The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America.

AuthorPallesen, Bryn Resser
PositionBook review

THE RIGHTS OF THE DEFENSELESS" PROTECTING ANIMALS AND CHILDREN IN GILDED AGE AMERICA. By Susan J. Pearson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2011. Pp. ix, 200. $45.

INTRODUCTION

In 1877, the American Humane Association ("AHA") incorporated as one of the first national organizations dedicated to the protection of animals. (1) Nine years later, it amended its constitution to include the protection of children in its chartered mission. (2) By 1908, there were 354 anticruelty organizations in the United States, 185 of which were, like the AHA, humane societies invested in the welfare of both animals and children (pp. 2-3). As primary source documents reveal, Gilded Age humanitarians viewed the joint pursuit of child and animal protection as entirely sensible (p. 5). One of the Illinois Humane Society's founding directors, for example, professed that the "prevention of cruelty to children and to dumb beasts, are part and parcel of the same work...." (3) By midcentury, however, the logic informing Gild ed Age anticruelty reform had been lost, and child welfare professionals began to criticize the mergence of child protection with animal protection as an illogical ordering of welfare priorities (p. 5). "It is a sad commentary," wrote Dr. Vincent J. Fontana, founder of the Vincent J. Fontana Center for Child Protection in New York City, "that it took a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals to protect the first recorded case of a maltreated child." (4)

In The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America, Professor Susan J. Pearson (5) sets herself the task of recovering the now-forgotten logic of anticruelty reform and the development of humane societies in Gilded Age America. Her resulting history demonstrates that the union of child and animal protection was "neither sad nor strange, but was instead tightly bound to the crosshatched threads of sentimentalism and liberalism" (p. 20). Specifically, Pearson argues that Gilded Age anticruelty reform was a "hybrid" movement--simultaneously derivative and constitutive of the American state. Drawing on anticruelty reform publications, popular literature, and histories of antebellum and postbellum America, she shows how the rhetorical and institutional innovations of anticruelty reform both shaped and were shaped by an ideology of what she terms "sentimental liberalism." By "[s]peaking a language of sympathy while deploying legal power," Pearson explains, "anticruelty reformers transformed not only sentimentalism, but also the reach and role of the state" (p. 13).

Although Pearson tags Rights of the Defenseless as an "intellectual and cultural history" (p. 8), it should also be recognized as a legal history--and an important one at that. Indeed, Rights of the Defenseless is, in many ways, more a history of the transformation of American legal liberalism (albeit one told though the voices and actions of Gilded Age humanitarians) than it is a history of Gilded Age anticruelty reform. (6) Accordingly, this Notice engages Rights of the Defenseless on those terms--that is, as a history of American legal liberalism. It proceeds in three parts. First, this Notice delivers a summary of Pearson's argument, paying particular attention to her discussion of liberalism and leaving her discussion of sentimentalism more or less aside. Second, it criticizes Pearson's surprisingly abridged treatment of the relationship between anticruelty reformers' successful expansion of welfare rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. Finally, it concludes with an argument that Rights of the Defenseless is nonetheless an important legal history because of the work it does to combat the pervasive and persistent myth of the weak American state.

  1. CONTRIBUTIONS

    Pearson describes Rights of the Defenseless as an investigation into "the connection between--and consequences of--animal and child protection" in Gilded Age America (p. 8). This investigation reveals that the leaders of anticruelty societies accomplished more than simply the legal protection of animals and children. Through their strategic efforts to establish recognized and enforceable legal protections (i.e., rights) for animals and children, these men and women also enlarged the reach and role of the American state. As Pearson explains, by "[f]reely mixing the language of traditional liberalism with that of sentimentalism, animal welfare reformers groped toward a newer, more expansive vision of the rights-bearing community that would include ... the helpless and dependent" (p. 101).

    Pearson begins her history of anticruelty reform and the development of humane societies in Gilded Age America with a critical examination of why Gilded Age humanitarians tended to consolidate child and animal protection under one institutional mantle. To the extent that humane society leaders addressed the decision to merge child and animal protection functions, they typically appealed to expedience or, less frequently, the shared helplessness of children and animals (pp. 21-22, 56). Pearson, however, suggests an alternative explanation for the union of...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT