Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Diana Donald

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Diana Donald Juliana Adelman (bio) Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Diana Donald; pp. xiii + 282. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, £85.00, $130.00. Animals are now firmly ensconced in the narrative of the Victorian era, and Diana Donald's work is one reason for this. Donald's 2008 Picturing Animals in Britain remains key reading for scholars interested in the role of animals in society. Donald's most recent book, Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain, presents an interesting contrast to this previous work. On the cover of Picturing Animals is Edwin landseer's portrait of the lion tamer Isaac Van Amburgh reclining among his beasts, and most of the subsequent images feature men and animals. One exception is Joseph Wright's painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768). The image dramatically contrasts female and male responses to the experiment, which will kill the bird by depriving it of air. Women Against Cruelty picks up on exactly such tensions involving the gendered nature of animal welfare debates and the development of animal protection. In the introduction, Donald makes the point that, while campaigns against animal cruelty have been well studied, the focus of analysis has been on issues other than animal welfare, and has also ignored the importance of women's contributions. Donald provides a succinct and useful review of the advent of British animal protection laws and their relationship to other reforms, such as abolition. Chapter 1 draws attention to women of the late Georgian period who wrote against animal cruelty. This chapter sometimes reads like a catalog of works that have not been analyzed fully or brought to bear on a central argument. However, the chapter does make clear that, like their male counterparts, many female advocates for animal welfare were nonconforming in religion and sympathetic to abolition. Chapters 2 through 5 offer significant insights into both the importance of women to the animal welfare movement and gendered ideas about the treatment of animals and their role in society. Other authors (myself included) have acknowledged the gendered dimension to ideas about animals without deeply questioning its significance or its broader effects, including our unexamined acceptance of it as a byproduct of Victorian gender roles. Through her examination of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and its cognate organizations and publications, as well as the anti-vivisection movement, Donald places women at the center of a tumultuous century of changing ideas about animal-human relationships. Frances Power Cobbe, Angela Burdett-Coutts, and Anna Sewell are all familiar names to students of the animal welfare movement. Donald's contributions are to draw attention to lesser-known advocates and to delve more deeply into the particulars of [End Page 316] women's engagement in anti-cruelty. In chapter 2, for example, Donald shows that the early RSPCA was poorer and probably less powerful for its reluctance to accept women fully into its activities. That reluctance was based not only in a separate spheres mentality, but also in concern about how women's involvement might reduce the appeal of the society's message. By the mid-century, however, women's committees and women-led initiatives around humanity to animals began to proliferate and were generally supported by the RSPCA. Chapter 3 looks at the rise of some of these initiatives, such as providing drinking troughs for working and food animals and homes for lost or stray pets. To the frustration of people like Cobbe and Burdett-Coutts, women's committees within branches of the RSPCA remained separate and their activities constrained. Chapter 4 looks at the obstacles to humane education created by ideas of appropriate masculine and feminine behavior and modes of thinking. Activities like the Band of Mercy had difficulty attracting older boys because of entrenched ideals of gendered behavior. The great impact of Black Beauty (1877), as Donald sees it, was due in part to its ostensibly masculine style of writing. Sewell managed to break the mold of traditionally feminine writing about humanity to animals, thus ensuring...