Yearbook of Women’s History / Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis - 2024: Gender and Animals in History

This chapter examines animal displays at Liverpool Museum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these interacted with school curricula. It argues that displays of birds and mammals emphasized femininity, domesticity, and the nuclear family, operating in tandem with anthropological galleries’ promotion of white supremacy. It considers the lessons and discourses schoolchildren were exposed to at Liverpool Museum, identifying a symbiosis between museology and pedagogy during James Granville Legge’s tenure as Liverpool City Council’s Director of Education. Liverpool schools adopted an object-centred, haptic curriculum that confirmed ideological messages about gender, class, race, and empire disseminated by the city museum. The chapter concludes by using historical photographs to critique the racist, sexist, and heteronormative legacies of natural history museums.

This chapter takes a feminist intersectional animal studies approach to explore the historical formation of the spatial arrangements of the housing of nonhuman animals in the laboratory. I argue that the discursive and material production of these spaces is inherently gendered. I draw on the feminist geography of Doreen Massey to show how gendered socio-spatial relations render nonhuman animals and women as inferior to the masculine domain of rational science. This inferiority rests on dualistic assumptions of space and time, which allow for the continued exploitation of nonhuman animals.

For millennia, the lives of humans and insects have been intimately connected. Living on bodies, in homes, and in people’s imagination, insects were (and are) an integral part of everyday life. In the historiography of human–animal history, the role of arthropods has recently gained more attention, with historians designating the Early Modern period as a time in which insects were increasingly studied and appreciated. In the domestic sphere, however, insects were seen as unwanted intruders. This essay considers the ways in which Dutch men and women encountered and were expected to deal with insects in the premodern period. It argues that ideas about (dealing with) insects intersected with ideas about gender and class, and aims to show how these ideas co-evolved over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Using honey bees (Apis mellifera) as a case study, this essay argues that animals and humans co-created gendered interpretations of sex differences and reproductive behaviour in the history of science. The typical narrative about gender in science says that humans have pushed our ideas about gender onto nonhuman nature. Rather than fight anthropocentrism, however, these explanations privilege humans as active historical agents and frame animals as passive. The science of honey bee sex differences demonstrates that gender has not only shaped bee science, but has also been shaped by it. Beekeeping manuals, scientific research, and even popular literature reveal that beekeepers and entomologists internalized honey bee gender while they attempted to describe and justify it.

Early relationships between gorillas and white colonists in Africa were hyper-masculine in nature, characterized as man against silverback. Alongside attempts to kill gorillas as trophies, repeated attempts were made to capture young gorillas. Despite young gorillas proving difficult to keep alive in captivity, they continued to be captured through the colonial period. Involving women in gorilla care appeared to improve gorillas’ outcomes, nurturing them within intimate interspecies relationships. Some African women were hired by white men to breastfeed unweaned gorilla infants. While some women took these gorillas into their homes, others were removed from their families to wet-nurse gorillas. White women became different kinds of foster mothers, treating gorillas as Europeanized children within the trappings of colonial domesticity. While women’s roles in gorilla care reinforced gendered and racialized hierarchies in colonial Africa, the interspecies intimacies that flourished between women and gorillas changed the lives of both.

In this chapter, we reflect on our readings of female/feminist primatologists’ studies of female primates and our understandings of the gendered lives of bonnet macaques, a female-bonded nonhuman primate species, endemic to peninsular India. These two focal points provide us with insights into the complexities of individual identity in nonhuman societies and the situatedness of human and other-than-human gender identities in their lived worlds. We first discuss the beginnings of feminist philosophy of biology through the virtually forgotten Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s remarkable critique of Darwinism and then trace the evolution of feminist primatology through the work of influential female primatologists. We consider how these feminist views have shaped our critical comprehension of gender roles in nonhuman primate societies and conclude by examining certain biological and sociocultural traits that are associated with biological sex and contribute to the social construction of gender in the lifeworlds of bonnet macaques and by extension, to those of other nonhuman primates.

In ‘The Cat’ (1901), the American regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman attempts to retrace an affective history of domestication, while coming to terms with the increasing regulation of queer affects that was taking place at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This leads her, this chapter argues, to experiment with a corporeal, sensuous method of doing history that queer theorists have since called ‘erotohistory’. Domestication and queerness sit at the intersection of private and public history, of feelings, corporeal sensations, and human politics – and Freeman’s feline tale reveals the importance of what the history of one could teach us about the history of the other.

‘Riot dogs’ have recently come to be symbols of revolution, stemming from protests in Greece and Chile, respectively, which saw free-living street dogs join humans in protests and remain despite harmful deterrents. A distinct notion of sociopolitical belonging was conferred upon these dogs by their respective communities which was linked to ascription of agency, commitment to activism, and adherence to a particular ideology. Interestingly, the five riot dogs who were named by their communities and subsequently gained the attention of international media have all been male. This discourse analysis begins with introducing the known riot dogs and the contexts in which they were active, and then moves to considering a perceived gender division of revolution. I then analyse how these dogs’ stories have been told and suggest they are informed by gendered expectations, with a focus on the most famous riot dog, Negro Matapacos of Chile. Ultimately, I suggest that part of these dogs’ symbolic legacies is anthropomorphically linked to a perceived embodiment of masculinity. I theorize that emphasizing ‘maleness’ over ‘dogness’ could perpetuate notions of a gender division in revolution and obfuscate women’s participation in social protest.

Taking cats and the vegetarian dish in Indonesia as a case study, this chapter explores the heuristic value of following the perspective of animals in studying histories of environmental knowledge and empathy in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It first figures out the politics and understandings of environmental empathy in a global context, turning, for the period under scrutiny, to forms of empathy that dwelled around gendered and theosophical recognitions of the suffering body of the animal, which unsettled dominant views on human–animal relationships in the West. How this mattered to cats in (post-)colonial Indonesia, and what the social history of the theosophical vegetarian dish can tell us further about empathy there, is the subject of the remainder of the chapter. The experiment turns out to be unsettling, and therefore insightful. The lives of cats and the vegetarian dish cross the spatial, moral, gendered, and racial structures of (post)colonial society, and help us look beyond these frameworks of understanding history.

This article explores the gender and species dynamics depicted in a medieval aphorism from the Mesnagier de Paris (ca. 1392–1405), which compares the qualities of a good horse to those of a maiden. The aphorism lists characteristics such as a handsome mane, a beautiful chest, fine-looking loins, and large buttocks. Although presented as common knowledge, the grammatical structure of the list raises questions about whether the maiden belongs to the human or animal realm. This study traces the origins and variations of this theme by examining the compilation of desirable horse qualities, the fragmented depiction of animals, and the sexualized association between women and horses. The aim is to uncover an ontological shift that occurred during the late Middle Ages, wherein a fragmented description of the female body rendered her available for both literal and metaphorical consumption, gradually replacing the horse as the ultimate symbol of what can be ridden.

This chapter unearths the biographies of two Przewalski’s mares, who were traded, bred, and exhibited as zoo animals, who were coerced into mating and had their female choice curtailed. Yet, these two mares played a crucial role in preventing the extinction of their species. The first mare, Lucka, born during the Second World War at Prague Zoo, became known for her prolific reproduction despite being an atypical descendant of a hybrid, part of what some called a ‘contaminated’ breeding line. The second mare, Orlica 3, was the last wild horse captured in the Dzungarian Gobi after the war. Her introduction to the captive population signified an infusion of wildness and genetic diversity into generations of captive-bred horses. Their human–animal histories shed light on how human values directed selective breeding, shaping reproductive lives, and animal’s bodies, ultimately shaping what many humans consider to be the last wild horse species on the planet.

Can BME (Big Mare Energy) be a Reparative force to help us become more comfortably present in female bodies (cyborg, goddess, human, nonhuman) that exist in space across time, recognizing that some limitations open new avenues for growth that moves beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion even if you are nervous and touchy? This personal narrative about a middle-aged Victorianist and a middle-aged Lipizzaner mare pays tribute to Donna Haraway, Vicki Hearne, Eve Sedgwick et. al as it tries to disentangle the blurred lines between gender and species, sex, biology, and society in seeking a feminism for plain ordinary creatures occupied with mud and manure during a time of profound global upheaval.