Born in England and having emigrated to the United States from the age of 16, Marjorie (Marj) Cramer has been involved in animal issues “since forever it seems like.” Cramer recollects her first animal protest manifesting as a refusal to engage with any books as a child that centered animal suffering. Her mother acquiesced and “sidelined those books,” she remembers. A compassion for other animals, in other words, has “always been there,” if initially “unvocalized.” Years later, Cramer’s daughter decided to go vegetarian at the age of 7, an event that prompted her to research plant-based eating out of concern for her daughter’s health. As it would turn out, she would be convinced to become vegetarian herself. Not long after, both she and her daughter would transition to veganism and became involved in activism.
Prior to this, the regular dismissiveness she experienced as a young woman seeking medical training triggered a feminist consciousness: “That, somewhere along the way, became tied up with concerns about the environment or concerns about animal suffering.” Medical school, she clarifies, was rife with misogyny and speciesism manifesting in harassment from professors and other students in its classrooms and horrific vivisection in its laboratories. These experiences, for Cramer, would trigger a more active involvement in animal and feminist issues.
Cramer became involved with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and the Medical Research Modernization Committee. The latter charity, she explains, was comprised only of physicians and focused on the scientific integrity of animal-based research instead of examining the cruelty of laboratories as is more characteristic of other charities like PCRM and PETA. The Medical Research Modernization Committee scrutinized research that relied on animal models and followed up on its findings and impact to demonstrate its inherent futility. That said, Cramer was also involved in protest that centered nonhuman animals: “Kind of outing the fact that these are the things that medical schools and research people do to animals and quite graphically explaining it and commenting on how it didn’t make a huge amount of sense most of the time and also doing demonstration and doing things that shocked people, you know these are all different facets of the animal rights movement.”
Today, Cramer is a retired general and plastic surgeon and looking back on decades committed to integrating her passion for medical science with her desire for animal liberation. “I had 35 marvellous years doing something that I really loved,” she explains, “and I tried to incorporate in my sensibilities about animal issues.” Intersectionality, she adds, emerged somewhat naturally from these sensibilities: “I can’t really, really figure out when these were separate issues for me.” “It’s probably a story that goes back to the time of Eve,” she reckons, pointing to the feminist-led anti-vivisection protests of the early 20th century as an example of this intersectional work. “I think movements for change have always been multifaceted,” she concludes.
In the 21st century, vivisection remains a mainstay of scientific and medical research despite its evidenced inadequacy as a scientific instrument. Kramer offers a number of reasons why this may be the case:
That’s the way you live your professional life. You can’t just say to someone who’s, let’s say, has spent thirty years experimenting on primates or rabbits or rats or any form of nonhuman life that, “well, what you really have to do is go back to the laboratory and find a way to do this,” you know, in a test tube or using AI or whatever way you’re going to do it because that’s not something that really happens. […] A lot of people are just invested in doing things the way they’ve always done them.
The resilience of vivisection is more than a result of institutional inertia, however. Cramer is clear that this resistance to change is ultimately a reflection of patriarchal thinking. The scientific establishment’s commitment to vivisection is an extension of patriarchy’s unyielding enforcement of violent practices, she explains, and it relies on hierarchy to achieve it.
The widespread practice of eating meat, a practice that is pushed on people at an early age, also creates a desensitization she explains. For Cramer, this is not unlike the experiences of Nazi doctors who, having been initially resistant, were quickly coaxed into conducting experiments on victims of concentration camps through processes of social pressure and normalization.
I became a doctor, really, when lots of things were stacked against me, um, in spite of all of that, not because of it, but […] somehow, I didn’t become so desensitized to it, and I don’t know how that happens.
Indeed, the neuroscience of compassion is of particular interest to Cramer who makes mention of ongoing research in the field as potentially revelatory: “I just don’t understand how other people can see it differently from me.”
Operating independent of patriarchal social norms is no easy task. Speaking out in resistance can also prove difficult. Vegan feminism, Cramer notes, is an important antidote to toxic ideologies and behavioral patterns. “It took me a long time,” she reflects on finding confidence in her contrariness, “consciousness raising is just sort of such a slow, incremental process, to really realize that no, I’m absolutely logical.” Now, she adds, it is much easier for her stand up for her beliefs. Unfortunately, she is also aware that many very intelligent students are failed in biology and anatomy classes because they refuse to dissect other animals. These students often abandon aspirations for a medical career as a result. This is not only a detriment to their ambitions, but to the field as well.
There have, however, been some important changes, Cramer admits. As a student in the 1960s, she recalls her required participation in vivisection, what she alludes to as “really nightmare producing, […] really awful things.” Since then, both the animal rights movement and more reliable modern technology have influenced the phasing out of some previously required animal-based medical and military training techniques. Recording the history of the movement is not only important to mark this progress and allow for encouraging reflection, but also for countering the tendency for longstanding struggles to seem new and alienated, Cramer adds. Reclaiming and preserving a movement’s legacy is an important source of empowerment, motivation, and knowledge for future generations of activists.
Cramer’s career is key to this legacy of vegan feminist work, emerging and persevering in the very heart of institutionalized patriarchal knowledge construction. In addition to the efforts above, she has also testified over a number of years in Massachusetts and Connecticut in support of bills seeking to shift classroom vivisection from mandatory to optional. “I was in a really good position to do it,” she points out, “because I could say, ‘Look, I’m a surgeon, I cut people apart for a living, so you can’t really call me a wimp or a silly female’.” In addition to advocating for student rights and undermining the scientific necessity of vivisection, Cramer remains proud of her work with various charities, including Feminists for Animal Rights. She reflects fondly on her collaborations with Marti Kheel and Batya Bauman, for instance, both of whom now passed, she notes, were amazing thinkers and deeply foundational to the movement.