Women and vegetarianism and veganism advocacy

Women and vegetarianism and veganism advocacy concerns women's participation in the promotion of vegetarian and vegan diets. The topic includes women's roles in religious and social reform circles, suffrage activism, cookery writing, vegetarian restaurants, animal advocacy, anti-vivisection, and later ecofeminist and vegan studies literature. Sources on the subject have examined ethical, health, temperance, domestic-labour, environmental and spiritual arguments for meat-free diets, as well as gender differences in adoption and attitudes.

History

Pre-1800s

Meat-avoidant practices predated organised modern vegetarian movements. The National Park Service notes examples including Indigenous foodways in parts of North America and religious abstention on the Indian subcontinent, which later campaigners in Anglophone vegetarian movements drew on or reinterpreted.

1800s

Women were active in nineteenth-century vegetarian and animal welfare circles, often in connection with other social reform movements and periodical publishing. In Britain, Martha Brotherton, a member of the Bible Christian Church, a Christian sect that advocated temperance and a meat-free diet, published Vegetable Cookery (1812). It has been described as the first explicitly vegetarian cookbook. Kathryn Gleadle and other historians have argued that the book helped early nineteenth-century Americans adopt vegetarianism and influenced later vegetarian cookbooks. In the United States, Asenath Hatch Nicholson promoted meat-free cookery after hearing Sylvester Graham lecture. She and her husband operated a vegetarian boarding house in New York City, and she published Nature's Own Book (1835) and A Treatise on Vegetable Diet (1848). The Transcendentalist community Fruitlands (1843) adopted a vegan regimen that excluded animal products and some crops. Louisa May Alcott's later account drew attention to the domestic labour expected of women at the community, which disbanded within months. In 1850, the American Vegetarian Society associated abstention from meat with other reforms. Its journal connected vegetarianism with women's rights and abolition, and reformers including Susan B. Anthony attended vegetarian society events. The physician and spiritualist Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) argued in The Perfect Way in Diet (1881) for meat abstention on anatomical, health, ethical and spiritual grounds. Ruby Ekkel writes that Kingsford connected vegetarianism with women's emancipation, anti-vivisection and Theosophical ideas of social and moral reform.

1890s–1928 (British suffrage era)

Leah Leneman's study of Britain during the suffrage era found that vegetarianism appeared in both militant and constitutional suffrage circles. She describes suffrage branch events, wartime vegetarian kitchens, and cooperation between suffrage groups and local vegetarian societies. Elsa Richardson writes that vegetarian restaurants in Edwardian London, including the Eustace Miles Restaurant in Charing Cross, the Gardenia in Covent Garden, the Criterion in Piccadilly and the Teacup Inn off Kingsway, were used by suffrage supporters for meetings, lectures and meals. Richardson states that a suffrage procession on 4 April 1908 ended with a breakfast at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, and that the restaurant later refused to give the authorities information about patrons. She also describes these restaurants as alcohol-free or otherwise suitable for unaccompanied women diners. The Minerva Cafe in High Holborn, established by the Women's Freedom League in 1916 under president Charlotte Despard, was used as a headquarters and fundraising site; according to Richardson, it marked the 1918 franchise reform with a vegetarian menu. Richardson connects these venues with earlier initiatives such as the Women's Vegetarian Union (1895) and with periodicals including Shafts, which associated meat abstention with women's rights, anti-vivisection, rational dress and education.

Richardson also reports that suffrage hunger strikers were received after release at public breakfasts at the Eustace Miles Restaurant, where medals were presented beginning with Marion Wallace Dunlop. In her account, food practices and opposition to force-feeding were used in suffrage arguments about bodily autonomy. Helen Antrobus discusses WSPU "Welcome Breakfasts" at the Eustace Miles Restaurant and cites a 1907 note in the Vegetarian Society's journal that "quite a number of the leaders in the Women's Suffragist movement are vegetarians". The Society's article also discusses suffragists and suffragettes who adopted vegetarian diets, prison diet requests including Constance Lytton's case, and figures such as Anne Cobden-Sanderson and Leonora Cohen.

1900s

In 1912, suffragist Minta Beach undertook a New York–Chicago walk while following a vegetarian raw-food diet and addressed audiences about diet and women's physical capability. Contemporary coverage described her meals and presented the walk as a test of health and endurance. Later in the century, nutritionist Alvenia Fulton ran the Fultonia Health Food Center in Chicago, promoted fasting and vegetarian eating, and advised civil-rights activist Dick Gregory during hunger strikes; the National Park Service states that Gregory ended a 54-day fast with a vegetarian meal at Fulton's centre.

2000s–present Social-psychological research from the 2000s onward has examined gender differences in vegetarian and vegan uptake. Reporting on this research has discussed "precarious masculinity", marketing that associates meat with masculinity, and different responses to the "meat paradox". Some studies have found that women are more likely to dissociate meat from animals, while men are more likely to justify meat eating as natural or necessary. Other work has discussed higher female participation in animal rights groups and stronger pro-meat reactions among some men when reminded of animals, with social-dominance explanations proposed for these findings.

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