On this day in vegan history · April 5, 1973
Singer Puts "Animal Liberation" on the Cover
A young Oxford lecturer took a book review assignment and used it to hand a movement its name and its argument in the same nine pages.
The facts
- Date
- April 5, 1973
- Publication
- The New York Review of Books
- Book under review
- Animals, Men and Morals, ed. Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris (Taplinger, 1972)
- Singer's post at the time
- Radcliffe lecturer, University College, Oxford
On April 5, 1973, The New York Review of Books ran the phrase "Animal Liberation" on its cover for an essay by Peter Singer, then a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford. He had been asked to review Animals, Men and Morals, a slim 1972 essay collection edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris. Singer used the review to argue that the only thing that should decide how we treat another creature is whether it can suffer, not whether it can reason, talk, or belongs to our species. The piece also carried, into wide circulation for the first time, a word one of the book's contributors had coined: speciesism. Two years later Singer expanded the argument into the book Animal Liberation, and the movement had both a name and a philosophy to organize around.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.
Peter Singer, "Animal Liberation," The New York Review of Books, April 5, 1973
Source: The New York Review of Books -
Richard Ryder, one of the contributors to Animals, Men and Morals, uses the term 'speciesism' to describe the belief that we are entitled to treat members of other species in a way in which it would be wrong to treat members of our own species.
Peter Singer, "Animal Liberation," The New York Review of Books, April 5, 1973
Source: The New York Review of Books
Why it still matters
The essay gave the modern animal movement its central claim, that suffering is what counts morally, not species, and set up the 1975 book that turned speciesism into a word activists actually use and put the treatment of animals on the same moral shelf as racism and sexism.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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