Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

Product Information

On both sides of the ocean, women conservationists were fighting to save birds from such a decorated demise.

Happily, since my book’s publication, Etta Lemon and co-founder Emily Williamson are being propelled into the spotlight. They had impressive organisational skills (Etta Lemon in particular), and their campaigns included both directly targeting wearers (with pamphlets and such) and even manufacturers, to trying to push through a bill for banning this cruel practice through the influential male members of the society. The plumed paradise birds, the great and little egret, blue-throated and amethyst hummingbirds, the bright green Carolina parakeet, the Toco toucan, the lyre bird, the silver pheasant, the velvet bird, the tanager, the resplendent trogon .

I rushed to the park – and there were two wet cygnets, newly hatched, and one breaking out of its shell. In the United Kingdom, Etta Lemon campaigned for 50 years against the slaughter of birds for elaborate fashion. Lemon soon came under scrutiny in The Field where an editorial in 1936 questioned the Society's inaction on cage birds, its gambling on real estate investment, its high expenditure, and its elderly management. A heroine for our times, Etta Lemon campaigned for fifty years against the worldwide slaughter of birds for extravagantly feathered hats. Rather, Boase introduces us to Alice Battershall, a young factory worker, who worked like hundreds of others in skilled and unskilled employments in the feather trade—from cleaning and washing to curling, thickening, and dyeing, among many stages before the plumes were ever affixed to a hat--and, mostly, for a pittance.

Feathers were among the luxury items whose import was banned from February 1917 for the duration of the First World War. For more on reserves, visit our Reserves A-Z and head over to our Bird A-Z for identification and behaviour information. I’d heard a rumor that Victorian women were behind Britain’s biggest conservation charity, and my curiosity was immediately piqued. In many ways, Etta Lemon was a heroine who fought what now feels like a very modern battle against animal cruelty.But the other side of the picture was that the millinery trade led to the massacre (a lot of it excessively cruel, like the egrets who were hunted during their mating/hatching seasons when feathers were at their most beautiful, leaving thousands of chicks to literally starve to death) of millions of birds every year.