November 18, 2025
Sisters of the Jungle, by Keriann McGoogan
In Sisters of the Jungle: The Trailblazing Women Who Shaped the Study of Primates, Keriann McGoogan—herself a scientist whose adventures have included studying howler monkeys in Belize and two years in Madagascar deep into lemurs—considers the question of why so many primatologists are women, especially in comparison with other scientific fields. McGoogan takes the stories of the world’s best known primatologists (I was going to specify female, but I think they’re the best known, full stop)—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikis—and weaves in others from the scientists who’ve built on their legacies in more recent years, along with her own perspective of experiences in the field, and draws a rich history of the evolution of primatology so that the book becomes (amusingly) a study the study of primates. The anecdotes are fascinating and the prose evocative and absorbing, McGoogan effectively balancing the personal and professional in her subjects’ experiences, all the while understanding how the lines are particularly blurred when one is in the field for months at a time.
She shows that while the women she writes about had to contend with sexism and limited opportunities due to gender, they also benefited from male mentors who took them seriously (Louis Leakey’s complicated legacy notwithstanding). And it is especially refreshing to read about the women whose male partners were supportive of their scientific endeavours, and who’ve been able to achieve some element of equality in their relationships, which has also been McGoogan’s experience.
The readability and engagingness of Sisters of the Jungle might belie just what a huge project it must have been to write—this is the history of a scientific field, a biography of at least six different people, plus memoir, and reportage. You get a lot of book in this one book, and it manages to be fantastic and inspiring from start to finish.
