The 'smooth cool men of science': the feminist and socialist response to vivisection.

Abstract

Introduction British animal rights groups of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were political and moral organisations which campaigned, like many contemporary feminists and socialists, in the public sphere with a focus on parliamentary reform. They can be seen not simply as manifestations of contemporary liberalism, as Dan Weinbren recently argued in History Workshop Journal 38,1 but also as encapsulations of the contradictory strands of modernity. Anti-vivisection activities arose from changes in the nature of science, with its increasing emphasis on the efficacy of physiology and its popularisation of the exciting ideas of Darwin. Concurrently there was a growth in state institutions which allowed demands to be focused upon the state. This was, in political terms, a period which witnessed the explosion of socialist, progressive and feminist groupings, all often in mutually exclusive and antagonistic ways looking for change in the coming century.2 As Marshall Berman has so poignantly characterised, it was an inspirational, exciting and frightening time: a time to look forward and back simultaneously.3 The maelstrom of modern life, as Berman describes it, was fed from discoveries in the physical sciences which changed images of the world and people's place within it.4 In his own vision of the modern environment Marx had argued that with the sweeping away of fixed relations