Partner Leisa Katherine
Schartau
Queer Places:
Cheltenham Ladies' College, Bayshill Rd, Cheltenham GL50 3EP, UK
Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society (ADAVS), 170 Piccadilly, St. James's, London W1J 9EJ, UK
Ferne House, Shaftesbury SP7 0EU, UK
7 St Edmund's Terrace, St John's Wood, London NW8 7QP, UK
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Emilie
Augusta Louise "Lizzy" Lind af Hageby (20 September 1878 – 26 December 1963)
was a Swedish-British feminist and animal rights advocate who became a
prominent anti-vivisection activist in England in the early 20th century.[1]
‘Lizzy’ (Emilie Augusta Louise) Lind-af-Hageby and Leisa Katherine
Schartau met at a lecture in Stockholm, and they formed a lifelong
partnership devoted to opposing aggression against women, nations and animals.
Lind-af-Hageby and Schartau attended, with their notebooks, some 100
physiology lectures and 50 demonstrations on live animals in London. Their
book, originally called Eye-witnesses, and then The shambles of science:
Extracts from the diary of two students of physiology, caused a storm with its
dramatic descriptions of the ‘theatre’ of the medical experimenter’s art – no
science, they said, but a display of butchery put on for entertainment that
must not fail to brutalize the students exposed to it: ‘The physiological
theatre offers plays that are as exciting, thrilling, and entertaining as any
others; there is quite enough of murderous attempts and of struggle for life,
and the manager is anxious to bring the best performers on the stage.’ Lizzy
Lind-af-Hageby and Leisa Schartau’s lifelong liaison, most of it lived in
Britain, was built around the anti-vivisection, animal rights and
environmental rights movements, to which they saw the issue of women’s rights
as intimately linked.
Born to a distinguished Swedish family, Lind af Hageby and another Swedish
activist enrolled at the London School of Medicine for Women in 1902 to
advance their anti-vivisectionist education. The women attended vivisections
at University College London, and in 1903 published their diary, The
Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology,
which accused researchers of having vivisected a dog without adequate
anaesthesia. The ensuing scandal, known as the Brown Dog affair, included a
libel trial, damages for one of the researchers, and rioting in London by
medical students.[2]
In 1906 Lind af Hageby co-founded the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection
Society and later ran an animal sanctuary at Ferne House in Dorset with the
Duchess of
Hamilton. She became a British citizen in 1912, and spent the rest of her
life writing and speaking about animal protection and the link between that
and feminism.[3][4]
A skilled orator, she broke a record in 1913 for the number of words uttered
during a trial, when she delivered 210,000 words and asked 20,000 questions
during an unsuccessful libel suit she brought against the Pall Mall Gazette,
which had criticized her campaigns.[5]
The Nation called her testimony "the most brilliant piece of advocacy
that the Bar has known since the day of Russell, though it was entirely
conducted by a woman."[6]
Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby (centre) at the International Anti-Vivisection
Congress, 1913
Born into a wealthy and noble Swedish family, Lind af Hageby was the
granddaughter of the chamberlain to the King of Sweden, and the daughter of
Emil Lind af Hageby, a prominent lawyer. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies
College in England, which gave her access to the kind of education unavailable
to most women at that time. This, combined with a private income from her
family, enabled her to pursue her political activism, writing and travelling
around the world to deliver lectures, first in opposition to child labour and
prostitution, then in support of women's emancipation, and later animal
rights.[7]
Lisa Gålmark writes that Lind af Hageby took to the streets, organizing
rallies and speeches, when women of her class were expected to stay at home
embroidering.[8]
When Lind af Hageby spoke to the Glasgow Vegetarian Society in 1914, a
Daily Mail journalist reported that he had expected to find a "square
jawed, high browed, slightly angular, and severely and intellectually frugal
looking" woman, but instead found "a pretty, little, plump woman, with kind
brown eyes, eyes that twinkle ... She was not even dowdy and undecorative. Her
blue dress was ... pretty as anyone could wish." He wrote that he was "almost
converted to vegetarianism" by her "straight, hard logic."[9]
After college Lind af Hageby spent time in Paris in 1900, where she and a
Swedish friend, Leisa Katherine
Schartau, visited the Pasteur Institute.[10]
They were distressed by the vivisection they saw there, and when they returned
to Sweden joined the Nordiska samfundet till bekämpande av det
vetenskapliga djurplågeriet (the Nordic Anti-Vivisection Society). Lind af
Hageby became its honorary chair in 1901. In 1902 the women decided to enrol
at the London School of Medicine for Women to gain the medical education they
needed to train themselves as anti-vivisection activists.[4]
Lind af Hageby co-founded the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society
(ADAVS) in 1906 with the Duchess of Hamilton, with a shop and office at 170
Piccadilly, London. As part of the society's work, Lind af Hageby drafted a
petition in or around 1906, An Anti-Vivisection Declaration, which
was distributed around the world, translated into several languages, and
signed by prominent anti-vivisectionists.[16]
In July 1909 she organized the first international anti-vivisection conference
in London; Mary Ann Elston writes that the conference promoted gradualism in
the fight to end vivisection.[17]
Lind af Hageby was opposed to vivisection both for the sake of the animals
and because she regarded it as bad science, though she told a Royal Commission
on Vivisection that she had "no objection to vivisection, provided that the
vivisectors experiment on themselves."[14]
She argued that it was not enough to vilify vivisection; activists had to
educate themselves so that they understood the science well enough to be able
to argue their case.[22]
She continued throughout her life to advocate social reform and economic
equality as the main way to overcome human disease,[23]
living as a strict vegetarian and becoming a board member of the London
Vegetarian Society.[7]
She was also active in Henry Stephens Salt's Humanitarian League. Leah Leneman
writes that Lind af Hageby saw Darwin's theory of natural selection – the
Origin of Species had been published in 1859 – as essential to the cause
of animals, because it "brought about the decay of the old anthropocentric
idea of man ... It taught that if there is this kinship physically between all
living creatures, surely a responsibility rests upon us to see that these
creatures, who have nerves as we have, who are made of the same flesh and
blood as we are, who have minds differing from ours not in kind but in degree,
should be protected ..."[24]
She was also active in several women's organizations, including the Women's
Freedom League, arguing that the kinship she felt between humans and
non-humans had implications for the enfranchisement and education of women,
and that support for animals and women was connected to a "general
undercurrent of rising humanity."[17]
Indeed, the connection between rights for women and animals, neither of them
regarded as persons during Lind af Hageby's lifetime, had been starkly
illustrated a century earlier when
Mary
Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) was
swiftly followed by a parody and reductio ad absurdum, Vindication
of the Rights of Brutes,
written anonymously by a Cambridge philosopher.[25]
Following the lead of
Frances Power Cobbe, Lind af Hageby regarded feminism and animal rights
(and, in particular, vegetarianism), as strongly linked, seeing the advance of
women as essential to civilization, and the tension between women and male
scientists as a battle between feminism and machismo.[26]
Craig Buettinger writes that feminism and anti-vivisection were strongly
linked in the UK, where the comparison between the treatment of woman and
animals at the hands of male scientists (and, indeed, their husbands)
dominated the discourse. But in the United States, the antivisectionists based
their need to protect animals on their duties as mothers and Christians, and
did not see advancing women's rights as part of that.[27]
Lind af Hageby saw the spirituality and Christianity of the American
anti-vivisectionists as directly tied to women's rights and progress in
general. "[W]hat is called effeminacy by some ...," she wrote, "is really
greater spirituality ... and identical with the process of civilization
itself." Leneman writes that this view accounted for the involvement of
feminists in the theosophy and other spiritual movements.[24][n
2] Lind af Hageby was herself involved with the London Spiritualist
Alliance from 1935 until 1943.[29]
In 1950, at the age of 73, she attended The Hague World Congress for the
Protection of Animals.[4]
From 1954 she ran a 237-acre animal sanctuary at Ferne House near Shaftesbury,
Dorset, an estate left to the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society by
the Duchess of Hamilton on the latter's death in 1951; the Duchess, a friend
of Lind af Hageby, had been using the estate as an animal sanctuary since the
Second World War.[30]
Lind af Hageby died at her home in London at 7 St Edmunds Terrace, St
John's Wood, on 26 December 1963, leaving £91,739 in her will.[17]
The society's assets were transferred to the Animal Defence Trust, which as of
2012 continues to offer grants for animal-protection issues.[31]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzy_Lind_af_Hageby
- Oakley, Ann. Women, Peace and Welfare . Policy Press. Edizione del
Kindle.