'Woman Who Loves Giraffes' coming to Fermilab Oct. 11
Fermilab Arts & Lecture Series will offer the movie "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes" at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11, in Ramsey Auditorium, off Pine Street in Batavia. Tickets are $8. For tickets or information, call the box office at (630) 840-ARTS (2787) or visit events.fnal.gov.
Join a viewing of "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes," followed by Q&A with Anne Innis Dagg, the subject of the film, and the director of the film, Alison Reid.
In 1956, Anne Innis Dagg made an unprecedented solo journey to South Africa to become the first person in the world to study animal behavior in the wild on that continent. When she returned home a year later armed with groundbreaking research, the insurmountable barriers she faced as a female scientist proved much harder to overcome.
In 1972, having published 20 research papers as an assistant professor of zoology at University of Guelph, the Dean of the university, denied her tenure. She couldn't apply to the University of Waterloo because the Dean there told Anne that he would never give tenure to a married woman.
This was the catalyst that transformed Dagg into a feminist activist. For three decades, Dagg was absent from the giraffe world until 2010 when she was sought out by giraffologists and not just brought back to into the fold, but finally celebrated for her work.
In "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes," an older, now 85, wiser Dagg takes us on her first expedition back to Africa to retrace where her trailblazing journey began more than half a century ago. By retracing her original steps, and with letters and stunning, original 16 mm film footage, she offers an intimate window into her life as a young woman, juxtaposed with a first hand look at the devastating reality that giraffes are facing today.
Both the world's first 'giraffologist', whose research findings ultimately became the foundation for many scientists following in her footsteps, and the species she loves have each experienced triumphs as well as nasty battle scars. "The Woman Who Loves Giraffes" gives us a moving perspective on both.