Hrdy was the only female graduate in her class and the focus was firmly on male animals. The halls were heavy with testosterone. ‘Sexism was built into the sciences at Harvard back then,’ she told me. The textbooks of the time considered female primates only as mothers, fundamentally nurturing and with zero competitive edge. Female primates were ‘invariably subordinate to all the adult males’ and sexual behaviour was understood to play ‘a small part in the life of an adult female’. As such they were ‘relatively identical’ and considered scientifically dull.
