On this day in vegan history · June 12, 1929
Brigid Brophy Is Born
A novelist's dare of a magazine essay talked animal rights back into public conversation, and the chain it set off ended in Peter Singer's Animal Liberation.
The facts
- Born
- 12 June 1929, Ealing, London
- Essay
- 'The Rights of Animals,' The Sunday Times, October 1965
- Turned vegetarian
- At age 25; never wore leather
- Legacy book
- Reprinted in Animals, Men and Morals (Victor Gollancz, 1971)
Brigid Brophy was born on 12 June 1929 in Ealing, London, to the writer John Brophy and his wife Charis. She became a vegetarian at 25 and refused to wear leather, a private conviction she turned into a public argument in October 1965, when The Sunday Times invited her to write an opinion piece. Her response, 'The Rights of Animals,' opened with a grim thought experiment about baiting a hook with a human meal and argued that animals deserved the same basic moral standing Thomas Paine had claimed for men. The essay was widely discussed and became the seed of a small Oxford circle's 1971 anthology, Animals, Men and Morals, which carried her argument further.
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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Were it to be announced tomorrow that anyone who fancied it might, without risk of reprisals or recriminations, stand at a fourth story window, dangle out of it a length of string with a meal (labelled 'Free') on the end, wait until a chance passer-by took a bite and then, having entangled his cheek or gullet on a hook hidden in the food, haul him up to the fourth floor and there batter him to death with a knobkerrie, I do not think there would be many takers.
Brigid Brophy, 'The Rights of Animals,' The Sunday Times, October 1965
Source: Wikipedia -
Animals, Men and Morals is a manifesto for an Animal Liberation movement.
Peter Singer, review of Animals, Men and Morals, The New York Review of Books, 5 April 1973
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Her essay gave the Oxford circle behind Animals, Men and Morals its starting point, and Peter Singer's 1973 review of that book coined the term 'animal liberation' and led directly to his 1975 book of the same name, the text most credit with launching the modern movement.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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