Tag Archives: Sweden

Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby: Vegan Feminist, Lesbian, Anti-Vivisectionist, and Scientist

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Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby (1878-1963) was a Swedish born feminist, vegan, anti-speciesist, and anti-vivisectionist. She and her partner Leisa Schartau,1 who had been stirred to the cause having visited the Pasteur Institute in Paris and coming across hundreds of cages of sick and dying animals intentionally infected with disease and callously treated by research assistants (Kalechofsky 1992), had already been heavily involved in antivivisection campaigning in Sweden before turning their attention to London (Gålmark 2003). To improve their understanding of the atrocities taking place in British laboratories and the scientific rationales that sustained them, the two enrolled students of physiology at the London School of Medicine for Women. Because vivisection did not take place in the women’s university, they sought special permission to supplement their lectures with vivisection demonstrations at other laboratories in the city. The two took extensive notes on the use of vivisection in the classroom, publishing their findings in Shambles2 of Science in 1904.

The exposure of laboratory activities in Shambles of Science would find Lind-af-Hageby charged with libel (not for the last time) regarding her documentation of one little brown terrier dog that had been vivisected multiple times (thereby violating the 1875 act). Parts of the book were suppressed as a result. However, the success of Shambles of Science was unmistakable, not only in raising public attention to the unseen suffering of fellow animals (it increased in sales after the court case) (Lansbury 1985), but in signaling women’s entry into public and political life (Gålmark 2000). Lind-af-Hageby and Schartau’s tactic of non-participant observation served as a potent “feminist tool,” Harvey adds, “It introduced women and female professional students into the public vivisection debate” (2018: 89).

Lind-af-Hageby, known as an excellent orator, would prove herself a formidable force in delivering an incredibly lengthy defense in litigation. She was not alone in her efforts. Cobbe and other anti-vivisectionists arranged a fund to support her case (Kalechofsky 1992). Immediately following the trial’s unfavorable conclusion, a drinking fountain was erected in Battersea, London (the site of an antivivisection hospital) by Lind-af-Hageby and her colleagues including Despard, Shaw, and Louisa Woodward of the Church Antivivisection League. The statuesque fountain was topped with a small brown dog and a plaque that memorialized the growing number of invisibilized vivisection victims. This drew immediate response from the university and its medical students.

The male students and faculty of the medical school regularly attempted to destroy statue as it was seen to challenge their power and authority in a deeply stratified Edwardian society. As such, it required police vigilance. The gender and class politics were astute, observes Lansbury:

What infuriated these young men was that they had been treated in the same manner as the suffragettes, who were now being routinely arrested after their disturbances and given prison sentences. (1985: 16)

The student protesters disrupted all manner of feminist gatherings in retaliation, cementing the perceived intersection between anti-speciesism and feminism. Feminists, it should be clarified, were certainly not in agreement. Many of the disrupted meetings were composed of suffragettes who were completely unaffiliated with (and uninterested in) the anti-vivisection campaign.

Support from the working classes was perhaps more consistent. Alliances were made with the Battersea Labour League and the Operative Bricklayers’ Society, for instance. The working classes offered their support in guarding the statue as well as public meetings on anti-vivisection, even raising funds to maintain the adjacent anti-vivisection hospital when its funding was revoked. Anti-vivisection hospitals were deeply valued by the working poor of England as they feared that they, too, would be used in vivisection.3 “Most certainly,” suggests Gålmark, “the people of Battersea had much fun when supported by antivivisection organizers, they got the opportunity—as lower class against upper class—to beat up the students” (2000: 10).

Electoral maneuvering to undermine socialism in the borough and anti-vivisection’s alignment with the suffrage campaign, Lansbury (1985) suggests, introduced divisiveness. A less sympathetic Battersea council removed the statue under reasoning of excessive cost in protecting the statue from student hooliganism. Lind-af-Hageby, Despard, and Shaw, undaunted, assembled an anti-vivisection rally in Trafalgar Square ten days later. More than three thousand persons attended. At the same time, Lind-af-Hageby and Schartau would co-found the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society (ADAVS) with Nina Douglas, the Duchess of Hamilton.

Based on her observations for the writing of The Shambles of Science, Lind-af-Hageby maintained that vivisection-based science primarily a machoistic pageantry for the entertainment and amusement of male scientists and students (a view shared by Cobbe and others). The spectacle of vivisection, she became convinced, was less about the advancement of humanity, and more of an impediment to it. For that matter, the claim that vivisection was necessary for life-saving research to ease children’s suffering (a trope that predominates today) facetiously deflects from the predominance of profit-motivated, unnecessary, and life-threatening research in vivisection labs, including that directed to the development of war technology. Retorts the ADAVS:

The sheer hypocrisy of pro-vivisectionists who declare the life of one human child to be worth the vivisection of all animals in the world, whilst, at the same time, through poison-gas experiments on animals, vivisectors are making preparations for an intensive destruction of human life in the event of another war. (1935: 184)

A pacifist, Lind-af-Hageby challenged war and violence wherever it may lurk. Although history remembers her best for her fight against vivisection, she also spent much of her career shining light on the hidden horror of the abattoir. She stood steadfastly against extreme institutional aversion to offering fellow animals even the slightest mercy of being stunned before being hacked, bled, and butchered for Western diets of affluence. The Slaughter of Animals Act was not introduced in the UK until 1933. It would be over two decades later before the United States introduced similar legislation. Exemptions for religious slaughter were included. Likewise, exemptions for some species, namely chickens and fishes, further limited the utility of the act. Nonetheless, English and Jewish butchers alike pushed even harder in protest following its passage, fearful of the financial costs it might entail.

The ADAVS spent years promoting what it hoped to be the “ideal” slaughterhouse, that is, one designed to reduce (as much as is possible) fear and suffering. These recommendations were based on scientific observations undertaken by Lind-af-Hageby herself in various slaughterhouses. In doing so, she highlighted the everyday terror that food animals endure, a world fast becoming all but hidden to most consumers in the early 20th century. Widespread ignorance to the experiences of Nonhuman Animals killed for food was clearly a key element to the cultural acceptance of killing without stunning (usually accomplished with several blows from a hammer or poleaxe). An unintended consequence of Lind-af-Hageby’s national campaigning was the rejection of the slaughterhouse itself. The ADAVS (1924) reports that its efforts for slaughter reform resulted in “a great increase in the number of people who give up eating meat” (64). The society happily met this demand for a peaceable diet, promoting vegan food and products “for the benefit of the stricter abstainers from the use of animal life” in its exhibitions (69).

Lind-af-Hageby and Schartau were two of many vegan feminists who were heavily engaged in care work as well. They founded numerous homes for unhoused companion animals as well as aged and disabled horses exploited in work and war. Some sanctuaries were located on their own property. Their colleague, the Duchess of Hamilton, kept dozens of cats on her estate in Dorset, many of whom had been spared from the “pet massacre” orchestrated by the British government during World War II. From this effort, she would found the Ferne Animal Sanctuary, bequeathing it to Lind-af-Hageby following her death in 1951. Lind-af-Hageby, who herself died 12 years later, left her own legacy with the Animal Defence Trust, which continues to issue funds to protection efforts today.

Lind-af-Hageby and her partner Schartau are two more amazing vegan feminist lesbian leaders who have been all but lost to the patriarchal activist imagination. They were true trailblazers, entering into hidden vivisection laboratories and slaughterhouses, employing scientific methodologies to document the horrors within, and melding feminist compassion with modern scientific approaches to reform and development. They composed research that dramatically impacted British culture, law and politics, formed lasting anti-speciesist organizations, and cemented the link between anti-speciesism and feminism that continues to inform vegan feminist theory today.

Notes

  1. Both Gålmark (2023) and Rolle (2025) suggest that the two were a lesbian couple, cohabitating for much of their life.
  2. Shambles is an archaic term for slaughterhouse.
  3. Prior to the mid-20th century, hospitals were used primarily only by the poor. Hospitals were also major sites of medical research, such that poor persons were indeed vulnerable to vivisection.

Works Cited

Animal Defense and Antivivisection Society. 1924. Reports for the Years 1923 and 1924. Animal Defense and Antivivisection Society: London.
Animal Defense and Antivivisection Society. 1935. Reports for 1933 and 1934. Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society: London.
Gålmark, L. 2000. “Women Antivivisectionists.” Animal Issues 4 (2): 1-31.
Gålmark, L. 2023. “‘Problems of the Women’s Movement.’” Women’s History Review 32 (5): 699-722.
Harvey, C. 2018. “Science and Sensibility.” Journal of Women’s History 30 (1): 80-106.
Kalechofsky, R. 1992. “Dedicated to Decartes’ Neice.” Between the Species (Spring): 61-71.
Lansbury, C. 1985. The Old Brown Dog. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Lind-af-Hageby, L. and L. Schartau. 1904. Shambles of Science. London: Self-published.
Rolle, E. 2025. Queer Places. Self-published.

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.

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), Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021), and Vegan Witchcraft: Contemporary Magical Practice and Multispecies Social Change (Routledge 2026).

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On Swedish Veganism and Goodness: Intersections of Species, Gender, Race, & Nationality

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By Anna Nygren

Oat Drink

I think about: Buying things, buying food, buying bodies, buying inclusivity and exclusivity and subjectivity.

In Sweden, in the fall of 2014: The company Oatly sells its oat based products with slogans such as “It’s like milk only made for humans” and “Wow, no cow!” which made LRF Mjölk (the national organization for diary producers) angry and they sued Oatly. In the end, I think Oatly won (I’m not very good at understanding trials and commercial law, but I read that the process raised the sales figures). OK, milk producers being upset about what should count as Real Milk is not really a new thing, but still, I think this thing with Oatly and LRF make visible something about the relation between drinking milk and being human…and being Swedish.

Dairy Farm

The dairy industry quite often sells their products using arguments like, “From Swedish farms.” They also work hard to produce a history of milk-drinking Swedish people, and a Swedish self-image that includes drinking milk from cows. It has worked so well so that “Landet Mellanmjölk” has become almost a synonym to Sweden, referring to a Swedish people as being moderate (“mellanmjölk” means pasteurized cow milk with 1.5 % fat).

mellanmjölk

Making milk-drinking a criteria for Swedishness not only make violence part of the Swedish history, but also creates a limit for who can be a “real” Swede. It is a definition that excludes everyone who doesn’t want to be part of the milk industry, and it also, very physically, excludes those bodies (for example many Asian-Swedish bodies) that are hurt by lactose and so on. So, LRF’s reaction to Oatly’s campaign also reflects the threat felt by an Astrid-Lindgren-blonde-healthy-good-racist Swedishness to the national self definition.

I hope my references concerning Swedishness are not too internal. I recognize the history of racism and racial biology in Sweden. I think about the “folkhem” (welfare state, literally translated as “the people’s home”), “folkhälsa”/public health, and the violence and exclusions in these concepts. I recognize how Lindgren’s books have been used to define real Swedishness and a romantic nationalism, something light and bright and fresh and white.

Image of Pippi Longstocking, white, red-haired girl with long braided hair smiling in the snow

Pippi Longstocking is perhaps one of author Astrid Lindgren’s most famous characters

I think I love Oatly for challenging this, for saying, “Hey, your products hurt, and that’s not a necessary.” Still, I have a problem with a lot of Oatly’s rhetoric. Because they, in many cases, use the same arguments for selling their products as the milk producers do. Take, for example, the Swedishness aspect. They not only write, “Wow, no cow!” on their products, but also: “No artificial badness,” “Swedish independent,” and “Packed with Swedish goodness.”

Firstly, in the end of 2014, Oatly launched Oatly Apparel featuring t-shirts with their slogans written on them. The photos of the t-shirts on their Facebook page show only white models. People have reacted to this, and Oatly writes that the models are their friends who did the shooting for free, and that they gladly show cool people of other ethnicity, gender and sexuality in other spaces such as Instagram. Looking at their Instagram, I can see that they might be sort of right, but mostly I see only the packages of the products. I think the whiteness of the models are also problematic and connected to “Swedishness.” Seeing a blonde girl dressed in blue jeans, jogging shoes, and a pink t-shirt saying “Packed with Swedish goodness” doesn’t really broaden the definition of Swedishness.

Several images of models wearing Oatly t-shirts. All are in their early 20s, male and female, and white.

Using Sweden in their rhetoric might be a sort of counter-strategy. For example, it is working against the milk industry, connecting the Swedishness, not with Mellanmjölk, but with oat. And for a buyer in Sweden, the ecological aspect of using Swedish (i.e. local) oat might be of importance.

However, consider also the name. I can only think of American Apparel (and I most often don’t want to think of American Apparel), and well, Apparel might have other connections than American Apparel, but it’s not very often used in Sweden, and I think the choice to use the word might come from a similar strategy as the Swedish-thing. It is a way of using words in a different way: I can think of sexist American Apparel pictures and all the debate about them, I can see non-pornographic pictures with the same word connected to them, and I can think, wow, words can have different meanings, or something like that.

But, I still think the Swedishness aspect is problematic because of the whiteness and because of the “goodness.” Lately, the “goodness” (the superiority, the equality and being-best) of the Sweden (or the [self] picture of Sweden, or of Swedish history) has been questioned in different ways. Recall that Sweden was the first country to have a national racial biological institute. Observe that “neutral” can never be neutral because neutrality can never exist. Remember that Sweden has also enacted war and colonization. Researchers like Tobias Hübinette discuss Swedish whiteness as a discourse of Sweden as the whitest country, with the Swedish whiteness as the purest. This discourse creates violence on a lot of bodies. This Swedish whiteness is what I think about when I see Oatly’s t-shirts. It is a violent whiteness and it hurts. It reproduces a picture of a white Swedishness and Swedish whiteness.

On their website, under the heading, “Swedish independent” Oatly writes:

We know how it sounds. Tall, blond, beautiful, hard to get, extremely liberal with no sense of attachment or responsibility whatsoever. Sorry to disappoint you, that’s just not us. We are the other Swede – somewhat boring, super practical, painfully honest, notoriously hardworking and independent not because we don’t want to be social but merely because we want to have the right to say what we think and do what we think is right. 

It’s like, they make fun of the Swedishness, but they hardly challenge the whiteness. They also keep the discussion somewhat middle class-bound (that can be discussed), within a hipster-ish circle, and in line with a discourse of superiority. And then consider the use of the language, the consciousness, the negations. I mean, I think you might only want to abnegate your Swedishness if you’re not really risking losing it, and it might be impossible to distance yourself from it if you’ve never really been included.

So, I think that using Swedishness in any way is problematic. Maybe especially at the moment, when the elections in 2014 gave at hand that the third largest party in Sweden is a racist, nationalistic and fascistic one. I mean, I don’t think that nationalism in any case can save the world, or do much good, because nationalism per se is based on excluding (but still, some sort of “nationalism” might be temporally needed to fight colonialism and so on, though, Sweden doesn’t really need that kind of temporally nationalism).

Secondly, the use of goodness is, I think, another problem. For me, goodness is closely connected to Christian ecclestical discourse, and in the name of that goodness a lot of violent actions have taken place, like missionary colonialism and burning women for being witches. I think: The most violent and cruel actions are often made for goodness sake. And I think: in order for the good to exist, there must be a bad, and for some people to be good, some must be called bad, this creates a dichotomy that will always hurt the Other.

Goodness is also related to the individualistic view of the world. The goodness is tied to the individual person, who, by eating and drinking and buying Oatly’s products will do a good action and become a good person. And the problem is: Not hurting other is something that can never be done for your own ego, because then it is easily the case that what will gain this ego is instead something that will hurt other.

On the webpage for a post-humanist seminar in Lund, Sweden (that I wasn’t able to attend and for which I am crying my eyes out!), I read about the research of Claire Molloy (of the UK). I want to cite it because I can’t write it better!

She also problematized the (at least in the anglo-world) ongoing mainstreaming of (celebrity) veganism, arguing that when veganism becomes another private consumer choice, a hobby to find easy pleasure and fulfillment in, it easily gets detatched from its ethical dimension and radical driving force. The risk is that  the long term goal of abolishing the use of animals in food industry disolves and disappears under the horizon. 

I think this can be connected to the goodness concept. There are a lot of “good” celebrities, and it seems to me that it is quite easy for them to be “good” because they have the money, the power, and the opportunity. Not everyone has this privilege. This is another reason why goodness is a problem.

So, I think about Oatly, about being good, about buying things and selling things and living in a nation and who could be a part of this nation. I think that the problem is probably the market and the commerce and the capitalism, and the language and discourse existing within these, and building these. I think about violence and veganism and goodness. And the problems of how things get connected. And then, I think, I still like Oatly’s product (maybe except for the t-shirts).

Oatly Vegan