Jane Goodall taught you how to ‘look’

Jane Goodall, the celebrated primatologist, in New York, Oct. 17, 2017. Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa, grasped the vast power that lay in careful, mutual observation. (Gabriela Herman/The New York Times)

By RHONDA GARELICK

We don’t think of Jane Goodall as a style icon. But we should.

Style is about having a keen awareness of and control over how the world sees you, and about understanding how you see the world — how to notice and respond to all its tiny details. Goodall, who died Oct.1 at 91, was a master at this.

Goodall grasped the vast power that lay in careful, mutual observation: She sat patiently for months in the rainforest of Tanzania, observing the chimpanzees, who initially fled from her in fear. Undeterred, she kept watching, aware that the chimps were watching her, too. Eventually she gained their trust and immersed herself in their society, engaging in a kind of dialogue with them. This method of intense observation and respect led to Goodall’s simple yet revolutionary discoveries: that “animals, like us, have personalities, minds and emotions,” and that human beings were not the “highlight of creation” — which had been settled wisdom for centuries — but “an animal like the others.”

This work brought Goodall enduring celebrity, landing her on the cover of National Geographic in 1965, where, at 31, she appeared in what would become her signature look: blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail, notebook on her knees, and a uniform-like outfit of khaki button-down and shorts. In the photo, she sits, bare legs bent up toward her chest, gazing with a warm, engaged smile not at the camera, but at a group of chimpanzees in the foreground. The message was clear: “Don’t look at me. Look at them.”

She was modeling, that is, how to look, how to attend to the natural world. She was using her own style to reveal the hidden lives of animals, to reveal that they, too, had style: individuality, identities, quirks and foibles.

Goodall had inaugurated a new kind of intellectual glamour. She was the photogenic anthropologist. But fame came with both benefits and pitfalls. While her allure attracted research funding, it also garnered belittling, sexist critique. As she explained to Alex Cooper on the podcast “Call Her Daddy”: “Some of the jealous male scientists would say, ‘Well, you know, she’s just got this notoriety, and she’s getting money from Geographic. And they want her on the cover, and they wouldn’t put her on the cover if she didn’t have nice legs.’ So if somebody said that today, they’d be sued, right?”

She did not deny her attractiveness, but indicated that she’d long understood how to use it for the benefit of science. “If my legs were getting me the money, thank you, legs!” she exclaimed in the interview, merrily slapping her thighs for emphasis. “And if you look at those covers, they were jolly nice legs.”

In 2022, Mattel put Goodall’s combination of style and intellect to use, issuing a Jane Goodall Barbie as part of its “Inspiring Women” series. The doll depicts her as she looked 60 years ago, complete with shorts, binoculars and ponytail. Goodall seemed delighted to see herself transformed into the classic fashion doll. She felt it would inspire an interest in science.

Goodall clearly accepted her legs and the rest of her understated, elegant appeal as tools with which to share her message — not unlike the tools she famously discovered that chimpanzees used, upending the view that toolmaking was practiced exclusively by human beings.

This approach was perfectly in keeping with her organic view of life in general: She saw no distinction between the human and animal worlds.

Given her all-encompassing, egalitarian view of nature, it’s not surprising that Goodall evinced little fear of old age or death, which she saw not as a fearsome end, but as another natural stage of life. “I always say to people that my next adventure will be dying,” she said in a recent interview. “Because either there’s nothing, in which case, well, you don’t care, do you? Or there’s something. And if there’s something — which I believe — then I can’t think of a greater adventure than finding out what that something is.”

This excitement and curiosity about what comes next may explain why Goodall seemed almost unaltered by age. At 91, she looked, sounded and worked much as she always had, her enthusiasm and commitment — to protecting animals and the Earth, to teaching, to inspiring others — undimmed. The certainty that she belonged to the larger community of all living things seemed to grant her a calm radiance, encouraging others to pay attention to her message and to her.