'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.'
Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, Durham University
'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.'
Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat and Burger
'Diana Donald’s engaging and thoroughly researched new book reveals the importance of the activities of women in the development of the animal protection movement in Britain. [...] This is an excellent book because it demonstrates the huge amount of female talent and energy that underpinned the animal protection movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is also, though, realistic about the scale of the challenge – imperialism, hunting and industrial capitalism all increased cruelty to animals in this period. These
women were battling against expanding vested interests and an entrenched gendered culture that systematically dismissed and marginalised feminine views. Donald’s work is important in showing female activists, organisations and strategies, but it also allows us to see their relationship with wider Victorian and Edwardian culture.'
Women’s History Review
'[...] Donald describes vividly the advocacy of women on behalf of animals and the gendered perceptions of kindness to animals during the Victorian era.'
Reviews in History
'[...] Donald’s work offers a more focused, detailed examination of Victorian gender politics as they manifest in debates over the status of nonhuman animals.'
Society and Animals
'Donald explores the interplay between women, gender, politics, and animal protection. She skillfully constructs an argument to show how feelings of empathy for animals and advocacy for better treatment was cansidered more appropriate for women at the time. [...] Readers interested in the history of women and religion in nineteenth-century reform movements will flnd much to commend in this book.'
Anglican and Episcopal History, Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook
From the Back Cover
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.
About the Author
Diana Donald, now an independent scholar, is the author of Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850, and co-author of the prize-winning Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts
