Sarah Blaffer Hrdy graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College and earned her PhD at Harvard in 1975. She is professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of five books including The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), Mother Nature (1999), and Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding (2009) as well as co-editor of Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives and Attachment and Bonding: A New Synthesis. Her current focus is on how evolutionary perspectives can help us better understand the needs of children.
Oral History Highlights
Did you like reading books as a child?
Oh, of course. But there weren’t many admirable women protagonists, mostly just Nancy Drew. She was pretty much all there was. And of course I loved Walter Farley’s black stallion books. Beside living on a farm and raising horses, I wanted to be a writer, initially, a novelist. That's all I could imagine ever being. When I was in high school, I remember my mother, who was a Jungian and believed in handwriting analysis, took me to this specialist who tells people what kind of occupations they might like to pursue in life. It was interesting for her time that she even considered that I might want a career. Anyway, she took me for these tests, and they told me I should either be a fabric designer or veterinarian, which was not too far off.