Women against cruelty

Protection of animals in nineteenth-century Britain: Revised edition

Diana Donald

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526150462
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526162281
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Women against cruelty is the first book to explore women's leading role in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain, drawing on rich archival sources. Women founded bodies such as the Battersea Dogs' Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and various groups that opposed vivisection. They energetically promoted better treatment of animals, both through practical action and through their writings, such as Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. Yet their efforts were frequently belittled by opponents, or decried as typifying female 'sentimentality' and hysteria. Only the development of feminism in the later Victorian period enabled women to show that spontaneous fellow-feeling with animals was a civilising force. Women's own experience of oppressive patriarchy bonded them with animals, who equally suffered from the dominance of masculine values in society, and from an assumption that all-powerful humans were entitled to exploit animals at will.

1

Sexual distinctions in attitudes to animals in the late Georgian era

As we have seen, the very first debate on the nature of cruelty to animals to take place in the British parliament had already involved notions of proper masculinity and femininity, reflecting age-old assumptions about the characteristics of the sexes.¹ Ruthless domination of working, hunted and baited animals was assumed to be a function of masculinity; but where did ‘manliness’ (control, robustness, bravery) end, and reprehensible brutality begin? Conversely, femininity was expressed by pity for all helpless creatures, and by attempts to dissuade men and boys from cruelty towards them. Priscilla Wakefield, in Instinct Displayed (1811), gave this commonplace view both a biological and a cultural basis. One of her imagined female letter-writers tells another that boys, ‘from false notions of courage and spirit, are suffered to take birds’ nests, to tyrannize over horses and dogs, &c. till their feelings are blunted’ for ever after. ‘Women are more tender-hearted than men; which may partly be attributed to a wise provision of nature, to qualify them for the maternal office. But they are also indebted to education: cruelty is discouraged in girls, as unamiable, and discordant with their natural character; so that an affectation of great sensibility has, of late years, been very fashionable.’ Only people endowed with genuine sensibility would perceive, sympathise with and seek to relieve the suffering of animals; but this impulse might be feigned for effect, misdirected, transient or foolishly excessive. It was also liable to be inconsistent, as an effect of prejudice and partial judgement to which women were believed to be especially prone. They might wring their hands over particular cruelties, real or imagined, while perpetrating greater ones themselves. William Howitt, in The Rural Life of England (1838), defended hunting from its detractors in ‘A word to the too sensitive’: a ‘delicate lady’ of his acquaintance wept pleasingly over a sentimental novel, while condemning the live turkeys in her kitchen to the agony of suspension and slow bleeding to improve the flavour of the flesh.²

Many women came to resist the imputations of shallow emotionalism or illogic which were raised against them; they began to undertake a systemic analysis of the deep-seated causes of cruelty in society, and sometimes risked practical interventions of their own to resist it. Yet in making these efforts they encountered a negative construct of femininity more established and ingrained than was displayed merely in the depreciation of sensibility. It was widely believed that women were not just likelier than men were to identify with animals: they were actually more akin to animals, as the supposed preponderance of intuition and instinctive feelings in their behaviour suggested. In this chapter, I shall explore the gendering of attitudes to animals, and its effects in shaping the work of female reformers themselves.

The notion of affinity between women and animals

The idea that only males were capable of rational, abstract thought had an ancient history. In the writings of Aristotle, femaleness was a kind of natural ‘deformity’, while nevertheless complementing maleness as matter complemented spirit. Women’s supposed kinship with ‘nature’ and animals and their incapacity for intellectual or ethical pursuits placed them in a proper subjection to men, just as animals were subjected to human beings.³ This was a view that, as we shall see, persisted and even grew stronger in the later nineteenth century under the influence of evolutionary theory, taking on a scientific or psychosexual guise. Milton’s Eve, though created out of Adam’s body, was inferior to him, ‘in the mind/ And inward faculties’. Her lack of spirituality and wisdom, and even her physical form, meant that she reflected less clearly than Adam did the image of a masculine deity. Nor could she lay claim so indubitably to that right of ‘dominion’ over the irrational creatures which the deity had conferred on man. Indeed, she was soon to fall victim to the blandishments of the evil tempter in the form of an erected snake.⁴ Women’s proximity to animals in the scale of being was also signalled by their alleged sensuality. Fear of women’s sexuality and the disgust excited by female bodily processes haunted the male consciousness throughout European history, from Juvenal’s description of Messalina to Swift’s evocation of ‘The lady’s dressing room’. In the latter, the ‘lady’ takes on beast-like characteristics, needing tweezers to remove ‘Hairs that sink the Forehead low,/ Or on her Chin like Bristles grow’, and manufacturing her night gloves out of her deceased lapdog’s skin.⁵ Indeed, the link between repulsive carnality and animality was especially symbolised by the imagined libidinous relationship between such women and their pet dogs, a theme which occurs also in Pope’s Rape of the Lock and many other eighteenth-century poems and essays. Moreover, the physical vanity that was imputed to women could also take on animalistic features; even in the later Victorian period, cartoons depicting women wearing furs and feathers virtually transform them into hybrid creatures with crests and claws (see figures 27 and 28).⁶

If women shared with animals an essentially non-reasoning persona, they also felt a bond with them created by common victimhood. In Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), the beautiful and tender-hearted Fanny tries to save a hunted hare, exclaiming ‘with tears in her eyes against the barbarity of worrying a poor innocent defenceless animal out of its life’ – only to become herself the intended prey of the hunting squire.⁷ In fact, the language of hunting was and is suffused with sexual metaphors and analogies, stressing the varied sensuous attractions of the quarry, the mounting excitement of pursuit, the pleasure in admiring but also in defeating the animal’s evasive stratagems, and the ecstatic gratification of capture and conquest. The imagined aptitude of the hunted hare (always referred to as ‘she’, whatever its actual sex) to being hunted, and the supposed ‘Coquetries’ of its wiles in trying to thwart the hunters, offer a particularly strong parallel with the language of sexual predation.⁸ Even the hunted fox could take on sexual allure: a Victorian writer thought that its scent trail was ‘as incomprehensible as woman … when you trust it, it may suddenly jilt you; when cold, may turn as suddenly hot’, keeping the hunter’s ‘passion evergreen’.⁹

The engagement of women themselves in field sports, which had been accepted by the aristocracy in earlier centuries, was increasingly anathematised, with direct effects in a gendering of attitudes towards these pursuits. Sportswomen now represented a perversion of the natural order, as the assertion of mastery involved in hunting and shooting was assumed to be essentially and exclusively masculine. In the view of Joseph Addison in the Spectator and later of Hannah More in Coelebs in Search of a Wife, such sporting viragos or ‘Amazons’ were likely to evince a taste also for politics or ‘party rage’ and for intellectual dispute that represented a further intrusion into the male sphere, and a betrayal of their own proper female roles.¹⁰ Moreover, as William Alexander noted in his History of Women (1779), men who were habitual hunters and ‘trained up in the exercise of every cruelty against the brute creation’ became so unfeeling that ‘even the tender and inoffending fair sex are subjects upon which they exercise that ferocious temper’.¹¹ For all these reasons, a lust for the chase was wholly inconsistent with the timidity, ‘softness’, gentleness and empathy with suffering fellow-creatures that were considered ideal qualities in women. In the words of Humphry Primatt: ‘What a contrast to the tenderness of Rebecca’ – the Old Testament heroine who voluntarily drew water for Abraham’s camels – ‘is the hardheartedness of our sporting females, who can testify their delight in the piercing groans of the dying and more delicate STAG. In minds so abominably callous, Religion can have no place’.¹²

Such vehement condemnation reflected a genuine fear that, through women’s acquired ‘hardheartedness’, animals were likely to lose their domestic defenders; but the reflexive effect of hunting and other field sports on the characters of women who engaged in them was of equal concern. Thus sensitive ladies’ aversion to the killing of hares, deer and wild birds could be celebrated, even as those sports continued to be ratified and enjoyed by male participants. Francis Noel Mundy’s poem, ‘On reading verses by the Hon. Julia Curzon, On Hare Hunting – December 1792’, is full of suave gallantry, in its evocation of her touching distress over the animals’ suffering:

Indignant now she points her pen,
To urge their plea with savage men;
And pours a strain so sweet, so strong,
(For Innocence inspires her song,
Humanity and warmth of heart,
And Pity do the Muse’s part),
That thoughts so elegantly drest,
Win on the most obdurate breast.

Nevertheless, a footnote admits that Mundy himself indulged in hare coursing (setting greyhounds on a hare released from a trap), and being made ‘conscious’ of the cruelty of the sport was not imagined as really ‘winning’ on him to desist. Indeed, he wrote another poem about the pleasures of hunting a hare with beagles.¹³

In Mundy’s poem, the aristocratic Julia Curzon’s ‘innocence’ and sweet ‘pity’ typify the more idealising images of women’s affinity with nature that developed in the romantic period, countering the negative stereotype of female animality. Other examples can be found in the early poems of Wordsworth recalling his childhood, such as ‘To a butterfly’, written in 1802. When he and his sister ran after a butterfly

A very hunter did I rush
Upon the prey: – with leaps and springs
I follow’d on from brake to bush;
But She, God love her! feared to brush
The dust from off its wings.¹⁴

Masculine boldness and activity, feminine sweetness and compassion, were now supposedly complementary qualities of the sexes, allotting to women a civilising or ‘softening’ function in society. However, complementarity did not imply equality of force – female distress over cruelty was a pleasing foil, not a corrective to masculine behaviour. In practice, the value placed on female passivity and the exclusion of women from the public sphere severely restricted any practical effects which their advocacy of kindness to animals might bring about; and, as we shall see, this was a fundamental problem that had to be confronted by the many women who sought to effect a change in attitudes to other species in nineteenth-century Britain.

Field sports, in particular, were perceived as belonging so entirely to a prestigious, upper-class masculine realm that the pleasure they gave was beyond the comprehension of women, and arguably exempted from their criticism. Sarah Trimmer, in her Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (1787), was intent on teaching children to recognise animals as God’s creatures, and to treat them, therefore, with respect and loving kindness. However, ‘Gentlemen often take great diversion in hunting Stags’ – captive, semi-tame animals that were ‘carted’ to the meet, and then let loose to be chased. ‘I suppose there is pleasure in hunting, but I think the poor creature should be allowed to return to his Park again’ after the hunt, rather than being killed. So too with hare hunting: ‘I don’t know how it is with Gentlemen, H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Prefatory note: the archive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
• Introduction
• 1 Sexual distinctions in attitudes to animals in the late Georgian era
• 2 The early history of the RSPCA: its culture and its conflicts
• 3 Animal welfare and ‘humane education’: new roles for women
• 4 The ‘two religions’: a gendered divide in Victorian society
• 5 Anti-vivisection: a feminist cause?
• 6 Sentiment and ‘the spirit of life’: new insights at the fin de siècle
• Index