Institutional Logics and Social Movement Transformation_Th..

The history of the Animal Protection Movement is discussed as a case of social movement transformation. Transformation here refers to significant shifts in the goals, strategies, tactics, and membership of the movement and that I suggest reflect the shifting institutional bases of the movement. What emerges as a reform movement of aging elite evangelicals in the earlyto midNineteenth Century England, by the 1960s becomes a radical abolitionist movement of young middle-class women in the U.S.. The analysis is exploratory and incomplete, but raises unanswered questions in the social movements literature about why a movement changes over time or differs across geographic (and institutional) space. That the women’s movement is dominated by women is no surprise. That most US civil rights movement participants were black also makes intuitive sense. We may also readily accept that the environmental movement is middle class, the labor movement is working class, and the temperance and anti-abortion movements are Christian. But what about the Animal Protection Movement? Today’s animal rights activist is a young, vegetarian, nonconformist raised on 1960s movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, and environmentalism. In contrast, nineteenth century animal welfarists were conservative, Christian elites—more closely aligned with the temperance movement than the women’s suffrage movement. Animal protectionists have changed; but, what about animal protectionism? Our theories of social movements account for changes in movements over time by the rise and decline of resources, the opening and closing of political opportunities, or the growth and decay of some exogenous structural strain. But these theories only speak to the fluctuations of mass mobilization and highly publicized protest activity— the peaks of protest activity. What they do not address is the transformation of social movements throughout their lifetimes, such as the animal protectionist movement moving from the right to the left of the political spectrum between 1850 and today. In this paper I aim to extend our