https://youtu.be/8OuigXkL7EE
Desaulniers is a vegan feminist author based in Montreal, Quebec. For six years, she served as Director of Montreal SPCA but now works with people struggling with addiction. She has been involved in vegan movement for 15 years but came to feminism late. Having studied political science, she has thought feminism was obsolete. Although she was shocked by the misogynistic terrorist attack on Montreal’s Polytechnique engineering school, this systemic sexism was osfucated by representations of women in power. Canada, afterall, already had a female Prime Minister. “Like, I could become prime minister if I wanted, I could become whatever I wanted,” she reflects, “So everything was solved.”
This postfeminist position, however, was soon challenged by her vegan journey. Her partner, a philosopher, ordered Éthique Animale by Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer for his students, but Desaulniers, a cat lover, was inspired to read it. It was the first book on animal ethics published in French in the past decade or so and had a big influence on her thinking. The book persuaded her to go vegetarian right away and vegan within a month or so. Activism for animal rights was “really straight forward once I realized everything behind it,” she explains, “For feminism, it took me a lot more time.”
Desaulniers came to vegan feminism after finding a Carol Adams’ book in a Portland bookstore. She didn’t pick it up, but it did make an impression. At the time, she thought “I don’t need to read that, I already know what’s in it. I don’t need that book.” Today, she adds, “I feel really ashamed about that now!” In writing her 2015 book, Cash Cow: Ten Myths About the Dairy Industry, she had an epiphany: “Oh my god, this is like women! […] this was at the core of what I was doing.” Desaulniers’ thinking was helped along by prominent feminist author Martine Delvaux who happened to work alongside her in the same coffee shop. “Everything changed, like, in a matter of minutes,” she remembers.
Vegan feminism [..] is just having compassion for all beings around us, animals and non-animals. So being a feminist is having compassion for everybody, all humans, being a vegan feminist is extending this compassion to nonhuman animals, so it’s just normal, and I’m proud to be a vegan feminist.
Although it was too late to update Cash Cow with a feminist critique, she realized there was very little written on vegan feminism in French, so she began contributing to the dialogue herself. She started by integrating these issues into her speaking and eventually into her journalism. Although she was afraid of backlash and the resistance from established feminists, “it went well” she muses. She was even awarded for her vegan feminist work with the Grand Prize in Independent Journalism in Quebec in 2015.
The more I was learning, the more I became sure that it would be at the core of what I was doing as an author and as an activist.
Desaulniers does clarify that the conditions for her reception were fleetingly conducive. French Canadian culture, for one, tends to be more open to vegan feminist ideas than continental French. She also clarifies she is privileged with some credibility as an older, straight white woman who has a philosopher as a partner. “So I seemed ‘normal’,” she surmises. Having been offered more television and radio invitations to share her ideas, Desaulniers also enjoyed some added safety by avoiding online spaces, a privilege, she acknowledges, that is not equally enjoyed by vegan feminist activists.
After 2018, however, these supportive conditions quickly eroded. The political opportunity of interest in broadening the moral circle in Canadian culture closed as the population turned its attention to inflation, pandemics, climate change, immigration, war, and other issues. Post-pandemic society, Desaulniers observes, has placed more emphasis on cutting costs and hedonism, neither of which have always been conducive to support for animal rights. Subsequently, the national interest in discussing veganism, for the time being, has closed. During her work with the SPCA, she noticed a brief uptick in concern for nonhuman animals as dogs and cats were quickly being adopted for lock-down companionship, but vegan politics have otherwise lost resonance in a society in crisis.
Desaulniers, who is interested in promoting everyday altruism, has also paid attention to the ways in which these social crises might be addressed by regular people. Care work, she recognizes, is both feminized and underappreciated. In 2022, she decided to donate a kidney to a stranger, an act that, to her surprise, garnered far more attention and accolade than her ongoing, more “mundane” carework. While she received considerable praise for the comparatively short-term process of donating an organ (which comes with considerable institutional support), for instance, the many years of caring for her mother (which receives little to no institutional support) has gone unacknowledged. Desaulniers also sees parallels in her SPCA work. It’s more than the fatigue of caring, she explains, “It’s probably a fatigue of being in a society like ours where we’re the only one that cares. The problem is not that I care too much, it’s that other people don’t care enough.”
Desaulniers, like many vegan feminists, rejects biological essentialism with regard to caring:
I’m pretty, pretty, pretty, sure […] I don’t have anything biological that makes me different, I’ve learned to be more empathetic, I’ve learned to become more altruistic and I think other people can learn it, too. And the fatigue is to be the only one to do that effort.
“Only women feel the pressure to do it” she stresses, “when you’re a woman the pressure is to be more generous, caregiver, whatever and the fatigue comes from this imbalance.” If caring can be learned, Desaulniers is firm that it can be learned as both a child and an adult. One does not have to be defined by the values of their family or community of origin: “Anyone can do it, I’m really not that special.”
I want to show that a regular person with an average life can be a good person. Anybody can be a good person.
Finally, Desaulniers asks us to consider why everyday altruism should be rooted in compassion rather than courage. Perceived courageousness, she supposes, is probably why she received so much praise for her decision to donate an organ and so little praise for her decision to go vegan or care for her mother. Courageousness, as she points out, is a male value. Generosity, a more feminized value, has been downplayed in the narrative. Courage, with its unnecessary risk-taking, is not so conducive to supporting veganism, she adds. Instead, advancing veganism through care work will be more sustainable and validating.
Desaulniers’ 2015 book, Cash Cow, is available from Lantern Publishing. Read more about her decision to donate a kidney in her piece for Broadview Magazine.
📖VEGAN FEMINISM: HISTORY, THEORY, ACTIVISM
This interview was recorded on March 17, 2025.