Neff, Flora Trueblood Bennett (1858-1943)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Flora Emma Trueblood Bennett Neff was born on 12 January 1858, in Howard County, Indiana, and died on 5 April 1943, in Los Angeles County, California. Her sister, Elnora Trueblood, was an advocate for the American Humane Association and Flora was an active supporter of the Logansport (Indiana) Humane Society. In 1913, Flora Neff created a national scandal when she divorced her second husband, Jasper Neff (she was widowed after three years of marriage to her first husband, Asher Bennett), and demanded as part of the divorce settlement that he become a member of the American Humane association (established on 9 October in Cleveland, Ohio) as well as an advocate for women's suffrage, as a way to counteract his cruelty.

Her major work, Along Life’s Pathways: A Poem in Four Cantos with Recreations (1911), explores her intersecting concerns for class, gender, and species equality. In this respect, the world that Neff envisages at the end of her long poem dramatizes both her commitment to labor, women's and animal rights, and also the vision of global peace and equality through veg*nism imagined by contemporaries such as William Dean Howells, Parker Pillsbury, and Agnes Ryan. In her letter to the Editor of the  Vegetarian Magazine, “Congratulations Mrs. Hayward,” she makes the statement, frequently quoted by later activists, that stresses the intersectional nature of social justice advocacy:

Why can’t we be rounded out reformers? Why do we make one reform topic a hobby and forget all the others? Mercy, Prohibition, Vegetarianism, Woman’s Suffrage and Peace would make Old Earth a paradise, and yet the majority advocate but one, if any, of these” (16-17).

PUBLICATIONS