As a fresh anthropology graduate student in 1972, I was enthralled by the idea that you could observe nonhuman primates and gain clues about human behavior. Yet I was also confused by the limited information presented in the first primatology course I took. The portrait of females, for example, was rather simple. It appeared that monkey and ape females spent all their time making babies, having babies, and caring for them. If there was an evolutionary relationship between these animals and the human lineage, surely there was more to female behavior than this.

It is no coincidence, of course, that these thoughts occurred to me, a 25-year-old, independent woman, smack in the middle of the feminist revolution. So, after class one day, I approached the professor who was teaching the course and asked, ‘What else do these females do besides have babies?’ He looked at me thoughtfully and said, ‘That's a good question. They must do something else. But I don't know what it is.’ Surrounded by women who were occupied in many other ways besides mothering, and nursing ambitions for a career rather than nursing babies, I just knew that my nonhuman primate sisters had other things to do as well.

I went on to complete dissertation research at the University of California, Davis, on female macaques without infants. More significantly, this research was part of a much larger wave of research on female primate behavior. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, animal behaviorists, both women and men, were starting to focus on female behavior.