Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  13. Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 168.

  14. Nel Noddings, “Comment on Donovan’s ‘Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,’ ” Signs 16, no. 2 (1991), p. 420.

  15. Susanna J. Sturgis, “Arsenal of Silencers,” Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, December 1991, p. 5.

  16. Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982), pp. 109–31.

  17. Noske, Humans and Other Animals, p. 157.

  18. Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983, 1985), p. 302, n. 9.

  19. Noske, Humans and Other Animals, p. 125.

  20. For information on downed animals contact Farm Sanctuary, P.O. Box 150, Watkins Glen, New York 14891, 607–583–2225, or fax 607–583–2041. A video entitled “The Down Side of Livestock Marketing” is available from them for $15.00.

  21. Mary Zeiss Stange, “Hunting—an American Tradition,” American Hunter, January 1991, p. 27.

  22. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970, 1993), p. 36.

  23. Ibid., p. 26.

  24. See Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, 1988), pp. 6–7.

  25. See ibid., pp. 6–7.

  26. See ibid.

  27. See ibid.

  28. Beverly Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 255.

  29. Ellen Bring, “Moving towards Coexistence: An Interview with Alice Walker,” Animals’ Agenda 8 (April 1988), pp. 6–9.

  30. Stange, “Hunting,” p. 26.

  31. Noddings, “Comment,” p. 421.

  32. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power, p. 9.

  33. Noddings, “Comment,” p. 421.

  34. Indeed, Nodding’s entire response to Donovan is contaminated by this refusal to engage the actual issues. While admitting that the greatest difference between herself and Donovan is their position on the eating of animals, she continually strays from that issue. Diversionary issues such as a discussion of whales and dolphins (who are rarely eaten by Americans), and her cats’ predatory nature (which has no resemblance to the human traffic in animals), have little to do with the social construction of flesh consumption.

  35. Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 92–93.

  36. This problem is discussed at length in Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, pp. 63–82.

  37. Sally McConnell-Ginet, “Review Article on Language and Sex,” Language 59, no. 2 (1983), pp. 387–88, quoted in A Feminist Dictionary, ed. Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler (Boston: Pandora, 1985), p. 264.

  38. Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 164.

  39. Jennie Ruby, Farar Elliot, and Carol Anne Douglas, “NWSA: Troubles Surface at Conference,” off our backs, August–September 1990, p. 11.

  40. Pat Parker, “To a Vegetarian Friend,” Womanslaughter (Oakland, CA: Diana Press, 1978), p. 14.

  41. Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–1987 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 172.

  42. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, p. 6.

  43. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 73.

  44. Goodman, “Debate Rages over Animals.”

  45. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 32.

  46. Ibid., p. 31.

  47. Walker, Living by the Word, pp. 182–83.

  48. Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 181.

  49. Summarized in the Ecofeminist Newsletter, Spring 1991, p. 3. Thanks to Batya Bauman for her work on this recommendation.

  50. See ibid.

  Chapter 7

  1. Judy Romero, letter to the editor, Dallas Times Herald, August 11, 1989.

  2. See Kim Bartlett, “Editorial: A Patriarchal World,” Animals’ Agenda, October 1990, p. 2.

  3. See Mary Zeiss Stange, “Religious Ethics and Fur,” Fur Age Weekly 140, no. 2 (1990), n.p.; Sherrie Hicks, “Accessory to Ignorance,” Fur Age Weekly September 24, 1990; Fred Le Brun, “Warm, Furry Thoughts at Dawn,” Albany Times-Union, November 12, 1990; responses by Holly Cheever, letter to the editor, Albany Times-Union, November 1990, and Canadian Anti-Fur Alliance, Press Release defending “Shame of Fur” ads against charge of sexism, November 30, 1990. Address: 11 River Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5A 4C2

  4. See Stange, “Religious Ethics and Fur”; Germaine Greer, “Home Thoughts: Germaine Greer on the Fallacy of Animal Rights,” Independent, January 1990; response by Carol J. Adams, “On the Fallacy of Germaine Greer,” Newsletter of the International Association against Painful Experiments on Animals, Fall 1990, pp. 6–7.

  5. An alternative to this rejection of animal defense because of its dependence on rights-based discourse is available. Since the mid-1980s several feminists have offered non-rights-based arguments on behalf of the other animals. In particular, see Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals (London: Pluto Press, 1989); Josephine Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 2 (1990), pp. 350–75; Marti Kheel, “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), pp. 128–37; the essays collected in Greta Gaard, ed., Ecofeminism, Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), and the essays by Deane Curtin (“Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care,” pp. 60–74), Roger J. H. King (“Caring about Nature: Feminist Ethics and the Environment,” pp. 75–89), and Deborah Slicer (“Your Daughter or Your Dog?,” pp. 108–24), in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, special issue on ecological feminism, 6, no. 1 (1991).

  6. See Susan Finsen, “Making Ends Meet: Reconciling Ecoholism and Animal Rights Individualism,” Between the Species: A Journal of Ethics, 4, no. 1 (1988), pp. 11–20 for an admirable discussion of the points of dissension and her attempt to resolve these points.

  7. Besides writings by Kheel, Slicer, Donovan, Gaard cited above, see, for instance, the writings of Andrée Collard, with Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth (London: Women’s Press, 1988); Connie Salamone, “The Prevalence of the Natural Law within Women: Women and Animal Rights,” in Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, ed. Pam McAllister (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1982); Genoveffa Corea, “Dominance and Control: How Our Culture Sees Women, Nature and Animals,” Animals’ Agenda, May/June 1984, p. 37; Karen Davis, “Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection,” Animals’ Agenda, January/February 1988, pp. 38–39; Zoe Weil, “Feminism and Animal Rights,” Labyrinth: The Philadelphia Women’s Newspaper, February 1990; Sally Abbott, “The Origins of God in the Blood of the Lamb,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), pp. 35–40; Norma Benney, “All of One Flesh: The Rights of Animals,” in Reclaim the Earth: Women Speak Out for Life on Earth, ed. Léonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland (London: Women’s Press, 1983); and Aviva Cantor, “The Club, the Yoke, and the Leash: What We Can Learn from the Way a Culture Treats Animals,” Ms. magazine, August 1980, pp. 27–29.

  8. Corea, “Dominance and Control,” p. 37.

  9. See Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Men, Women, and Beasts: Relations to Animals in Western Culture,” in Good News for Animals? Christian Approaches to Animal Well-Being, ed. Charles Pinches and Jay B. McDaniel (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993).

  10. Peggy Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  11. See Nancy Jay, “Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman,” in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Mile
s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).

  12. Marti Kheel, “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Can Ecofeminism Bridge the Gap?” Prepared for delivery at the 1988 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, March 10–12, 1988, p. 14. See the arguments in chapter 5.

  13. Admittedly, some environmentalists do not see the issue of domesticated animals as a pressing concern or one that falls under the rubric of environmental concerns. J. Baird Callicott contends that farm animals “have been bred to docility, tractability, stupidity, and dependency. It is literally meaningless to suggest that they be liberated” (J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy [Albany: State University of New York Press], 1989). Creating a dichotomy of wild, independent, valued animals and docile, domesticated, unvalued animals enacts at the environmental level the traditional view of men and women, as Davis points out (“Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection,” p. 38). One of the strengths of the ecofeminist-animal liberation position evidenced in Davis and Kheel, especially her 1985 response to Callicott, is the analysis that recognizes all animals—“domesticated” and “wild”—as worthy of theoretical concern. See Marti Kheel, “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair,” Environmental Ethics 7, no. 2 (1985), pp. 135–49. And also Harriet Schleifer, “Images of Death and Life: Food Animal Production and the Vegetarian Option,” in In Defense of Animals, ed. Peter Singer (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 63–73.

  14. Thus, even if some animal rights philosophy appears to err by being extensionalist—that is, by arguing that a select group of animals ought to possess the rights that at this time only (some) humans possess—the animal-defense movement is much broader in its goals and activism than this, including environmental degradation under its rubric. The change in the subtitle of one of the leading animal-defense magazines the Animals’ Agenda in the early 1990s indicated this. Formerly called the Animal Rights Magazine, it was renamed the International Magazine of Animal Rights and Ecology. Also, the British magazine, the Beast: The Magazine that Bites Back, a short-lived production that flourished in the early 1980s, carried extensive environmental coverage as well.

  15. See, for instance, the writings of Jay B. McDaniel, especially Of Gods and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989).

  16. See, for instance, Noske, Humans and Other Animals.

  17. See, for instance, the essays in Carol J. Adams, ed., Ecofeminism and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 1993), and the writings of Karen J. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections,” Environmental Ethics 9, no. 1 (1987), pp. 3–20, and “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism,” Environmental Ethics 12 (Summer) 1990, pp. 128–33.

  18. See chapter 4.

  19. See Warren, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism,” pp. 128–33.

  20. See Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), pp. 98–111.

  21. Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), p. 56.

  22. For an interesting discussion of the Wollstonecraft-Taylor controversy and why Singer’s use of this in Animal Liberation errs, see Mary Ann Elston, “Women and Anti–vivisection in Victorian England, 1870–1900,” in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas Rupke (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 260–61.

  23. Ruth Ginzberg, “Feminism, Rationality, and Logic,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 88, no. 2 (March 1989), p. 35.

  24. Sandra Harding, “Is Gender a Variable in Conceptions of Rationality? A Survey of Issues,” in Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy, ed. Carol C. Gould (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1983), p. 43.

  25. In 1920, at the behest of a feminist friend active in the campaign for a plumage bill, Virginia Woolf wrote a short essay for the Woman’s Leader. The political dynamics swirling around that issue are similar to those of the antifur campaign: blaming women for wearing apparel derived from animals. But how is this apparel obtained? Woolf wrote about birds who are robbed of their feathers, “We may fairly suppose then that the birds are killed by men, starved by men, and tortured by men.” [Echoing Woolf, feminists in response to the current ad painted on one of its billboards: “MEN kill animals. MEN make the profits . . . and MEN make sexist ads! with friends like Greenpeace, who needs enemies?” See p. 124.] Virginia Woolf, “The Plumage Bill,” from the Woman’s Leader, July 23, 1920, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–24, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 337–38.

  26. Lorraine Code, “The Impact of Feminism on Epistemology,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 88, no. 2 (March 1989), p. 25.

  27. See, for instance, Jane Flax, “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. S. Harding and M. Hintakka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983).

  28. For background see Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).

  29. See Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), and Donovan, “Feminist Theory and Animal Rights,” pp. 364–65.

  30. See Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, p. xii; Peter Singer, Animal Liberation 2d ed. (New York: New York Review Book, 1990), pp. ix–x; and Donovan critique, “Feminist Theory and Animal Rights,” pp. 350–52.

  31. Roberta Kalechofsky, “Descartes’ Niece.” Paper presented at the Spoleta Festival for the Animals, Raleigh, North Carolina, October 6, 1990. In fact, women have been disproportionately represented in animal-welfare work. The emotional, intellectual, and political reasons that women become involved with fighting on behalf of animals differ in many ways from those of men. Coral Lansbury suggests that women acted on behalf of animals out of sense of identification or shared oppression. See Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: Wisconsin, 1985) and R. D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

  32. Beverly Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 13.

  33. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

  34. See Lorenne M. G. Clark and Lynda Lange, The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).

  35. See Harrison, Making the Connections, pp. 235–36. Chapter 9 engages this insight more fully.

  36. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), and Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

  37. See Donovan, “Feminist Theory and Animal Rights,” p. 374.

  Epigraphs to Part Three: Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog (San Francisco: Mercury House, Inc. 1990), pp. 16, 63. Roberta Kalechofsky, “Introduction,” in Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb, ed. by Roberta Kalechofsky (Marblehead, MA: Micah Productions, 1988), p. v. For a list of the
ir publications on Jewish vegetarianism and animal issues, write them at Micah Publications, Inc., 255 Humphrey St., Marblehead, MA 01945.

  Chapter 8

  1. See Karen J. Warren, “Women, Nature, and Technology: An Ecofeminist Philosophical Perspective,” Research in Philosophy and Technology, special issue “Technology and Feminism,” guest ed. Joan Rothschild, vol. 13 (1992), and Ecofeminism: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

  2. See Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982), pp. 109–31.

  3. Just how humans should relate to other animals in any intimate way, that is, the feminist implications of “pet” keeping and whether domestication of animals is consistent with a nonhierarchical feminist theory, is beyond the scope of this book, but see in general Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 1989); Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); and Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

  4. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 92.

  5. See my discussion of her analysis on pp. 101–2.

  6. Warren, “Women, Nature, and Technology: An Ecofeminist Philosophical Perspective.”

  7. Anne L. Ganley, Court-Mandated Counseling for Men Who Batter: A Three-Day Workshop for Mental Health Professionals (Washington, DC: Center for Women Policy Studies, 1985), p. 16.

  8. Lenore Walker, Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women Kill and How Society Responds (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 76.