Thinking With Care About Animals in Medicine and Veterinary Medicine: Gender and the Politics of Care in Scotland, 1910–30

ABSTRACT In this article, we ‘think with care’ about gender in Scotland in the early twentieth century, undertaking an ethnographic approach to the archive of OneKind, formerly the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Vivisection (SSPV), which has only recently been catalogued. In exploring the development of the SSPV from its beginnings in 1911 to 1930, we draw on Joan Tronto's definition of care and Puig de la Bellacasa's three dimensions of care: labour/work, affect/affections and ethics/politics. We argue that the SSPV, founded and largely run by women, employed gendered discourse rooted in a distinctive gendered politics of care embedded in Scottish evangelical Christian socialism; this gendered politics has not been the focus of previous historical research. This context of Christian socialism in Scotland created a milieu in which the women of the SSPV, positioned by their gender as natural bearers of compassion, led campaigns. They articulated a duty of gendered care towards animals and expanded a conception of brotherhood (fraternity) that demanded social change. By focusing on specific relationalities and explanations surrounding meanings of care in Scotland, we deepen our awareness of where we are today and how we got here. Understanding the gendered history of care between humans and other animals is essential to finding effective ways to move forward in caring about and for the nonhuman.