Equality (1897)

AUTHOR: Bellamy, Edward

KEYWORDS: animals, education,  food, health, labor rights, land usage, pacifism, slavery and Abolition, women’s rights

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

In this sequel to Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward (1888), the "Great Revolution" has embraced the social rejection of meat eating, for both health and ethical reasons; indeed, the ethical reasons are stressed as being more important than the health reasons, which are taken for granted.

Doctor Leete takes Julian West on a tour of the city in his flying car. As they pass over a glass building, Leete explains that it is the sanatorium, for people with diseases that would be best treated by travelling to various climes, but who refuse, so they are treated at the sanatorium instead. This leads to a conversation about the state of medicine in Leete’s society, in which everyone is educated in school to have a basic medical understanding of the body and health so that doctors are, in this age, merely specialists and consultants, the first stage of medical investigation being the patient himself and his friends. Within this conversation, Leete discusses how advances in women’s rights and the new equality between the sexes has had important benefits for women’s health and the health of the general public, as sexually transmitted diseases, like syphillis, have been eradicated. Shortly after this conversation, notably about women’s health, equality, and sexually transmitted disease, they pass over Brighton, previously home to Boston’s slaughter yards and cow pens. West mentions that they have been removed and assumes that some better form of producing and providing meat has been discovered. The doctor is surprised no one has mentioned the topic to West already; to this, West indicates that he had neither noticed nor thought to raise the point of eating meat before (284-85). West admits that he hasn’t noticed the lack of meat because the food recipes are, in general, so different from his usual diet that he has not missed the taste.

Following the Revolution, meat-eating quickly disappeared and West assumes this is due to health concerns; however, Leete explains that while health may have been a consideration, this was not the primary driver of concern. Rather, society stopped eating meat for ethical considerations. Men of the day, Leete says, did not stop eating meat for health concerns for the same reason that cannibals do not stop eating their fellow humans for health concerns (286).While the context is anthropocentric and human superiority is assumed, the care of animals is contained within this speciesist ideology: humans should care for their “fellow animals” because it is the moral responsibility of the superior species. West explains that, in his historic time, there was an interest in improving the conditions and lives of nonhuman animals but there was no understanding of how to achieve this and also with what animal meat could be replaced (287). Here, Leete brings the communalist (versus individualist) argument to bear, arguing that the rich could afford meat and the poor could not, so there was no great effort needed in order to fix the problem of meat-eating because it no longer affected those in power (289). Leete mentions a cartoon from the period when the eating habits changed, which personifies humanity as a woman who looks at animals with regret, wondering “‘how we could ever bring ourselves to eat you?’” Five years later, she is depicted looking at the animals with disgust, asking “‘how indeed’” (290).