At the end of the 1900s the craze for adorning women's hats (and other fashion accessories) with the taxidermied body parts of birds was an international phenomenon that reached from Paris to London to Melbourne and Manhattan. The demand for avian bodies was such that legislation – in many cases the first animal-protection legislation – was devised to prevent species extinction. Lyrebirds in Australia, Huia in Aotearoa New Zealand, Birds of paradise in colonial Papua are among the many species endangered by the feather trade and, as in the fur trade, Indigenous communities were culturally threatened by this exploitative hunting of relative-beings. The late nineteenth-century plumage trade was entirely consistent with the earlier North American fur trade that brought many species to near extinction and has been described as an “animal holocaust” that parallels the genocide of Indigenous human communities under British settler colonialism.

In this presentation, I focus on the intersecting discourses of colonialism, speciesism, and patriarchy mobilized by this fashion craze. Notable social commentators of the time, women who would now be termed vegan ecofeminist activists, made this connection which was dramatically expressed by Frances Willard. She is reported to have seen the birds adorning the hats of her fellow suffrage campaigners and to have exclaimed loudly, “Can they not see that it is all connected?” The reasons why, in the name of fashion, women collaborated with these bloody trades was a question widely explored, for instance by the feminist reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In The Dress of Women (1915) Gilman highlights the contrast between Victorian images of femininity and the violence of the mass killing committed by the fur and feather trades, asking “Would it not be reasonable for every woman of intelligence to determine once and for all, 'I will not decorate my body with death trophies'. ” Gilman connects the lack of conscience that is required to wear “death trophies” with the denial to women of the full rights of citizenship. The denial of civic participation, with the moral and ethical behaviors that implies, offers one explanation for women's subservience to the dictates of fashion; another is offered by an ecofeminist approach to the enabling discourses of speciesism, sexism, and the patriarchal commodification of “the feminine” – human women and other-than-human beings – as a resource for the display of power.