icit right to liberty, or equality. Indeed, animal and child advocates saw little contradiction in making such positive rights claims within a broader status matrix of dependency and inequality. Thus, one might conclude that the humane movement simply reified the existing social order. Yet Pearson suggests that new anticruelty laws signaled a major departure from older conceptions of rights in common law tradition, where animals were defined as personal property and children were similarly defined as household dependents under coverture. In common law, cruelty to animals or children was a crime exclusively against the property owner. By contrast, New York State’s new law against cruelty to animals (1866) focused on the protection of the animal itself, instead of protecting the property interests of the owner.
Pearson shows that the ideological primacy of a movement language of kindness, feeling, rights, and individual moral redemption demonstrates a significant degree of continuity--rather than historical rupture--between the antebellum and postbellum eras of social reform. Moreover, the Civil War played a critical role in bridging these two eras. The abolition movement, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction Amendments directly grappled with questions of suffering and rights, challenging the state to protect the “rights of the defenseless” in key ways that shaped the rhetoric of animal and child protection.
Pearson’s imaginative use of diverse primary source materials substantiates the power of her argument. A superb work of intellectual history, The Rights of the Defenseless charts a clear genealogy for generations of social thought regarding children, animals, property, the family, and state formation, including Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and theologians of the Second Great Awakening. Pearson also uses other interdisciplinary sources, such as fiction, cartoons, illustrations, humane society periodicals, convention records, newspapers, scripture, legal documents, and perhaps most imaginatively of all, childrearing and animal training manuals to show the ubiquity of protectionist ideologies in unexpected places.
Weaving facets of the Mary Ellen Wilson story throughout, Pearson’s text is organized thematically and chronologically. Chapter 1 reveals the diverse historical locations of social thought fusing children and animals. Chapter 2 unpacks the dialectical relationship between teleological discourses of civilization, cruelty, barbarism, and the changing philosophical and legal landscape of modern liberal thought. Chapter 3 grapples with the conundrum of liberalism directly--in reconciling classical liberal thought with a new positive conception of the right to protection from cruelty. Chapter 4 explores the question of sentimentalism and the “long arms of the law” in theory and in practice. Finally, chapter 5 analyzes the growing rift in these dual movements after 1900 with the growth of the Progressive movement, which focused on solving the systemic, structural causes of cruelty to animals and children, rather than individualizing cruelty as the product of an immoral owner, or drunken parent. A new child welfare movement aimed to provide relief and education to help children remain with their families--rather than remove them; similarly, new animal protection organizations like the Horse Aid Society of New York attempted to improve the welfare of working equines and their human drivers through better veterinary care, education, family assistance, and comfortable accommodations. This is a fascinating historical turn that deserves further attention; such tensions between individualized and structural solutions to cruelty remain a conundrum of modern liberalism to this day.
. Lela B. Costin, “Unraveling the Mary Ellen Legend: Origins of the ‘Cruelty’ Movement,” Social Service Review 65 (June 1991): 203-223.
. Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2006).
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