Diana Donald
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Sentiment and ‘the spirit of life’
New insights at the fin de siècle
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Sentiment and ‘the spirit of life’: new insights at the fin de siècle The 1890s were marked by a general mood of pessimism and frustration in the animal protection movement, but also by an upsurge of utopianism symbolised by Henry Salt’s Humanitarian League. The new generation of activists took their lead from vegetarian and theosophical thinking, but equally from progressive politics and feminism, for example, Katharine Glasier and Nessie Stewart-Brown. Louise Lind-af-Hageby and Mona Caird in particular situated their opposition to vivisection and other cruelties in the context of resistance to patriarchy, while the novelist Ouida saw the persecution of animals and destruction of the environment as baneful aspects of the authoritarian, industrialised and militaristic nation state. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, founded by a group women in 1889–1890, crystallised this new concern for threatened wild creatures, but even here concepts of gender were contested through the Society’s campaign against the use of birds’ feathers in ladies’ millinery. As leadership of the RSPB was gradually taken over by men, tension between male ‘rationality’ and female ‘sentiment’ once again became an issue, and the book concludes with reflections on the value judgements involved in this ancient but still operative antithesis.

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Women against cruelty (revised edition)

Protection of animals in nineteenth-century Britain

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