Women Against Cruelty Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Diana Donald, now an independent scholar, is the author of Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850, and the prize-winning Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts<p>'In her riveting and meticulously researched book, Diana Donald explores the complex relationships between women, gender and animal protection movements. She shows, with insight and compassion, what was at stake in the quest to change both attitudes towards and practices concerning animals. Weaving together accounts of women's activism, legal and political debates, controversies around vivisection and the roles of institutions, Donald is writing important and timely history about forms of empathy.' <br /><b>Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, Durham University</b><br /><br />'In a compelling and fascinating work, Diana Donald restores the words and deeds of 19th century women to the historical record—updating interpretations with a powerful and empowering narrative of the inseparability of animal advocacy, politics and gender.'<br /><b>Carol J. Adams, author of <i>The Sexual Politics of Meat</i> and <i>Burger<br /></i></b><br />'Rebuilding the pieces of a complex and stratified history in which were contained very different demands and sensitivities (political, religious, cultural), Donald highlights, on the one hand, how the natural convergence<br />between women's rights and animal protection was the result of a hierarchical and patriarchal social system and, on the other hand, as "sympathy, compassion, and caring "became the basis" upon which theory<br />about human treatment of animals should be constructed.' <br /><i><b> Ricerche di Storia Politica </b></i></p>
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Preface
Prefatory note: The archive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
Introduction
1 Sexual distinctions in attitudes to animals in the late Georgian era
2 The early history of the RSPCA: its culture and its conflicts
3 Animal welfare and ‘humane education’: new roles for women
4 The ‘two religions’: a gendered divide in Victorian society
5 Anti-vivisection: a feminist cause?
6 Sentiment and ‘the spirit of life’: new insights at the fin de siècle
Index
This is the first book to explore women’s leading role in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Its originality lies in uniting feminist perspectives with the fast-developing field of animal-human history, and it opens up rich archival sources for further research.
Women founded charities devoted to animal protection, such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. They intervened directly to stop abuses, passionately advocated greater kindness to animals, schooled the young in humane values, wrote imaginative stories of animal suffering, and debated the causes of human cruelty in polemical works. In all these enterprises they encountered opponents who sought to discredit their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’. However, the gradual emancipation of women in the later Victorian era led also to the formulation of a body of feminist theory on the centrality of ‘sentiment’ as a positive force in animal advocacy. The power of patriarchy in repressing women’s aspirations to personal independence and voting rights gave them a sense of common cause with animals, who equally suffered from the dominance of male values in society, and from an assumption that humans were entitled to exploit animals at will.
Women against cruelty will be essential reading for those studying and working in the fields of animal history, feminist theory, women’s history, nineteenth-century literature and Victorian society and institutions.