Patricia Pearson

In primate research, all it took was one scholar, the primatologist Sarah Hrdy, to pose the right questions and challenge the myth of exclusively male aggression. Conducting field research in Africa in the 1970s, Hrdy observed that, in monogamous primates, loyalty was imposed by the females, not the males. « Any prospect of polygyny, » she wrote, referring to thé practice of having multiple mates, «would be precluded by fierce antagonism among females of breeding age. In most monogamous species, rival females are physically excluded from the territory by thé aggressiveness of its mistress. »