeatedly. Race was usually a silent privilege for both men and womenamong the people who cooperated with my study. Women informants describedthe effects of class and its links with their gender in practical terms, such as beingable to travel abroad studying as a kind of tourist-scientist in an archaeological digin order to help resolve a period of academic crisis that included overt sexistdiscrimination in a previous university situation; being able to fund field work fromfamily sources when grants did not come through; being able to draw on theacademic self-esteem and knowledge of options made possible by the model of anacademic professional parent, including a mother; and being able to sustain anindependent career, perhaps as a research associate without much or any salary, inthe face of sexist treatment by individuals and institutions, while publishing exten-sively to become attractive at a higher level of the academic job market later. Moneyfrom parents and/or from upper middle-class husbands helped some women sustainheterodox careers, including having children earlier than would otherwise be possi-ble for a professional woman-or having children at all. To have children is an actthat can scuttle a woman scientist's career if she is held to a male-norm career clockand/or if she must rely on one income, even a middle class, academic income. Onthe other hand, several of my women informants, but none of the men, describedmarriage and children as a factor in delaying finishing degrees and especially indelaying establishing post-doctoral research programs. Others described practical

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barriers and personal reservations about seeking a doctorate at desirable institutionswhere a professionally senior husband was a faculty member in the only relevantdepartments. For the men, the pattern was more likely to include a wife, notnecessarily a scientist, helping in the early field research, although a couple of thewomen also had that experience. Also, for men in my sample, gender-linked accessto the means to be a scientist included veterans benefits.

The prominence of married couples publishing together in the primate literatureis striking. Likely missing many, I have counted over 65 such couples (not all innaturalistic field studies) in a publishing field with a few hundred authors in thepost-World War II period. Obviously, marriage does not exhaust the kinds ofintimacy that are important in the ways primate networks function professionally;but it is a particularly public form, with inherited loaded meanings, especiallyfor the women, both those with access to the mixed, but substantial, blessings ofheterosexual privilege and those without such access. Marriage has systematicallydifferent effects for men and women, whether they are married or single. Evenwith new post-World War II-and especially post-Sputnik and post-women's move-ment-options permitting more degrees of freedom in a gender-structured society,including giving access to the practice of science, women continue to need to arrangetheir lives in relation to the consequences of the institution of heterosexual marriage,whether they are married or not. The need is not always accompanied by thepossibility. The women spoke about the issues of both class and gender, and abouttheir links, more spontaneously, possibly in response to my gender and gender-skewed way of interviewing, but also possibly because the men were less explicitlyaware of how their work was structured by their gender, in concrete detail ratherthan in sociological abstraction. Gender, race, sexuality, and class are not less struc-turing for men, or white people, or heterosexuals, or middle class people. Rather,the structure is less visible, and it takes a different kind of work to learn to see thanfor those at a less privileged node in a complex, hierarchically organized field.

I do not have evidence to claim that men and women primatologists have comefrom different class backgrounds, but I am suggesting that class and race mightaffect them differently as a function of gender. My interviews left me with questions,not answers: Did anglophone white women need to be in a relatively higher classposition than white men to find themselves in primate studies between 1960 and1985? Post-war primate studies grew up with a vast expansion of science fundingnationally and internationally. Did that fact deeply alter the class composition ofnatural history fields compared to the first half of the twentieth century? Bothmen and women in primate studies have needed philanthropic and public sciencefunding, and both have needed and sought independent career jobs. Both benefitedfrom the explosion of material support for jobs and research in primate studies inthe 1960s and early 1970s. Both suffered from the constrictions in jobs and funding,or at least lower rates of increase, since the mid-1970s. My point is not that whitemen and women inhabit totally different material worlds, but that they experience"common" worlds differently on the basis of gender.

Publishing

The explosive growth of post-World War II primatology has overlapped the"second wave" of the Euro-American women's movements. Young women and men


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entering primatology in those years could not be unaware that their field wascontested from the "outside," in gender politics and much else. It was also contestedfrom the "inside." One result was the explosion of writing by women on primatesociety and behavior, both for popular and professional readerships. The followingcatalogue, consisting only of books, not the major form of publishing especially innatural sciences, is not exhaustive; but it gives the flavor of abundance and achronology showing the steady rise in women's production of primatology. Lookingonly at women-authored material in this way obscures the work by several men thatalso contributed to deconstructing what counts as female and woman.

Nadie Kohts, Untersuchungen ilber die Erkenntnissfiihigkeiten des Schimpansen aus demzoopsychologischenLaboratorium des Museum Danvinianum in Moskau (1923), opens mylist in order immediately to transgress the categories of American, post-World War11, and field primatology, and also just to honor an important predecessor in theappreciation of primate mind.9 Robert Yerkes and Ada Yerkes's The Great APes(1929) marks the frequent role of the officially non-scientist wife, who contributedsubstantially to the production of the primate text. Belle Benchley's My Friends theAPes (1942) is probably also little known except to the aficionada/os of apes, but shemarks several categories important to gender in primatology: zoo work, lay status,success in ape breeding.1o These three pre-World War 11 names underline myinability to find a single book, popular or professional, about primates by a doctoralwoman scientist in the world before the 1960s. There are several by men.

Then comes the best known name of all, beginning a chronological list of womenprofessional biologists and anthropologists writing for many audiences: Jane vanLawick Goodall, My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees (1967) followed by In the Shadow ofMan (1971) and The Chimpanzees of Gombe (1986); Thelma Rowell, Social Behaviourof Monkeys (1972); Alison Jolly, Lemur Behavior (1966), The Evolution of PrimateBehavior (1972, 2nd ed. 1985), and A World Like Our Own (1980); Jane Lancaster,Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture (1975); Sarah Blaffer Hrdy,Langurs of Abu (1977) and The Woman That Never Evolved (1981); Alison Richard,Behavioral Variation (1978) and Primates in Nature (1985); Jeanne Altmann, BaboonMothers and Infants (1980); Katie Milton, The Foraging Strategies of Howler Monkeys(1980); Nancy Tanner, On Becoming Human (1981); Linda Marie Fedigan, PrimateParadigms (1982); Adrienne Zihlman, The Human Evolution Coloring Book (1982);Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist (1983); Barbara Smuts, Sex and Friendship in Baboons(1985); Shirley Strum, Almost Human (1987). This list includes only books singlyauthored by doctoral women in the field. II

A larger picture emerges if we consider the profusion of books focused ondebates about sex and gender which take serious account of the work by womenprimatologists and reconstructed men primatologists. Everyone of these books ispart of a large international social struggle, especially from the 1960s on, about thepolitical-symbolic-social structure, history (natural and otherwise), and future ofWoman/women. The political struggles are not context to the written texts. Thewomen's movements, for example, are not the "outside" to some other "inside."The written texts are part of the political struggle, but a struggle conducted withvery specific "scientific" means, including possible stories in the narrative field ofprimatology. By definition, the origin point has to be outside the history I will tell,therefore consider first the unique, renegade pre-1960s classic, a book that is tofemale primates and feminist primatology as Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex is to


feminist theory of the second wave: Ruth Herschberger, Adam's Rib (1948); it wasreissued in paper in 1970, hardly an accidental date. Herschberger's dedication ofthe book to G. Evelyn Hutchinson recalls the crucial importance of pro-feministmen in the pre-history of feminist struggles for science.

A title from the 1960s gives the starting point for thinking about females withregard to (zoological) class, but note how the field expands through the 1970s, whenmaternal behavior is no longer the totally constraining definition of what it meansto be female: Harriet Rheingold, ed., Maternal Behavior in Mammals (1963); ElaineMorgan, The Descent of Woman (1972); Carol Travis, ed., The Female Experience (1973);Rayna Rapp Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975), with the classicpaper by Sally Linton, "Woman the gatherer: Male bias in anthropology" and aninfluential paper by Lila Leibowitz, "Perspectives on the evolution of sex differ-ences"; Evelyn Reed, Woman's Evolution (1975); M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voor-hies, Female of the SPecies(1975), dedicated to Margaret Mead; Ruby Rohrlich Leavitt,Peacable Primates and Gentle PeoPle (1975); Cynthia Moss, Portraits in the Wild (1975);Bettyann Kevles, Watching the Wild APes (1976) and Females of the SPecies (1986); H.Katchadourian, ed., Human Sexuality: A Comparative and Developmental Perspective(1978); Lila Leibowitz, Females, Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach (1978); LionelTiger and Heather Fowler, eds. Female Hierarchies (1978); W. Miller and LucilleNewman, eds., The First Child and Family Formation (1978); Elizabeth Fisher, Woman'sCreation: Sexual Evolution and the ShaPing of Society (1979); Frances Dahlberg, ed.,Woman the Gatherer (1981); Helen Fisher, The Sex Contract: The Evolution of HumanBehavior (1982); Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theorieson Women (1984); Ardea Skybreak, Of Primeval Steps and Future Leaps (1984).12This list contains travel literature, textbooks, conference publications, children'sliterature, academic feminist theory, popular polemics, and science reporting. Allare part of the apparatus of production of the primate body. It would be a mistaketo leave out science fiction, which is both influenced by and an influence on thestruggles over sex and gender in primatology, e.g., Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear(1980), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and the bio-fiction of C.].Cherryh and James Tiptree, Jr. (Carolyn Jane Cherry and Alice Sheldon).

This catalogue is heterogeneous from several points of view-political allegiance,intended audience, credentials of the authors and editors, publishing format, genre,ete. Interestingly, it is nationally and racially homogeneous; this point matters inview of the universalizing tendency of the literature, which repeatedly seeks to beabout the nature of "Woman." No one could claim from any of the lists in this paperthat white U.S. women occupy a unified ideological space or are in any simple sense"in opposition" to masculinist positions, much less to men. But it should also beimpossible to miss the collective impact of these public stories: new lines of forceare present in the primate field. It has become impossible to hear the same silencesin any text. The narrative field has been restructured by a polyphony rising fromalalia to heteroglossia. In the practice of telling important origin stories amongpeoples of the Book, women now also speak in tongues, imagining female within areinvented language (Elgin 1984).

Volumes edited or co-edited by professional primatological women produce an-other long list that begins with the publication of the papers from Phyllis Jay's 1965Wenner-Gren conference Gay 1968). For this study, the list ends with a spate ofbooks published in the mid-1980s. These books mark the prestige of "sociobiological

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theory" in primate studies and the complex place of sociobiology in the crafting ofself-consciously pro-female and often feminist accounts of primate, and indeedvertebrate, evolution, behavior, and ecology.13 Meredith Small's collection, FemalePrimates:Studies by WomenPrimatologists(1984) is explicitly a kind of celebration offemale primates, human and animal, in collaboration to write primatology. It waspublished as Volume 4 of Monographs in Primatology under the scrutiny of a ninemember editorial board, only one of whom (Jeanne Altmann) is a woman. Theeditor was a graduate student, and she was explicitly encouraged by her advisor,Peter Rodman. Female Primates includes twenty-one women and one man (as a co-author) among its authors. The range of concerns includes post-menopausal ani-mals, female adolescence, female sexual exuberance, feeding strategies, matingsystems eXplained from the point of view of female biology as the independentvariable, and much else. Any notion that the book might be pollutingly popularshould be nipped by its style.

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The portrait of publishing and rough numerical representation needs to becomplemented by a brief review of the major institutions that have produced womenscientists in the field. Women's professional practice in field primatology has meantaccess, submission, and contribution to the institutional means of producing knowl-edge. Despite the National Geographic's imagery of "Jane" alone in the jungle withthe apes, a Ph.D. is bestowed for social work, often experienced as lonely andsometimes named as alienated, in a different sort of jungle where monkeys andapes are transcribed into texts, or more recently coded onto tape. Women did notearn Ph.D.s for research on primate behavior randomly from all possible doctorate-granting institutions where people did such work. For example, Harry Harlow'slaboratories at the University of Wisconsin were particularly impoverished in humanfemale doctoral fauna. That fact contributes to the pattern of more women in thefield than in lab-based psychological primatology. Two universities were initiallycrucial, the Anthropology Department of the University of California at Berkeleyand the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour of Cambridge University at Mading-ley. By the 1970s, Stanford University, with its ties to Gombe and its captive chimpan-zee colony, and Harvard University's program in physical anthropology becameimportant.

From 1958 to 1980 at least 18 women earned Ph.D.s for work on primate evolutionand behavior at the University of California Berkeley in a program deeply influ-enced by Sherwood Washburn's plans for reconstructing physical anthropology.Many of those women were the students of Washburn's former student, Phyllis(Jay) Dolhinow, who joined UCB's faculty in 1966. The UCB program has beenfamous for its unusually large number of women students in the early years of post-war primatology. The role of Washburn in the accomplishments of his students iscontroversial and many other figures were crucial to their intellectual formation,e.g., Peter Marler, Frank Beach, and Thelma Rowell. But the program foundedand sustained by Washburn's power in physical anthropology was the route tocredentials for the U.S. women until the late 1970s, as well as most of the menthrough the 1960s. The women often formed cohorts with each other that haveinfluenced their professional lives over several years. Key names include Adrienne


Zihlman, Jane Lancaster, Mary Ellen Morbeck, Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff, Na-omi Bishop, Suzanne Ripley, and Shirley Strum. Many of the UCB women havebeen leaders in reconstructions of sex and gender in primate story telling. Theyprovided peer cohorts for each other during graduate school and have formedcritical support networks in later professional life. Their relationships with theirmale student peers are an important part of the story. There are several "genera-tions" of UCB primate women, not to mention individual heterogeneity, and gener-alizations are tricky. Their strengths and limitations are controversial and are ger-mane to the debates about explanatory powers of sociobiology and socioecologycompared to evolutionary structural functionalism.

Like Washburn, Robert Hinde of Cambridge has sponsored the doctoral work ofa significant number of the important women primatologists, includingJane Goodalland Dian Fossey. At least as important has been the work of Thelma Rowell, anearly Hinde student, who, after a period at Makerere University in Uganda, movedto the Zoology Department at UCB, where her presence made a major differenceto the primate students in the Anthropology Department as well, perhaps especiallythe women. My interview informants argued that Goodall and Rowell were criticalto Hinde's theoretical and methodological development, leading him to see beyondLorenz and Tinbergen to the complexity and individuality of primate behavior.Including Ph.D. students and post-doctoral associates, since 1959 about 15-20women primatologists have been associated with Hinde's laboratory at Madingley.Crucial names also include Dorothy Cheney, Kelly Stewart, Carol Berman, andPhyllis Lee. The approach of his lab may be followed in a recent volume of essays(Hinde 1983). Many of these students were Americans who earned their Ph.D.s inthe U.S. and did post-doctoral work associated with Madingley or vice versa. Net-works of institutions and researchers are probably more useful way for tracingprimate lineages than dissertation advisors. Crucial in these networks are long-termfield sites, like Gombe, Amboseli, Gilgil, Cayo Santiago, and others.

Stanford University was for a time at a nodal point of institutions and fieldsites. Stanford women, former undergraduates as well as graduate students, haveimportant ties with other central institutions grounding primate research. In addi-tion to Gombe, they have worked at Harvard, Cambridge, U.C. Davis, KekopeyRanch at Gilgil, Amboseli and the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller University'sresearch station at Millbrook, and other places. Their ties with each other and malepeers were crucial to setting up a second primate year at the Center for AdvancedStudy in the Behavioral Sciences in 1983-84 to produce a volume reflecting therecently ascendant explanatory frameworks. Reconstructed female animals, as wellas women primatologists, occupy very active positions in that text (Smuts et aI1987).

Irven De Vore was a dominant figure in Harvard's program in physical anthropol-ogy after he finished his Ph.D. in 1962, from many accounts as Washburn's favoredson. DeVore's undergraduate course in primate behavior at Harvard has beenimmensely popular, and since DeVore's famous "conversion" to sociobiology (toWashburn's great dismay) in the 1970s, that course and his graduate primateseminar have been important institutional mechanisms for reproducing the explan-atory strategy in younger workers. Robert Trivers's tutelage of De Vore was pivotal.It appears that in the first sociobiological years the seminars were classically "male-dominated," by faculty and students. But then the name of Sarah Blaffer Hrdybegan to appear in print and in my informants' accounts. An unrepentant sociobiolo-

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gist, she centered females in her accounts in ways that destabilized generalizationsabout what "sociobiology" must say about female animals or human women. She isalso an unrepentant feminist, greatly admired by the reviewer of her Woman ThatNever Evolved in Off Our Backs, the major radical national feminist newsprint publica-tion in the U.S., and greatly criticized by many feminist opponents ofliberal politicaltheory, including its sociobiological variants. Women students like Patricia Whittenand Nancy Nicolson who came to Harvard for graduate work after Hrdy consistentlynamed her presence as a crucial supportive factor in their own confidence andintellectual power. They formed cohorts with each other and regarded Hrdy as akind of elder sister. These networks ground much of the currently interestingreconstructions of primate females and primate society as a disrupted "whole."Hrdy became a professor at U .C. Davis in the 1980s, another institution that hasbecome a nodal point for reconstruction of female primates and education ofwomen primatologists, such as Joan Silk, Margaret Clarke, Ardith Eudey, LindaScott, and Meredith Small. [Figure 11.3]

One last locus is the savannah baboon research project in Amboseli National Parkin Kenya and the Department of Biology (Allee Laboratory of Animal Behavior) atthe University of Chicago, where Jeanne Altmann and Stuart Altmann have workedsince 1970. Jeanne Altmann has been important in primate field studies since shebegan working with Stuart Altmann in the early 1960s, but she earned her Ph.D.only in 1979, with a dissertation ("Ecology of Motherhood and Early Infancy")

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Figure 11.3 Langur female relatives and their young on Mount Abu, India. Published with permis-sion of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy/Anthrophoto.


submitted to the University of Chicago Committee on Human Development. Ini-tially, Jeanne Altmann, without a Ph.D., was rarely invited to conferences unlessher husband was also invited. Progressively, she became a power in her own rightin the field. Jeanne Altmann was cited by my younger informants as a significantnode in developing "invisible colleges" among women.

It is time to turn to the case studies for exploring the complex intersections anddivergences of feminism and primate studies in the practice of North Americanwhite women. The intersection works not by replacing feminist stories for masculi-nist ones, or scientific stories for ideological ones, truths for representations, but byrestructuring the whole field of possible stories. To destabilize a story field, onemust do many things, such as write computer programs, argue for different datacollection protocols, take photographs, consult on national science policy bodies,write high school texts, publish in the right journals, etc. Even to imagine destabiliz-ing stories, one must be formed at a social moment when change is possible, whenpeople are producing different meanings in many other areas oflife. Destabilizationis.a collectiveundert<lk~ng. Within the altered field structure, new dommatiOiis arepossible, but so might be something else. Although my focus will be on the practiceof western white women in primatology and changing constructions of what itmeans to be female in biology and physical anthropology, these matters concernboth men and women, males and females, as actors, authors, and subjects of thestories. That women usually took the lead in the reconstructions was not a naturalresult of their sex; it was an historical product of their positioning in particularcognitive and political structures of science, race, and gender.

HARAWAY

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