WAS EVANGELICAL FEMINISM REALLY FEMINISM?
No TL;DR found
Abstract
stitution in 1935, they included a plank that withdrew the policing powers of the American-backed SPCA of the Philippines. Whether they promoted it or rejected it, both animal advocates and colonial nationalists recognized the “gospel of kindness” as a tool of assimilation. In focusing on the connection between the gospel of kindness, animal advocacy, and programs of civilizational uplift at home and abroad, Davis brings fresh questions generated by imperial, borderlands, and transnational history to the study of animal protection. She convincingly shows how the treatment of animals became a measure of moral fitness, in turn linked to class, race, and national belonging. For students of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, movements for social reform have long been of interest, and questions of social control have dominated the scholarship. The question of how to judge those who promoted kindness to animals has likewise dogged much of the scholarship on such movements. Did they care for animals at the expense of human beings? Did they care more about protecting animals or about persecuting animals’ alleged abusers? Was it a deeply felt morality or the desire for social control that animated their animal-loving hearts?Were these groups, as Karl Marx once accused, the ultimate expression of bourgeois class identity? Davis is judicious about these questions. She believes her subjects when they say that they care about animal suffering, and she notes how animal advocates often espoused other progressive and humanitarian causes; but she does not look away when accusations of “cruelty,” and programs to ameliorate it, serve as instruments of oppression. The Gospel of Kindness is thus not only good history, but also a model of morally complex scholarship.