♀️🌱 Edith Ward and the editors and contributors of Shafts: For Workers and Women (1892 - 1893) saw that human and animal oppression and liberation were intertwined
🌱🙏 There have always been those who saw animal rights as intertwined with other social justice causes.
🌱♀️Edith Ward was a feminist animal rights activist and writer. These quotes are from her November 18, 1892 article in Shafts: A Paper For Women and the Working Class. The article is prompted by Henry Stephens Salt's recently published book Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress.
Shafts: A Magazine For Women and Workers was an English feminist magazine produced by Margaret Sibthorp from 1892 until 1899. Its themes included women's suffrage, women's education, workers' rights, strikes, prison reform, and radical attitudes towards vivisection, dress reform, women's control of their sexuality, child care, and vegetarianism.
Ward says:
The case of the animal is the case of the woman.
This similitude of position between women and the lower animals, although vastly different in degree, should ensure from the former the most unflinching and powerful support to all movements for the amelioration of the conditions of animal existence.
“What can be more injurious to the ethical advancement of the race than long-continued exercise of tyranny over any class of beings? What, for example, could be more calculated to produce brutal wife-beaters than long practice of savage cruelty towards the other animals? And what, on the other hand, more likely to impress mankind with the necessity of justice for women than the awakening of the idea that justice was the right of even an ox or a sheep?”
“Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum” [“Let justice be done though the heavens fall”] must be our motto; “Justice for all,” our battle cry. Mercy, it is our duty to show; justice, our duty to demand; mercy, it is our prerogative to grant; justice, it is our right to maintain. To plead for mercy is to acknowledge wrong, and would you have us believe that it is a crime to be a woman or an animal?”
The meetings and notices in the April 1896 issue embody the intertwined politics of Shafts:
Read the November 19, 1892 issue of Shafts at https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/Documents/Detail/shafts.-nov-19-1892/143749
Read the April 1896 issue of Shafts at https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/Documents/Detail/shafts.-apr-1896/144778
Read all the Shafts archives: https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/documents?filter_21=Shafts&applyState=true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sibthorp