Bygone birding: ‘hateful fashion’ that resulted in slaughter of millions of birds

Eliza Brightwen - speaking up for welfare of birds

Aberdeenshire-born Eliza Brightwen was a leader in the campaign to end the slaughter of birds for their feathers to be used as adornments on women’s hats. Regrettably, she gets little more than a mention by contemporary author Tessa Boase in her otherwise excellent commentary* on what, in Victorian times and later, was a lucrative but cruel trade. Married to a banker who pre-deceased her, Brightwen (1830-1906) spent a mostly reclusive life in the spacious grounds of her home in Stanmore, Middlesex. She was 60 before she took to writing but soon won acclaim for her sensitive studies of Nature at a time when the customary practice was either to exploit or destroy it, sometimes (as in the millinery trade) both. Below is an extract from  her  popular (and influential) book, Inmates of My House  and Garden, published in 1895.

THERE is a form of cruelty of which thousands of ladies are guilty and against which I, for one, shall never cease to protest until the hateful fashion has entirely ceased. 

How often I wish I could lead those of my own sex to think of the terrible suffering they are causing to millions of sweet and innocent birds.

Can any one conceive my distress at having them  killed and stuffed, then placed as a trimming on bonnets!

The thought of such birds’ mother-love ought to make such an idea abhorrent to any gentle-minded woman.

Cannot my sisters be brought to reflect that every wing and bird's body they wear on their headgear means the cruel death of a creature of both use and beauty that was enjoying its innocent life and doing us only good by carrying out its appointed duties in God's creation? 

I cannot express the pain it gives me to see aigrettes, wings, and whole birds still so lavishly used in trimming hats and bonnets. 

Loving birds as I do, I cannot help pleading for them from time to time, in the hope that public opinion may have some influence, and ladies may learn at last to be ashamed to be seen decked with an ornament which proclaims them both thoughtless and unfeeling.

*