Visionary women who changed our world
Andrea Barnet makes a compelling case for the four women - Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters - who helped us ‘‘pay attention’’, writes Joanna Scutts.
They were single and married, mothers and not, educated and self-taught, financially comfortable and struggling. Their work spans the second half of the 20th century and continues into the present. They did not know one another. But in her lively new biography of Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters, Andrea Barnet makes a compelling case that these women ‘‘changed our world.’’
Visionary Women links her subjects chronologically, with an emphasis on the 1960s. It was then that the women became, collectively, ‘‘a kind of true north for the gathering counterculture’’. They were Davids aiming slingshots at the Goliath of postwar America, which was waging an all-out ‘‘war on nature’’ with wrecking balls and toxic pesticides.
In Silent Spring (1962), Carson shocked the nation by laying bare the enormous environmental cost of technological progress.
Jacobs, in turn, was fighting to keep another fragile and beautiful ecosystem – her New York City neighbourhood – from being flattened by the highways whisking white families to the suburbs.
Meanwhile, Goodall camped for months in the jungles of Tanzania to bring back reports of the intelligence and sociability of chimpanzees, which upended the scientific establishment’s assumption of human supremacy.
Finally, Waters, more product than driver of the counterculture, built a restaurant and a worldwide reputation on the idea that the best meals were created in a respectful symbiosis between environment, farmer, chef and diner.
Beyond their iconoclasm and remarkably supportive families the main biographical trait these women share is that all of them are white.
Barnet makes a powerful case for a shared perspective among her subjects, likening Carson’s understanding of the sea to Jacobs’s view of the city, as ‘‘a balance of live and ever-evolving forces, a fluid network of exchanges, as much a process as a place.’’
Goodall recorded everything about her chimpanzees in capacious detail, without hierarchy or categorisation, looking ‘‘with a kind of blinkered intensity, drawing upon all her senses’’.
Waters, a young student in France, recalled lavishing a similar attention on ‘‘what the fruit bowl looked like, how the cheese was presented, how it was put on the shelves, how the baguettes twisted. The shapes, the colours, the styles.’’
All four women learned by immersing themselves in their environment and letting their eyes lead the way. Of the many lessons they have to teach us, this may be the most potent of all: Pay attention.
– Washington Post