‘It was wholesale slaughter’: The forgotten history of the plumage trade and the women who brought it down

Years before the feather hat-adorned suffragettes arrived, a group of Victorian women changed the face of conservation at a time when women’s voices were rarely heard. So why have they been all but wiped from history? Ashley Coates revisits the RSPB’s founding females

Wednesday 31 July 2019 18:28 BST
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A campaign against plumage in hats may seem obscure today but the demand for both local and exotic feathers was huge in the late 19th and early 20th century
A campaign against plumage in hats may seem obscure today but the demand for both local and exotic feathers was huge in the late 19th and early 20th century

Few people are aware that the RSPB, Europe’s largest conservation organisation by membership, was founded by Victorian women working to end the cruelty of the feather trade.

Established in a house in Manchester 130 years ago this year, the Society for the Protection of Birds was initiated by Emily Williamson, the wife of a middle-class solicitor. An organisation with the same aims, known as Fur, Fin and Feather Folk, was set up in London by Eliza Phillips and merged with the SPB in 1891.

Active years before the suffragette movement, Emily Williamson, Eliza Phillips and the fastidious campaigner Etta Lemon, were far-sighted activists who utilised all the tools of communication available at the time, successfully capturing society’s hearts and minds and helping to bring about a change in consumer behaviour as well as some of the first laws to protect wildlife.

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