The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations)

by Carol J Adams

  I wish this book could offer a definitive history of the long and fascinating connection between feminist-activist thinkers and vegetarianism. No book can detail that history yet since the scholars themselves who have access to primary materials that indicate women’s concerns for animals—either through activism or the individual choice of vegetarianism for ethical reasons—usually ignore this information. How do I know this? Because I have interrogated them or consulted their writings.

  I asked a suffrage worker, still active in radical politics in the 1970s and recording her oral history, if she had ever discussed vegetarianism with her friend, Agnes Ryan. No, she replied, it seemed relatively unimportant to her. I asked a leading feminist historian if she had noticed references to vegetarianism in the letters she had just finished reading of women pacifists of World War I. Frankly, she admitted, she would not have noticed. Ida Husted Harper who edited the last two volumes of the mammoth History of Woman Suffrage omitted any discussion of a confrontation between a vegetarian milliner and an officer of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association over an aigretted hat and a chicken dinner. Harper could have included the impassioned statement made by the milliner on behalf of animals that occurred during the 1907 National Convention: “Nothing would persuade me to eat a chicken, or to connive at the horror of trapping innocent animals for their fur. It causes a thrill of horror to pass through me when I attend a woman’s suffrage convention and see women with ghastly trophies of slaughter upon their persons.”23 But Harper silenced her instead.

  Women’s alliance with vegetarianism in history and literary texts has been distorted. The result is the failure to sketch an inspiriting network of feminist vegetarians. Past women vegetarians who were feminist theorists have had a part of their feminist theory silenced. What we have is a double hidden history: the hidden history of women, and the illusive history of animal activism and women’s vegetarianism.

  The absence of references to vegetarianism by historians and literary scholars is part of the history of women. Distortions occur in history and literary criticism not only because historians and literary critics fail to take seriously the vegetarianism they encounter in their texts, but also because they fail to take seriously their own meat eating. They fail to confront the meaning of their own possible vegetarian body.

  Feminist-vegetarian texts are the absent referent in feminist criticism and history. Vegetarianism is trivialized, seen as a distraction from or incidental to the important aspects of history and biography, or relegated to the realm of the individual and seen from the lens of male experience. And in contrast to the pressing difficult topics of sexuality, politics, family, work, racism, sexual and domestic violence, vegetarianism is judged as irrelevant to a serious study of women’s lives. The silencing of women’s vegetarianism is a critical theoretical act because as feminist-vegetarian texts and history are lost to us, so are our foundations for new insights. This silencing of feminist-vegetarian texts parallels my own silencing; after all, thirteen years have intervened since I identified in my journal entry the issues this chapter examines.

  Why should we learn to recognize the distortions of the vegetarian body? First, our historical record is inadequate. Second, one way to delegitimate a reform movement is by calling it a fad. A historical cliche which pervades books is that vegetarianism is faddish. But can something be a fad—something that enjoys brief popularity—if it recurs throughout recorded history? In the following quotation from Notable American Women concerning Abigail Kelley Foster, notice how the author creates a dichotomy between such things as vegetarianism and the “major” purposes of Kelley’s life: “Like many reformers of her day, she was attracted to dietary novelties, water cure, homeopathy, phrenology, and spiritualism: yet these faddish interests never diverted her from the major purposes of her life.”24

  Since the connection between feminism and vegetarianism is being argued by some today, its history also carries significance for interpreting present day culture. The silencing of vegetarianism is related to the larger silences concerning women and are of interest for what they reveal of how dominant cultures enforce that dominance. Those who live deeply in their bodies may overcome the separations enforced by the dominant morality. In the following sections I will juxtapose the traditional view of vegetarianism with a more positive approach. Our failure to acknowledge the importance of body-mediated knowledge and how it may be informed by the vegetarian body has caused us to distort our past and to misunderstand why women became vegetarians.

  Sexuality and the vegetarian body

  Victorian purity was the creation of a self-defined group of male sexual reformers who advocated a variety of reforms, all involving a fusion of bodily and social control: temperance, vegetarianism, health and food reform, phrenologically based eugenics. . . . All, indeed, chose the body as the focus of their reform efforts.

  —Carroll Smith-Rosenberg25

  Why should we not, at the same time, liberate ourselves from many inconveniences by abandoning a fleshly diet?

  —Porphyry26

  Now that the claims of vegetarians about the healthfulness of their diet have been confirmed, will we create a different analysis of women’s decisions about their vegetarian bodies of the past? It is of interest that the vegetarian anatomical/health argument is not aimed at fetishizing sex organs as essential factors in the makeup of human beings; the theories of the vegetarian body do not gravitate to an essentialist feminine/masculine makeup. They are protesting activities that they believe are not consonant with the human body.

  Yet nineteenth-century vegetarian popularizer Sylvester Graham bequeathed to feminism a mixed legacy. On the one hand, the predominantly vegetarian diet that gained his name and gave him his reputation proved immensely popular to the feminist reformers of his time. On the other hand, the emphasis that he and his medical followers gave to meat’s supposed influence on the male sexual organs has caused these ideas to be exposed as yet another instance of the buffoonery of dissenting ideas. That followers of Graham called meat “animalized protein” suggested to critics that vegetarians were denying their animal nature. From this the idea was extrapolated that other aspects of our “animal” nature were feared, i.e., sexuality. Fear of the body was then corroborated by Graham’s focus on controlling male sexuality.

  Graham, his diet, his theories, and the feminist response to these is more complex and revealing than we have traditionally espied. His claim as a moral reformer that meat caused undue pressure on male sexual organs has clouded the waters of historical reflection. His position implied that those concerned with eliminating meat from their diets might be unduly obsessed with sexual concerns. This equation, simplified to “not eating meat equals sexual hang-ups,” has dictated the impressions of numerous historians for whom meat eating is an accepted and important aspect of their own lives. When we pull away the threads of distortion, an alternative feminist approach to the historic eschewing of meat, especially by women, becomes apparent. An emphasis on the influence of meat on male sexual organs may have appealed to women for reasons other than puritanism and moral control. Meat eating was for many yet another sign of capitulation to the control of others; vegetarianism was an enaction of self-identity and feminist consciousness.

  Controlling male sexuality in and of itself was not a misguided goal of earlier feminists, especially if it meant controlling female fertility. In the light of our current movements that focus on marital rape, pornography, and child sexual abuse, controlling male sexuality is a legitimate and essential aspect of any campaign to insure female wholeness. The odd and quirky aspect of this earlier position was its emphasis on meat as a cause of unnatural sexuality and its inclusion of masturbation within this category. This is what Graham claimed: “Improper diet” was one of the “causes of extensive and excessive self-pollution.” The stimulating use of “high-seasoned food, rich dishes, the free use of flesh” would all undesirably “increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of
the genital organs.”27 To Graham, the body was a closed energy system. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg summarizes this viewpoint:

  Individuals possessed limited amounts of nervous and nutritional energy which the body appropriated to the different organs according to their importance in man’s overall metabolism. Sexual excitation and orgasm, the moral reformers argued, disrupted this natural order, drawing blood and energy to the lowest and least necessary of man’s organs—his genitals.28

  In addition to considering meat to be a stimulant like alcohol, meat was thought to cause constipation, thus predisposing a man to masturbation.

  Graham’s anti-meat crusade must be placed in the context of the amount of meat being consumed in the United States. Meat eating was quantitatively different for Americans than it was for Europeans. As historian Daniel Boorstin proclaimed, “Americans would become the world’s great meat eaters.”29 European visitors commented with amazement on the immense amount of meat that Americans consumed. Frances Trollope, the inquisitive author of Domestic Manners of the Americans, reported in the 1830s, “They consume an extraordinary quantity of bacon. Ham and beef-steaks appear morning, noon and night.”30 During this decade, 1830–39, per capita meat consumption has been conservatively estimated at 178 pounds annually.31 Anthony Trollope was astonished to find Americans consuming at least twice the amount of beef as Englishmen. After watching someone make a pie crust with lard, a vegetarian complained in 1846, “One might as well preach against licentiousness to a Sodomite, as to denounce grease to an American, especially to a Yankee.”32 Dr. John Wilson, Southern physician, criticized the American consumption of pork, estimated to be three times that of Europe: “The United States of America might properly be called the great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Republic of Porkdom.”33 Numerous letters back to relatives in the Old World proclaimed, “we eat meat three times a day.”34 One immigrant feared that if he told the truth about the amount of meat consumed his European relatives would not believe him; thus he deliberately understated the frequency with which he ate meat.

  Nineteenth-century women saw vegetarianism as liberating them from cooking fatty foods and laboring over a hot stove. The Grimké sisters, feminists and abolitionists, were convinced that the vegetarian diet of Sylvester Graham, which they adopted, “was the ‘most conducive to health and besides . . . such an emancipation of woman from the toil of the kitchen.’ ”35 Their biographer observes, “No doubt, in an age of heavy over-eating and over-drinking, when the better part of woman’s life was apt to be spent in baking, cooking and serving huge meals, the Graham diet simplified housekeeping and was a nutritional improvement.”36 Since nineteenth-century American women were nursemaids to a dyspeptic age, in which fried foods and meat dominated the diet, they saw in vegetarianism a promise of health. Catherine Beecher, arbiter of women’s roles in society, and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, claimed that a reduction in the consumption of meat would “greatly reduce the amount of fevers, eruptions, headaches, bilious attacks, and many other ailments which are produced or aggravated by too gross a diet. . . . The popular notion, that meat is more nourishing than bread, is a great mistake. Good bread contains more nourishment than butcher’s meat.”37

  Vegetarianism offered a release from the dual roles of cook and nursemaid by eliminating the meats and fried foods from the diet. In the American Vegetarian and Health Journal of 1853, Mrs. F. Gale argued that women must learn to heal themselves, and described how she cured her six children of smallpox without a doctor through vegetarianism. According to her, “Women are slaves to fashion—slaves to appetite—slaves to man—and more especially slaves to physicians.”38 Similarly, after World War II, when Great Britain was experiencing the continuation of wartime rationing, women looked for alternative foods that promised health on a meager diet. Reflecting on her mother’s conversion to vegetarianism, one daughter writes: “our diet was to do with the desperate need, wrenched from restricted circumstances, to be in charge of the body. Food Reform promised an end to sickness if certain procedures were followed.” And, of course, one could eat well and cheaply—a point that was not lost on nineteenth-century women reformers such as the Grimké sisters either.39 Grahamism promised that vegetarianism would release women not only from domestic oppression but also from the tyranny of the medical profession, upon which they would no longer need to rely because of their good health. In addition, vegetarianism provided a form of female networking.

  The language used by women concerning their decision to be vegetarians reverberates with feminist meaning: the Grimkés see themselves as “emancipated” by their change in diet; Mrs. Gale speaks as a liberator to those enslaved by the dominant culture. Anne Denton in an article on the “Rights of Women” published in the American Vegetarian and Health Journal in 1852, called upon women to develop their intellect, learn physiology, become vegetarians and leave behind bourgeois patterns of behavior: “Women should live for something higher and nobler than cannibal tastes, good appearance, costly furniture or fine equippage.” Mary Gove Nichols, nineteenth-century feminist and vegetarian, wrote with her husband of the new woman they anticipated: She “would not be the drudge of isolate household, cooking pork and other edibles for a gluttonous man.” Instead, “she understands Water-Cure well; she is a good physician and a good nurse; she lives purely and simply on a vegetable diet; and is a water drinker.” They conclude: “Many such women are growing amongst us.”40

  Besides the enticement of improved health, reduced cooking time and emancipation, many claimed that vegetarianism offered easier parturition. This appeal to an experience that was exclusively female, and often feared, proved sufficiently attractive to convert many women of child-bearing age. Alice Stockham in her Tokology: A Book for Every Woman, which recommended a vegetarian diet for pregnant women, included testimonials from women who had experienced easy childbirths by following her advice.41 Stockham’s vegetarian appeal is ratified by the numerous advertisements for the book that appeared in the Vegetarian Magazine at that time. In a book edited by Virginia Woolf’s good friend, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Maternity: Letters from Working-Women, one letter writer described her choice of a vegetarian diet since “this produces a cleaner, healthier child.”42

  With these specific female-identified reasons for the appeal of vegetarianism in mind, let us consider the arguments about the connection between vegetarianism and the control of male sexuality. Since meat was thought to cause undue pressure on the male genitalia as well as being viewed as a stimulating food, these ideas could be appropriated into a female position that sought to control male sexuality. The absence of meat was promoted as a form of bringing about male abstinence. In a world of imperfect birth control in which women were the bearers of countless children, Grahamism offered a promise of liberation and implied that the control of sexuality could be placed in women’s hands. Not only did many vegetarian leaders endorse birth control and abortion; some also advocated that women had a right to enjoy sex.43 Thus we find on the one hand vegetarianism evoked as the cure for uncontrollable male sexuality and on the other hand vegetarianism as the chosen diet of Utopian communities that practiced modified forms of free love.44 Historian Susan Cayleff observes that “In nineteenth-century America, meatless diet was a legitimate social and moral issue.”45 As such it spoke directly to women about their social standing and appealed to them for legitimate social and moral reasons.

  A meat phobia?

  Sometimes teenagers latch onto philosophies that involve a radical departure from the dietary customs of the rest of the family. Vegetarian diets are especially popular these days among idealistic youngsters who wish to save the world from starvation, or who think it’s wrong to eat animals, or who want to avoid the “poisons” they believe exist in animal food. There’s nothing wrong with a vegetarian diet.

  —Jane Brody46

  Flesh and Blood is too near akin to the Animal Life in man, to be a proper Food for him; ‘tis like the marrying of Brothers and Sisters.r />
  —Thomas Tryon, 168347

  According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a “phobia” is “a persistent, abnormal, or illogical fear of a specific thing or situation.” If one finds meat disgusting, horrifying, unsettling, this personal emotional response may be seen as illogical and abnormal to the dominant society. After all, the dominant society has deemed meat acceptable and appetizing. Does vegetarianism, then, manifest a psychological problem with food? The attempt to squeeze the meaning of a response to food into the term “phobic” when it might be cultural, symbolic, or political demonstrates the labeling impulse of the dominant culture seeking to control interpretation. When refusal to eat meat is labeled phobic the dominant society is enacting distortion; it cannot grant positive status to objections to eating animals. When someone says that meat eating is disgusting, it is their psychological state historians or contemporary cultural interpreters seek to place in perspective. The perspective against which refusal to eat meat is judged is one that presumes meat eating is an appropriate activity. Thus the dominant perspective mutes the minority perspective, absorbing it within the dominant perspective by labeling it as individual and deviant.

  The language of vegetarianism of the nineteenth century sounds phobic, but is it? Feminist and vegetarian Mary Gove Nichols describes a picnic of the 1840s: “There were stuffed hams, boiled, roast chickens, sausages, and mince pies, and other horrors composed of the corpses of animals.”48 In 1906, similar language can be found in the words of Josiah Oldfield: “And so at this moment the whole question of the dangers and the horrors and the unsavouriness of the meat-eating habit is prominently forward in men’s minds.”49 What happens when otherwise undistinguished young women use the same terminology as these writers? I wish to examine a specific case in which a discussion of the refusal of meat by young women is shrouded in psychological terms that distort many of the issues raised by close examination of the eating of animals. It is a case study in historical distortion.