Jane Goodall was born in 1934. Since she had been a small child, Goodall knew that she wanted to go to Africa and work with wild animals, and to write. Her mother always made it clear that if she put her mind to it, she could find a way to do what she wanted. Goodall’s father (a race car driver) divorced her mother when Jane was twelve, and she grew up in a home full of women, in Bournemouth. They didn’t have much money, and couldn’t afford college for Jane, so she did a secretarial course in order to have some professional skills that could be useful anywhere. In 1957 she had been working in London when she had the great luck to be invited to visit a friend who had moved to Kenya. She moved back in to her family’s home to save on rent and worked long hours at a tiresome job to raise the money for a sea voyage to Africa.  

Once in Africa, Goodall confirmed her feeling that she wanted to stay there, so through family connections she got a job with a British company. At a dinner party she was told that if she wanted to work with animals she should go to see Louis Leakey, a famously infamous paleoanthropologist. So she called him up, impressed him with her enthusiasm, asked for his help with her plan to work with animals and write, and took a job replacing his outgoing secretary. It turns out the previous secretary was leaving because the married Leakey had a habit of sexually harassing the young women he worked with. At the time this was thought to be “striking up an office romance.” Leakey decided to stay with his brilliant archeologist wife, Mary, so the secretary had to go. Amazingly, Jane was able to decline such a relationship with her boss, but still pursue a mentorship arrangement with him. He eventually had other plans for her.

In 1958, when Jane Goodall had the opportunity to do research on chimpanzees in the wild, the authorities in Africa wouldn’t let her, a young woman, go into the jungle without an official assistant. Remarkably, her mother volunteered and moved to Africa. In 1960, after all the permissions and funding were in order, they went together. Louis Leakey made the expedition possible. He wanted someone to study the chimps to get an idea of what the behavior of our common ape ancestors might have been like. It was important to him that Goodall had not been to University, he thought her mind “uncluttered by reductive scientific thinking” and set ideas about the differences between animals and humans. Leakey felt that women are better at studying animals than men are. As Goodall says in the film, “Jane’s Journey,” Leakey thought “women would be better observers, you need patience to be a good mother as you need to be able to understand quite quickly the needs, the wants, of a non-verbal being, and that’s our children before they can speak.” 

In the Gombe preserve in Tanzania, it was five or six months before the chimps would let Goodall close enough to see much. She left camp alone every day and many nights, in all weather, to go out into the jungle to try to observe them through her binoculars. She was able finally to get close to the chimps because of the personality of one individual chimpanzee that Goodall named “David Greybeard.” This particular chimp lost his fear of Goodall and let her get close to him. This influenced the behavior of the other chimps and she was able to regularly get close to the group. She eventually devised feeding stations close to camp so that the animals could be lured close daily. 

It is difficult to exaggerate how revolutionary is this long term study of chimpanzees. Goodall pushed against the methodological orthodoxy of the time by treating each animal as an individual with a personality. For example, she gave them names and spoke of their emotions. Goodall learned about effective child raising by watching Flo, a high-ranking female. Over six generations the project was able to connect effective child-raising with “successful” adults. Goodall found that chimpanzees make and use tools, something that was thought to define humans and separate us from all the other animals. She discovered that chimps eat meat. Chimps sometimes eat chimps! Chimpanzees engage in armed warfare. Troops of chimps have their own cultures that are different from other troops’; not every behavior is instinctual. She has concluded that the difference between humans and animals is a matter of degree and not of kind. 

When Goodall looks back at her story she is amazed at all the luck involved in her path. But I also see that she was able to turn her luck into something, and her will was just as important in creating her path. She made a way. She was a beautiful woman, and so got a lot of attention, sometimes condescending attention, but she also used this as a way to drum up public interest in her project and to get funding.

In 1986 Jane Goodall attended a conference about chimpanzees and was made to see all the threats to their survival around the world, not just the small group she was occupied with in Gombe. Since then she has been an activist and an organizer and her scope has vastly expanded. She can see that wildlife conservation can not be separated from work against poverty, because when humans will destroy their environment in order to find something to eat. She saw that if children do not have hope about the future then they will just give up. So her institute that was created to work for wildlife conservation expanded to include youth education. She called this program “Roots and Shoots” (see design note below).  When she saw the people living near Gombe cutting down the trees to make their living, she knew she needed to create an economic development scheme that gives micro loans to enterprises that must be environmentally sustainable. It wasn’t long before the forest started growing back. She leverages her fame to make a way forward for the survival of life on our planet. She is tireless. She persists.

Goodall did earn academic degrees. She had several marriages but always managed to belong to herself. She used child rearing methods she learned from Flo to raise her son (something like what we call attachment parenting now, quite out of fashion when she was a young mother). She has a spiritual interpretation of her feelings of connection to nature and her purpose in life. There is so much more to Goodall’s story than I can include here. Also, as she is still living, her story has not ended.

DESIGN NOTE
The first version of this design had a chimpanzee in the background and I never felt satisfied, it seemed too literal a representation of Jane’s story.The image was not about her power, for she admitted that the choice to study chimps was arbitrary. It was someone who visited my Female Power hut who gave me the idea I settled on (so far). The visitor said that her mother was a fan of Goodall’s and that her favorite thing from one of Jane’s speeches was that she described how a sprout can push through paving to grow: that an individual who seems slight can have immense strength. When I mentioned this to another visitor, she described how her own husband had been encouraged by someone who said that if you build roots, that is, a connected network, then you can have an outsized effect because of those connections. This image, then, gets at the radical optimism that Jane tries to promote with all her activism. We cannot give up because so much is at stake.

This print was published in June 2021 and revised in August 2021.

Here are some of the resources I used in this project:

The films “Jane” and “Jane’s Journey”

Books: In the Shadow of Man, by Jane van Lawick-Goodall
Jane Goodall, A Biography by Meg Greene

Online resources:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/episodes/weekender-dr-jane-goodall-her-lifelong-work-and-new-film
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/jane-goodall-research-
conservation/
https://www.ecowatch.com/jane-goodall-2646381906.html

The visitors to my booth (the “Female Power hut”) at Eastern Market in Washington, D.C.