Price 2

founding of state Audubon societies in the late 1890s to save bird species

feathers and whole stuffed birds on hats were fashionable

• hunters supplied the industry by shooting wild birds

• women were founders and most of the members of most of these organizations--it was an acceptable way for women to get involved in political issues
• women were beginning to organize as women to make a difference in society
  
• they were not birdwatchers but were horrified by the stories of killing large numbers of birds in rookeries (places where they nested in large numbers)
• certain bird populations were devastated (eg. egrets)
  
• the passenger pigeon was used as an example of the danger

Changing role of women

• colonial; women and men did different parts of producing what a family needed
• industrial revolution moves men's work away from the home and replaces some of the things women made with being a consumer buying things
• separate spheres: men's world is public and competitive, women's is domestic and moral
• women use these arguments to be involved in the public sphere
  

Women's clubs were a way for middle class women to improve their communities

• the idea that women had a separate sphere and were more moral than men had grown in popularity through the 19th century, and women used it to their advantage
• women's public moral reform started with temperance societies trying to ban the sale of alcoholic beverages
  
• sometimes called municipal housekeeping
• hats with birds became a symbol of women as vain rather than moral
• attack on extremes of vanity to argue that women should be taken more seriously
  
• the argument was tricky because hats were both frivolous and markers of social status
• Audubon societies made bird hats unfashionable
• argument for women as protectors of the young, bird hunting causes suffering to young birds
  

How to protect birds?

• the initial association was that birds were beautiful like women, which was initially used as an argument for birds on hats
  
• that shifted to conserve the beauty of live birds
• the Audubon societies also argued that killing birds who ate pests would harm agriculture
• birds were treated as human in nature stories, so seen as something more than food to be harvested
• again lower class market hunters were blamed
  
• a new argument that destroying nature for the sake of vanity was uncivilized (low class)
• the emphasis was on changing consumer behavior--business men were just seen as following the dictates of the market
  
• Laws to protect birds on a state level
• Lacey Act prohibited sending birds killed in violation of state law across state lines to be sold in another state