Animal Rights

This note analyzes the challenges that the animal rights movement faces in reforming society’s relationship to animals--particularly in regard to farmed animals--by tracking a similar evolution of the concepts of “dominion” and “civilization” within the early feminist movement. Specific focus is on nineteenth-century white middle-class women, who viewed themselves as models of civilized, liberated womanhood, while asserting maternalistic dominion over their “primitive” and underprivileged sisters. Acknowledging the way in which nineteenth-century America--which, for socio-political and legal purposes, was composed almost exclusively of Protestant white men--was willing to gradually “grant” one class of women a voice in society, based on well-established perceptions of “true womanhood,” is important in considering the way in which modern society seems poised to acknowledge some degree of rights for companion animals, while ignoring the legally-sanctioned misery to which billions of farmed animals are subjected annually.