Category Archives: Feminism & Patriarchy

The Alcotts and Vegan Feminism of the 19th Century

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Fruitlands. Photo credit: Wikicommons, Daderot

Although most of the early vegetarian feminists were not quite willing to acknowledge or resist the inherent violence in animal-derived foods and products beyond “meat,” political veganism in the West has been in practice since at least the early 19th century. The famous Alcott family of the United States, for instance, understood Nonhuman Animal rights as complementary to their abolitionist efforts. In the 1840s, they attempted to put their transcendentalist philosophy and social justice values into action not simply by practicing veganism by way of diet, but by creating a utopian-oriented communal farm (Francis 2010, Shprintzen 2013). They acquired a large 90-acre tract of farmland in rural Massachusetts they named Fruitlands. Here, they hoped to grow their own food—all vegan—without the use of horses, oxen, or other animals for draught nor manure.1

This emphasis on the utopia should not suggest that people of the era had an unfamiliarity with plant-based living. In 19th century Ireland, for instance, colonization ensured that the agricultural exploitation of cows and other animals for flesh and breastmilk was relegated primarily to British colonial landowners bound for industrializing England and the booming slave trade in the Americas. The Irish peasantry survived primarily on the farming of potatoes and other vegetables for their own consumption, and vegetarian advocates of the day saw this as evidence of the nutritional suitability of animal-free consumption (Wrenn 2021).

Veganic farming, for that matter, was not unknown prior to the industrialization of agriculture. For instance, abundantly available seaweed was used as a potent fertilizer in Ireland, while Native Americans did not rely on Nonhuman Animals for plowing and many tribes ate very plant-heavy diets (Robinson 2024, Teufel 2009). While the destruction of the American buffalo is often cited as a strategy in Indigenous genocide, less discussed is the assault on the American chestnut, a far more widespread and actively managed food source for natives of North America.

The Alcotts were familiar with these vegan-oriented food production systems and more, citing them in their writings as rationales for their own experiments. What they were less familiar with, however, was how to operationalize these techniques with little practical experience of their own. As upper-middle class artists, authors, and speakers, they were truly unprepared for the immense efforts needed to operate a fully self-sustaining farm. Louisa May Alcott (who authored the famous classic in American women’s literature, Little Women) was also acutely aware of the gender politics that remained largely unchanged in this little utopia (Shprintzen 2013). The male inhabitants of the project continued with their busy advocacy and lecture circuits, leaving the women behind to maintain the everyday drudgery of operating a working farm.

Within a year, the project came to an end. Historians have pointed to the eschewing of Nonhuman Animal labor as reason for the failure (Francis 2010), but it seems more likely that the philosophical interests and commitments of the residents distracted from the material requirements of farm life. They seemed more interested in pontificating about utopia than doing utopia.

That said, Fruitlands does provide evidence of early interest in the manufacture of a vegan society, one that was born of an intersectional praxis given the founders’ participation in so many social justice efforts of the time. It was also evidence of an early vegan feminist critique of male privilege in the movement. As would become a pattern across the next century, women would be burdened with the drudgery of organization and project upkeep, freeing men to undertake the more glamorous and celebrated public-facing work.

Notes

  1. Many “back to the land” hippie and feminist campaigns in the United States fail to consider the legacy of colonialism and Indigenious removal in the “taking back” of land. Fruitlands (now a museum) continues to occupy traditional lands of the Agawam, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket tribes in Harvard, MA.

References

Francis, R. 2010. Fruitlands. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Robinson, M. 2024. “Indigenous Veganism.” Pp. 295-313, in The Plant-based and Vegan Handbook. Y. Athanassakis, R. Larue, and W. O’Donohue (Eds.). Cham: Springer.

Shprintzen, A. 2013. The Vegetarian Crusade. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Teufel, N. 2009. “Nutrient Characteristics of Southwest Native American Pre-contact Diets.” Journal of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine 6 (3): 273-284.

Wrenn, C. 2021. Animals in Irish Society. New York: SUNY Press.

Wrenn, C. 2022. “Society Writings.” Pp. 333-348, in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies, L. Wright and E. Quinn (Eds.). Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

Witches for Animal Rights

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In my forthcoming book, Vegan Witchcraft, I explore the history of feminist witchcraft in the US and UK, arguing that, despite many key parallels, feminist witches have failed their commitments to other animals (often referred to as familiars) in either ignoring or outright rejecting veganism and total liberation.

That said, I have found evidence that some witches are making this connection. In the early 1990s, for instance, the Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter announced the formation of a new sister group in New York, Witches for Animal Rights. Witches for Animal Rights rallied fellow witches by imploring them to “save the world with your fork.” Feminists for Animal Rights (1994) explains that “members worship the Goddess by promoting the wellbeing of her nonhuman animals” (16), suggesting that interested readers contact the Morningstar Coven in McDonough, New York. Witches for Animal Rights also surfaces in the record as a performing group in “No RIO,” an anti-gentrification guerrilla project in New York City that provided space and platform for radical artists and activists (Forte 1989). This organization was likely shortlived as I was unable to find futher reference.

In the 2010s, a the Protego Foundation formed from a group of Harry Potter fans who contextualize their anti-speciesist activism in the magical creations of J. K. Rowling. A registered nonprofit, the Protego Foundation “fights to end the abuse of the animals in the Muggle world through our inspiration from the magical creatures in the wizarding world […] empowering all magical persons to get active for animals.”

Gregory Maguire’s (1995) retelling of the “Wicked” witch of Oz sees her (Elphaba Thropp) as a social justice activist, advocating for Nonhuman Animals and the environment. Indeed, vegan scholar Christopher Sebastian (2020) suggests that her skin is green as a symbolic reference to her advocacy for nature and other animals, but also to mark her as a monstrous other in protesting the violent social stratification of Oz where the oppression of humans and other animals are explicitly entangled.

Witches for Animal Rights, Wicked, and the Protego Foundation are interesting examples of witchcraft engaged in the service of other animals, but they are exceptions, not the norm. Many feminists have embraced spirituality, paganism, and witchcraft as an important thealogical, philosophical, psychological, and even strategic means of resilience and resistence, but few extend this nature-based practice to include veganism and species-inclusiveness. It remains to be seen if modern witchcraft will, on a whole, begin to incorporate these values. To date, it is not sufficiently distinct from mainstream speciesist feminism and anthropocentric institutionalized religions.

References

Feminists for Animal Rights. 1994. “Resources.” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 8 (1-2): 16.

Forte, S. 1989. “Guerilla Space: A Few Many Things about ABC No Rio.” X-posure Summer: no page.

Protego Foundation. No date. Who We Are. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from: https://www.protegofoundation.org/who-we-are.html.

Maguire, G. 1995. Wicked. New York: HarperCollins.

Sebastian, C. 2020. “Adaptation: No One Mourns the Wicked, But We Should.” Pp. 212-221, in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies, L. Wright and E. Quinn (Eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Witches for Animal Rights. 1994. “Save the World with Your Fork!” Feminists for Animal Rights Newsletter 8 (1-2): 15.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

Britain’s First Female Qualified Medical Doctor…and Vegetarian Witch?

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Anna Kingsford, Britain’s first qualified female medical doctor, was especially horrified by the burgeoning vivisection industry in the 19th century. Women were disadvantaged by their societal exclusion when protesting men’s scientific violence against other animals, but Kingsford’s medical training granted her access, insider knowledge, and proof that a degree could be earned without harming other animals. She also used her medical training to produce research that supported the suitability of plant-based eating, information that was largely absent in a society that was only just coming to discover and understand the science of nutrition.

When science and medicine proved ineffectual in her liberation campaign, she turned to the psychic realm. She levied psychic attacks on European vivisectionists, aiming not just to disrupt their work but reportedly to end their lives.

In the history of Nonhuman Animal rights, Kingsford is remembered as one of the first vegetarian feminists, bravely resisting anthroparchal violence in an era that offered little platform to women. But I would suggest that Kingsford should also be remembered as one of the first vegetarian witches. She certainly believed male vivisectionists were such—for Kingsford, these were not objective, calm, scientists; they were instead sorcerers engaged in black magic, fiendish for the blood, gore, and suffering associated with their laboratory torture.

Like the 20th century feminist witches that would follow her, she believed in reincarnation. Nonhuman Animals, she warned, were due considerable karmic compensation. Vivisectionists, then, if not to meet any justice in this life, would surely meet it in the next. Her belief in the afterlife of Nonhuman Animals perhaps offered some sort of solace. In her metaphysical work, these victims finally had voices, speaking to her in seances.

Although Kingsford may not have identified as a witch (while she was influenced by a variety of world religions, she was an avid Christian), the same concentrated intention for ending patriarchal violence and enacting justice through metaphysical means would be taken up by second-wave feminists in California a century later.

Work Cited

Budapest, Z. 1986. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting, and Other Womanly Arts. Oakland: Consolidated Printers.

Ferguson, C. 2022. “Anna Kingsford and the Intuitive Science of Occultism.” Aries—Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 22: 114-135.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

Women and Vegan Civil Resistance

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Although vegan feminism is a relatively new theory of social change in the West, it has had a rich background with a variety of innovative tactics, developed by innovative women in the resistance. In “Vegan Feminism Then and Now: Women’s Resistance to Legalised Speciesism across Three Waves of Activism” published in Gendering Green Criminology (Bristol University Press 2023), Lynda Korimboccus joins me in exploring this history through the efforts of three outstanding activists we take to represent feminist approaches to anti-speciesism across three primary waves of collective effort.

Charlotte Despard and First-Wave Intersectionality

The first, Charlotte Despard, was a British woman of Irish birth who was heavily active in Irish independence efforts, feminism, vegetarianism, and anti-vivisection campaigning. She is perhaps best remembered in the anti-speciesist movement for her protests involving the contentious Brown Dog statue in Battersea, London. The statue, meant as an homage to a canine who languished in the vivisection industry. This little dog represented thousands of others who were victimized by the increasingly powerful and entrenched medical science.

The statue was a direct challenge to patriarchal institutions and their systemic violence against Nonhuman Animals…and others. Despard chose Battersea for a reason: it was also a hotbed of Irish nationalism, feminism, and socialism. Despard’s protest tactics were intersectionally aware and explicitly engaged coordination across movements. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the belief in social progress was not isolated by cause. Many women activists were actively engaged in a variety of campaigns simultaneously, sometimes in overlapping ways.

Patty Mark and Second-Wave Open Rescue

By the mid-20th century, women had become the dominant group in activist ranks. And, although men’s philosophical contributions tended to take precedence, women activists were busy developing novel tactics for dismantling a now entrenched speciesist economics order. Patty Mark, for instance, had innovated a new strategy in Australia that both challenged the mundane normalcy of speciesism and physically intervened in Nonhuman Animal suffering. Her “open rescue” approach intentionally and strategically broke the law, the law being deemed illegitimate due to the horrific harms it protected. This tactic encouraged activists to peacefully enter industrial spaces to remove some victims to safety and disrupt industrial processes. Activists often chained themselves to facility infrastructure as well.

The aim was to attract media attention through illegality and disruption, bringing attention to the cause and allowing the public a rare opportunity to see within hidden speciesist spaces. Arrest was not only risked but even encouraged as it added to the spectacle and disruption. This tactic was innovative in introducing feminist ideals of nonviolence and active compassion.

Sarah Kistle and Third-Wave Vegan Intersectionality

Finally, we explored the tactical developments of Sarah Kistle. As the movement entered the 21st century, a return to intersectionality seemed ever more necessary. The late 20th century had witnessed a considerable neoliberalization that introduced and reified individualist approaches to social change. Indeed, the rational ideology that underpinned this shift made feminist approaches appear marginal, deluded, and unfocused. This new era of “rational” activism had also normalized welfare reform and animals’ flesh “reductionism.”

Sarah Kistle became a prominent figure in the debates that would arise between these two positions by the 2010s. Kistle advocated for a radical, intersectional approach to advocacy, insisting that veganism was the least humans could do to alleviate speciesism, and the movement had a duty to promote it as such. Importantly, she argued that this vegan message should not be restricted only to “animal lovers,” but should be actively put into conversation with other social justice causes. As a Korean American, she recognized that the unjust experiences of Nonhuman Animals heavily entangle with that of marginalized human groups. With the outbreak of Black Lives Matter protests later that decade, she realized this vegan intersectional theory by opening a vegan restaurant in Minneapolis, employing Black Lives Matter activists who had been harassed and arrested by the police.

Across all waves, we can find so many inspiring stories of innovative women who fought a speciesist legal system to advance the radical idea that animals (and the humans whose experiences intertwine with that of other animals) matter. Indeed, Despard, Mark, and Kistle took on the police themselves, using state repression as a means to shine light on the personhood of the oppressed. It is a vegan feminist criminology that should inspire another generation of women to critically examine a criminal justice system that has historically relied on violence, control, incarceration, and the stripping of rights to maintain not only speciesism but many other systems of oppression. Future tactics might continue to test the limits of what is legal and what is legitimate, devising new modes of resistance to unjust state institutions of “justice.”

Read the full article here.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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2nd Wave Vegan Feminism

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As the animal rights movement expanded in the late 20th century, fuelled in large part by the popularity of the civil rights movement, vegan feminism took shape as a potent and explicit critique of patriarchal oppression women and other animals and the male-centeredness in anti-speciesist mobilization.

In addition to the influences of anti-racism, feminism, and other social justice movements of the era, the environmental movement also offered a much-needed seedbed for theoretical development. Vegan feminism might be identified as a theory of animal rights, but it owes much of its development to the ecofeminist movement of the late 20th century. Many scholar-activists from the animal rights movement, such as Carol Adams, Greta Gaard, Lori Gruen, and Marti Kheel published and presented extensively in ecofeminist spaces.

Ecofeminism emerged in resistance to the androcentrism of environmental philosophy and activism, arguing that gender inequality served as the foundation to environmental destruction and subsequent violence against women and the natural world. Vegan ecofeminists expanded this discourse in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by explicitly acknowledging the oppression of nonhuman animals as important for advancing ecofeminist theory to its fullest intersectional expression.

As vegan ecofeminism gathered strength, it began to take on the Nonhuman Animal rights movement with more confidence. This culminated in the formation of Feminist for Animal Rights in 1981. For the next twenty years, FAR would develop an activist-oriented theory of vegan feminism that would interrogate anti-speciesism as a gender-neutral affair.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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Feminism in Men’s Meat Market

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The cultural drive for men to consume other animals is well understood in the social science literature, but less research has examined how women as a distinct social class might also wish to consume Nonhuman Animals, and, more specifically, why women might actively resist vegan outreach efforts.

For some women, the alignment with male consumer behaviour and value systems could indicate an attempt to bargain with patriarchy, a strategy some women use, whether consciously or not, to protest their station as a woman or even improve their status by aligning with male power.

Other women may celebrate their consumption of other animals as a demonstration of their improved social status in a “postfeminist” society. Women and girls, after all, have been systematically denied access to higher-value foods, such as animals’ flesh. Many are deprived of sufficient calories due to cultural norms.

Women’s access to animal bodies may therefore signal “We’ve come a long way, baby.” Claiming “meat” allows women to claim their power. To this end, many feminists are resistant to vegan claimsmaking, arguing that food deprivation and dietary dictates are sexist.

Although feminism has historically employed consciousness-raising to awaken women to their personal and shared oppressions, the neoliberal influence over contemporary feminism has encouraged more feminist attention on individual freedom and considerably less on collective liberation. As a result, mainstream feminism has obstructed solidarity with other animals, as the requisite adoption of a vegan diet is dismissed as a matter of “personal choice.”

Sociological and psychological research on the relationship between gender and veganism often feeds the scientific trend in reifying gender essentialism (assumed fixed differences between women and men), focusing on women’s tendency toward plant-based eating and men’s tendency to eat more “meat.” More research, however, is needed to address a trend that is frequently overlooked in the literature: despite women’s cultural affiliation with other animals, most women continue to them.

Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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