Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

For while Fossey and Goodall were describing dominant silverback gorillas and the hierarchies of male chimpanzees on mainland Africa, Jolly was in Madagascar, quietly documenting something completely different – antagonistic alpha females. Jolly arrived in Madagascar in 1962, aged twenty-five, with a brand new PhD from Yale and a big juicy ‘Sputnik-era research grant to swell my pride’. She established herself at Berenty, in the isolated south, and set to work documenting the island’s peculiar and poorly understood primate life. Her chief obsession was the absurdly charismatic and now justifiably famous ring-tailed lemur, Lemur catta.