What a Deformed Thief this Fashion Is (1921)

AUTHOR: Fiske, Minnie Maddern

In this article Fiske condemns the use of animal furs for fashion and she promotes alternatives. Fiske begins by describing a wintry street scene in New York with almost everyone clad in furs so that at “a little distance it looks like a procession of wild beasts” (20). Viewed more closely, she continues, “it is only a demonstration of fashion run mad” (20). Worse, “to be à la mode” even demands that “the troops of girls” wear so-called “summer furs” in the “sweltering August” heat (20). Most of the article is then devoted to lambasting this (unwitting) contribution “to hideous forms of torture of dumb creatures” (20).

Rehearsing arguments about the cruelty involved in trapping and livestock farming, Fiske explicitly couches animal welfare in terms of animal rights when she laments that “[m]ost of us have not awakened to the rights of the animal world” (20). “There is no more terrible sight on earth,” she maintains, “to those who know what trapping means than that of a delicate, refined woman clothed in skins and dangling tails and heads of creatures that have been sacrificed to serve her craving for barbaric decoration” (20). Fiske describes in detail some of the more cruel trapping practices. For example, she reports that “[n]ot long ago in the West a new trapping device was discovered. Bait was suspended from trees and the animal to be trapped would spring up and seize it. Fishhooks were concealed in the bait to catch the throat of the victim and thus it would hang suspended for days” (20). Fiske also notes that the market for furs has exploded since the end of “the Great War” (World War I) due to what she calls “women's craze for furs,” so much so that “juvenile magazines and periodicals” have started advertising trapping as a suitable and lucrative occupation for boys (21). For Fiske, it is clear that to incite boys “[t]o cause animal suffering blunts the sensibilities of a child and hardens him to all forms of suffering” (21).

In principle, Fiske is not opposed to the “comparatively new industry” of fur farming (21), as she believes it to be humane enough. But given its “negligible” market share, she does not think “that the situation can be greatly improved” in this way (113). She thus calls for “laws restricting trapping and imposing humane substitutes for the steel-clutch trap” (113). Given the global political climate, she is not particularly optimistic and so argues that women have to “refuse to buy more furs until trapping has been made a felony” (113). “The first step, therefore, toward complete reform lies in educating the public” (113).