Bitch

What does it mean to be female?

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What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again.

Whether it's the female lemurs of Madagascar, dominating the males of their species both physically and politically, the female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii, or the murderous meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert, the bitches in BITCH overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour.

In her trailblazing new book, Lucy Cooke offers a timely look at how sexist bias polluted evolutionary biology and through her riotous cast of bad-ass female animals shows the scientific patriarchy what's what.

Lucy Cooke's Bitch shows just how far we have come in seeing nature's females for what they actually are.'
Simon Ing, Telegraph

Fun, informative and revolutionary all at once, Bitch should be required reading in school. This is a joyous, and often hilarious, romp in which Cooke simultaneously does justice to the actual data, gives voice to the substantive contributions of women scientists, and demolishes bias, blindness and ignorance about sex in the academy and in the public. After reading this book one will never look at a clownfish, a barnacle, an orca, an albatross or a human the same way again. And the world will be better for it.
Augustin Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and author of The Creative Spark

Lucy Cooke's marvellous Bitch blasts the dust off stuffy old ideas to celebrate the true and wildly diverse influence of femal creatures throughout the animal kingdom, revealing them to be every bit as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive and dynamic as males ... In chapters fizzing with X-rated factoids, Cooke merrily demolishes myth after myth about our wild sisters ... Never mean or boring. It's exhilarating to zip through the world with her as she points out what has been missed or misinterpreted.
Helen Brown, Telegraph

About Lucy Cooke

Lucy Cooke is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning broadcaster and National Geographic Explorer with a master’s in zoology from New College, Oxford, where she studied under Richard Dawkins. She is a fellow of Durham University and a regular guest lecturer at universities including Harvard and Cambridge.
Lucy has written, directed and presented award-winning international television series for the BBC, National Geographic, Animal Planet and Discovery, and co-presented BBC Springwatch. On BBC Radio 4 she has hosted her own series, The Truth About… and Political Animals, and is a regular on The Infinite Monkey Cage and Sue Perkins’ Nature Table. She has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and New Scientist, among others.
Her bestselling book Bitch: What Does It Mean to Be Female? challenges the sexist dogma embedded in evolutionary biology. A Telegraph and Guardian book of the year, it has been adopted onto university syllabuses around the world and is being developed as a stage musical and television series. Her earlier books include The Truth About Animals, shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and translated into nineteen languages, and A Little Book of Sloth, which became a major Discovery series.

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