Dr. Jane Goodall

When I think of Jane Goodall, I see a woman holding a chimpanzee. When I was growing up, Jane Goodall was taught to me in the same way that I was taught about Albert Einstein. We watched a PBS special about her in science class when I was around eight, and I remember reading an article about her in Highschool for an AP English Language assignment. She seemed like an unattainable, almost mythical woman – a far away and respected deity for me and all the other animal obsessed girls in elementary school. She was the “Monkey Whisperer.”

As I get older, I try to dismantle these idealistic visions of the women I grew up looking up to. Not that there isn’t value in the way that America taught little girls about strong women in the 2000s, but it seems like we went through a period where you could be a lady, or be a strong woman. Dismantling this idea can be very hard, but not when it comes to Jane Goodall. She was soft spoken and intelligent, while also displaying courageousness in her strong-willed actions for animals and the environment.

Jane was born in 1934 in England, the oldest of two sisters, in a middle-class family. Her Mother, Vanna Morris-Goodall was a successful novelist, and her father, Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall was an engineer. It was the gift of a toy chimpanzee from her parents that sparked her journey to becoming one of the world’s most respected and revered conservationists.

Chimpanzees were sacred for Jane. Her relationship with them surpassed that of animal and researcher, especially in the 1960s. According to Sam Anderson from The New York Times, this was “back when scientists weren’t supposed to dignify the animals they studied with names.”. It was then, and still is, now considered standard practice for scientists to turn the animals into numbered subjects rather than sentient beings. It seems to me that the gap between her level of research and that of most previous scientists, into chimpanzee behavior, is in how she viewed the animals and the actual effort she took to learn their society. It was a novel approach, Jane was 26 and a few degrees short of being a scientist, when paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey sent her to Gombe, Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees. His foundation, the Leakey Foundation, states on its website that “the discoveries she made there transformed our understanding of chimpanzees and redefined what it means to be human.”

Without Goodall our knowledge of chimpanzees would be limited. The understanding of the way they “work,” their social needs, behaviors, emotions, their ability to create tools, as well as their personalities are all concepts that were founded by Jane Goodall on and after her trip to Gombe.

Jane Goodall became the UN Messenger of peace, she created the Jane Goodall Institute, and the Roots and Shoots youth program and she educated generations of people about animal welfare and biodiversity in a way that was previously unheard of. She was overzealous, underqualified, and a woman, yet somehow in 1960 she found herself with the opportunity of a lifetime and she used every moment of it to understand what it is to be a chimpanzee, and what it was to be human on this earth. Her work in Animal Welfare is unforgettable and her dedication is inspiring. Women and girls everywhere continue to look up to Jane Goodall, as we have for 60 years.

By Genevieve Pollock

The Lives They Lived: Jane Goodall. The New York Times. Anderson, S. (2025, October).

Jane Goodall remembered as a hero for animals. Humane World for Animals. (2025, October 1).

Jane Goodall | Biography, awards, institute, books, & facts. (2026, May 16).