The Rights of the Defenseless

Susan J. Pearson examines the founding of humane societies to protect animals and children. She explains such groups as the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) and its analogous child-centered group Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) as the middle way between the charitable work of pre–Civil War societies and the growth of state protective laws. For Pearson, these humane societies expose the transitions occurring during the Gilded Age as the country moved toward exercising state police power to protect its citizenry. One of the book’s major themes, and thus the context it posits for comprehending this transition, is that the SPCA and SPCC were not merely private philanthropic organizations but were ones in which their agents possessed police power to issue arrest warrants for suspected abusers. According to Pearson, the SPCA and SPCC should be considered together because both organizations were motivated by sentimental liberalism. Believing that cruelty to those unable to protect themselves disrupted the social order, the humane sentimentalists “sought to restore that order both to the heart and the law” (p. 8). Because they did not yet believe that the full power of the state could achieve this dual purpose, they practiced a “therapeutic approach to law in action” (ibid.). For such sentimentalists it was fundamental that all humans were capable of sympathizing with suffering; their motives and means were to use their legal authority to “reform individuals rather than to legally punish them ... in the spirit of educative prevention rather than punitive court action” (p. 170). They sought to reconcile this sentiment with nineteenth-century liberal ideas not by challenging the dependent status of animals and children within a hierarchy of existing relationships but by providing both groups with natural rights (p. 99). The humane societies wished to preclude state intrusion into human-animal relationships or into the familial setting, and they focused on the morality of cruelty

Context (archaeology · Criminology · Cruelty · Gilded Age · Political science · Power (physics · Punitive damages · Sociology · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History

• Genre, tradition and renewal

  Open Access•Chengcheng You•Humanities and Social Sciences…•2023

  Añadir item

• Can fiction make us kinder to other species? The impact of fiction on pro-animal attitudes and behavior

  Open Access•W P Malecki, Boguslaw Pawlowski et al.•Poetics•2018

  Añadir item

• Victims, Bodies, Playthings

  Ulrike Seifert•Society and Animals•2025

  Añadir item