Susan J. Pearson. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 280 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-65201-6.
Reviewed by Janet M. Davis
Published on H-SHGAPE (January, 2013)
Commissioned by Julia Irwin
Animals, Children, and the Making of Modern Liberalism
In the winter of 1873, Mrs. Etta Wheeler of New York City made a shocking discovery. As a church mission volunteer, she regularly witnessed scenes of hardship when she ministered the impoverished and homebound tenement residents of Hell’s Kitchen. At the urging of an elderly woman, Wheeler visited the apartment of a couple suspected of physically abusing a young girl. The scene was horrifying: dressed in rags, the girl was covered in welts and scars. A whip lay nearby. Wheeler immediately sought help from the police and local charities, but was told that nothing could be done unless the adult caretakers were caught in the act of physically abusing the child. Finally, Wheeler approached Henry Bergh, the president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Bergh and the ASPCA’s attorney, Elbridge Gerry, quickly took action and obtained Wheeler’s written testimony of abuse. In April 1874, Gerry legally removed the girl, Mary Ellen Wilson, from the tenement and arrested the girl’s caretaker, Mrs. Mary Connolly, who was tried and convicted of felonious assault and battery of a child. (Connolly and her husband had indentured Mary Ellen from Blackwell’s Island asylum when the girl was only two years old.) Little Mary Ellen was subsequently adopted into a loving family; Bergh and Gerry established a new organization, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NY-SPCC), and plural humane societies to protect animals and children spread across the nation.
Scholars have often treated the Mary Ellen Wilson story as a teleological creation narrative heralding the birth of the modern movement against child abuse. Simultaneously, scholars have mythologized Mary Ellen’s ordeal into an indictment of a laissez-faire society in which the rights of children were so tenuous that even animals were afforded better protection under the law. By contrast, Susan J. Pearson’s remarkable intellectual history of animal and child protection in the Gilded Age uses the Mary Ellen story to illuminate a wider historical sea change in the ways that Americans conceived of the state. In so doing, Pearson links animal and child protection to an astonishing array of social and cultural transformations without recasting the rise of the humane movement in the same teleological language that the protectionists themselves used.
Pearson contends that nineteenth-century Americans may have clung to exceptionalist ideals of weak, limited government, but in practice, the Civil War marked a consolidation of federal authority that intensified during the Gilded Age. The activities of state and local governments reveal an even more dynamic landscape of “state interference” during this era, especially with respect to the shared movement to prevent cruelty to animals and children. Although animal and child protection organizations were private institutions, they helped transform the reach of the state through an ideological project that Pearson calls “sentimental liberalism.” Vested with the powers of arrest in their state charters of incorporation, private SPCAs, SPCCs, and humane societies (which performed plural child and animal protection activities) fused the classical liberal language of rights with a sentimental conviction that “beasts and babes” had a right to protection because they could feel and suffer. According to Pearson, “Speaking the language of rights while amplifying the powers of the state, humane societies stood at the crossroads of what historians typically think of as two versions of liberalism--the one classical and minimalist, the other modern and interventionist” (p. 16).
Pearson explains that the right to protection from cruelty, however, did not confer an expl