By Jen Bravo, Guest Contributor
This post is the second in a series on the history of women in the animal protection movement, gender and animal advocacy, and stories of the women striving today to make the world a better place for animals.
In part one of Clear Eyes, Full Hearts: Women in Animal Advocacy, we highlighted three women who were instrumental in the fight to end vivisection in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. In part two, we explore just a few of the contributions women have made to the animal protection movement in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.
The Modern Philosophical Movement
The modern animal rights movement often traces its roots to the 1975 publication of Peter Singer?s Animal Liberation, and soon thereafter, Tom Regan?s The Case for Animal Rights in 1983. It’s frequently argued that these two works form the foundation of our modern understanding of animal rights. Brigid Brophy (Photo: The Vegan Society)
But before those seminal works were others written by women, like Ruth Harrison?s Animal Machines (1964), which exposed the world to industrial animal agriculture and influenced Peter Singer to become a vegetarian. And there was also Brigid Brophy’s essay in The Sunday Times, ?The Rights of Animals? (1965), in which she argued that ?…the relationship of Homo sapiens to the other animals is one of unremitting exploitation.? Brigid was a feminist and pacifist who campaigned for vegetarianism and animal rights, was ...