“Free Him Wholly from the Lusts of the Flesh Pots”: Vegetarianism and the Body in Nineteenth Century America
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Falvo, Kathryn Rose
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- January 02, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Lori D Ginzberg, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Lori D Ginzberg, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Amy S Greenberg, Committee Member
Bryan Lee Mcdonald, Committee Member
Nancy A Tuana, Outside Member - Keywords:
- vegetarianism; nineteenth century; reform
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the vegetarian movement in the United States from 1817 to 1861. This original crusade against meat eating in the US engaged a wide range of reformers, including abolitionists, medical practitioners, temperance advocates, evangelists, and women’s right’s activists. Adherents to the diet believed controlling the American diet was a solution to the most pressing concerns of nineteenth century society. Using physiology, chemistry, anatomy, and Biblical exegesis, vegetarians stressed that humans were fundamentally different from and superior to non-human animals. Eating them, they claimed, blurred this important hierarchy. Far from an exercise of compassion, then, Vegetarianism was a desperate attempt to assert and maintain the difference between the human and the animal, physically and ideologically. “Flesh” was threatening to their definition of the rational human. To abstain from meat was not an act of compassion. It was an act of rejection. This dissertation argues that by so clearly and rigidly defining the human body, vegetarians created a logic in which some humans were fundamentally more human than others; and they did so in a time in the nineteenth century when the question of who counted as “human” was very much up for discussion. As abolitionists and women’s rights activists sought to expand the definition of the rights-bearing human, vegetarians sought to define the human through its choices about food. This was in some senses promising for radical politics, but vegetarians more often ignored the logistical realities that informed the worlds of nonwhite and female people. I argue that vegetarians in the nineteenth century believed that we “are what we eat,” but they used dietary advice to make problematic assumptions about the meaning of the human body in the tumultuous political world of the early republic.