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Women in the Natural World

© Dorothy Hoffman

It's no exaggeration to say that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring changed my life. Her eloquent, passionate essay, published in 1962, details the devastating effects of the powerful insecticide DDT on birds and other living things in our environment and how the toxin works its way up the food chain. Carson, whose work had focused on marine biology and the ecology of life, detoured her career to warn the public about the long-term effects of pesticide overuse. Her courageous challenge of the powerful forces of government, the scientific establishment, and agricultural interest earned her some pretty poisonous attacks from both government and the chemical industry.

In the end, Carson's book proved more powerful, though, and her warning brought about the banning of DDT in the U.S. and helped form the foundations for the environmental movement of the 1970s.

Born in 1907 and raised in an era when few women ventured into the scientific fields, Carson rose to the position of chief of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by 1936 and wrote dozens of articles and books throughout her life on the wonders of the natural world and the importance of protecting it. Her central message throughout her life was the belief that the human race is an integral part of the natural world and our careless actions can have devastating effects.

In the early '60s, Dr. Jane Goodall was also blazing a trail for women in the natural world, venturing into the unspoiled wilds of Africa to begin what turned out to be the longest continuous field study of animals in their natural habitat. Establishing the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania in the mid-1960s, Goodall chronicled the lives and cultures of chimpanzees, orangutans, and wild dogs. Her work revealed that chimpanzees use tools, engage in wars, and display the same variety and intensity of emotions as humans. Her documented and often filmed observations of animal behavior and social interactions exploded centuries-old beliefs about the uniqueness of mankind and our separateness from other species.

As a teenager, I was inspired by the lives and work of Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall. They were my heroines not just because they'd achieved fame and success in male-dominated fields, but because they changed the way people viewed our place in the natural world. Many women have shared their profound connection with the natural world - women like anthropologists Mary Leakey, Diane Fossey, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Hidden Life of Dogs) on a large scale, and others like Beatrix Potter, Hope Ryden, Dorothy Richards, Hope Sawyer Buyukmihci, and Marinell Harriman on a smaller scale.

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