Wendell Berry, Gloria Steinem, & animal rights: idols meet (meat) reality

Berry raised animals for slaughter.  Steinem believed “Animals are not ours to eat,  wear,  experiment on,  or use for entertainment.”

Neither Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem,  each deceased at 92,  on August 31,  2026 and September 2,  2026,  respectively,  were known primarily––or perhaps even at all––for their considerable influence on the late 20th century rise of the animal rights movement.

Wendell Berry,  indeed,  distanced himself from vegans,  vegetarians,  and any association with organized animal advocacy.  The whole subject of “animal rights” seemed to embarrass him.

“Proud,  self-proclaimed childless cat lady”

Gloria Steinem,  on the other hand,  a quasi-vegetarian for more than 30 years who sometimes ate fish,  described herself as “a proud, self-proclaimed childless cat lady,”  embracing animal rights as a cause and contributing in various ways to many animal advocacy organizations.

Yet this side of Gloria Steinem’s work was so overshadowed by her leadership role in the feminist movement that at her death her extensive Wikipedia entry and most of her many obituaries never even mentioned her lifelong concern for animals.

Five generations in Kentucky

Both Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem began their parallel careers as cultural icons,  especially to Baby Boomers,  a generation younger,  as aspiring authors whose ambitions took them abroad.

Born in Louisville,  Kentucky,  to parents whose families had farmed for at least five generations in Henry County,  Wendell Berry earned first a B.A. and then an M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Publishing his first of eight novels,  Nathan Coulter,  in 1960,  Wendell Berry then won a Guggenheim fellowship that enabled him to visit Italy and France with his wife and children the following year.

Feminism was a Steinem family tradition

Steinem,  born five months earlier than Berry,  in Toledo,  Ohio,  had by far the more difficult childhood.  Her mother Ruth Nuneviller,  who suffered from repeated bouts of mental illness,  was Presbyterian,  of mixed German and Scottish ancestry.   Her father,  Leo Steinem,  was Jewish,  the son of immigrants from Württemberg,  Germany,  and Radziejów,  Poland.

Feminist activism was already a family tradition:  Steinem’s paternal grandmother,  Pauline Perlmutter Steinem,  recounts Wikipedia,  “chaired the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association,  was a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women,”  held in Geneva,  Switzerland,  “and was the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education.

“She was also a leader in the movement for vocational education,”  Wikipedia mentions,  “and rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust by securing passage for them from Europe to Palestine.”

From Toledo to the CIA

Leo and Ruth Steinem split in 1944,  when Gloria Steinem was ten.  Though Gloria Steinem started high school in Toledo,  she moved to Washington, D.C. before graduating,  to live with her older sister,  Susanne Steinem Patch.

Completing her senior year at Western High School in Washington D.C. in 1952,  Gloria Steinem attended Smith College in Northampton,  Massachusetts on a scholarship,  graduated in four years with top academic honors,  and won a fellowship to do post-graduate studies in India.

On her way to India in 1957,  Gloria Steinem found she was pregnant.  She had a then-illegal abortion in Britain.

“After returning to the United States,”  Wikipedia details,  Gloria Steinem “served as director of the Independent Research Service,  an organization funded in secret by the CIA.  She worked to send non-communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival,”  in Vienna,  Austria.

Magazine writing

A year later,  in 1960,  Mad magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman,  who had split with Mad publisher EC Comics in 1956,  founded Help! magazine,  an intended rival to Mad that lasted for 26 editions,  folding in 1965.  Joining Kurtzman were four former Mad artists and Gloria Steinem,  the first actual Help! employee.

One open door led rapidly to another.

“Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Gloria Steinem what she later called her first ‘serious assignment,’ regarding contraception,”  Wikipedia recounts.  “Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique by one year.”

Gloria Steinem then,  in 1963,  went undercover as a Playboy bunny at the New York City Playboy Club to produce “A Bunny’s Tale” for Show magazine,  exposing sexual exploitation.

Gloria Steinem further built her journalistic credentials by interviewing Beatles star John Lennon for Cosmopolitan in 1964,  wrote for the NBC television weekly satire That Was the Week That Was in 1965,  and was hired by Felker in 1968 after he founded New York magazine.

Wendell Berry tried New York City but returned to Kentucky & farming

Wendell Berry was not far away,  teaching English from 1962 to 1964 at the New York University campus in the Bronx.  But Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem are not known to have ever met.

In 1964,  as Gloria Steinem’s magazine writing career took off,  Wendell Berry returned to the University of Kentucky,  where he taught creative writing for the next 13 years.

Recounts Wikipedia of Wendell Berry,  “On July 4, 1965,  Berry,  his wife,  and his two children moved to Lane’s Landing,  a 12-acre farm he had purchased,  and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a homestead of about 117 acres.”

Some of the poems that Wendell Barry wrote there were later amplified by animal advocates,  including “The peace of wild things” (1968),  an excerpt from which is included by Action for Animals founder Eric Mills in his Animal Thoughts series of small advertisements,  and “Her first calf” (1971),  which can be read as more critical of animal agriculture,  even on a small scale,  than Wendell Barry ever actually was.

Anti-Vietnam War activism

Both Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem actively protested against the Vietnam War.

Wendell Berry,  after publishing his second novel in 1967,  had a leading role in the February 10,  1968 “Kentucky Conference on the War & the Draft,”  held on the University of Kentucky campus.

Gloria Steinem signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge,  a project begun in late 1967 by Gerald Walker,  an editor at The New York Times Magazine.  Eventually more than 500 writers vowed to withhold taxes in protest against the Vietnam War.

Gloria Steinem later dated the beginning of her “life as an active feminist” to covering an “abortion speak-out” for New York magazine in a church basement in Greenwich Village,  New York,  in 1969.

Ms. magazine & The Unsettling of America

Wendell Berry,  despite modest success as a novelist and poet,  was still very much an unknown––and would be for many more years––when Gloria Steinem with eight other women in 1972 cofounded the feminist magazine Ms. as a special edition of New York,  funded by Clay Felker.

Ms. an immediate success,  made Gloria Steinem a prominent spokesperson for feminism for the remainder of her life.

Wendell Berry,  meanwhile,  had already published a third novel and four works of nonfiction before his 1977 book The Unsettling of America:  Culture & Agriculture made him nationally prominent as a prophet of the back-to-the-land movement already inspired by,  among others,  the British economist E.F. Schumacher in his1973 treatise Small Is Beautiful.

Early critic of factory farming

The death of Schumacher (1911-1977) left Berry as more-or-less the default spokesperson for ideas about agriculture building on the economic and environmental ideas already advanced by authors including Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb),  Barbara Ward (Spaceship Earth),  Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for A Small Planet),  and Lester Brown (Seeds of Change and World Without Borders).

But Wendell Berry’s ideas perhaps built more upon those of British author Ruth Harrison (1920-2000),  whose 1964 book Animal Machines was the first prominent critique of what is now known as factory farming.

Wendell Berry in November 1977 debated former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz at Manchester University in North Manchester,  Indiana,  pointing out the cultural,  economic,  and environmental harm to communities resulting from the advent of industrial agriculture,  promoted by Butz.

Turned sheep farmer

Wendell Berry,  however,  distanced himself from the emerging animal rights movement by purchasing seven Border Cheviot sheep in 1978,  entering into hands-on animal husbandry.

Writing for the Rodale publications Organic Gardening & Farming and The New Farm from 1977 to 1980,  Wendell Berry amplified themes including sustainable agriculture,  appropriate technology, healthy rural communities,  connection to place, fidelity,  frugality,  reverence,  and the interconnectedness of life.

Wendell Berry simultaneously decried industrial farming and the industrialization of life,  eroding topsoil,  economic globalism,  and environmental destruction,  all from a Christian perspective.

Steinem:  “Wherever there is anti-Semitism,  I identify as a Jew.”

Gloria Steinem contrastingly stated, “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian,  but wherever there is anti-Semitism, I identify as a Jew.”

Gloria Steinem and Wendell Berry often stood for the same things,  but from different perspectives.

Wendell Berry,  for instance,  argued in January 2009 against the death penalty in a statement that began,  “As I am made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life before birth,  I am also made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life after birth.”

Gloria Steinem also opposed the death penalty,  including in the 1993 film Better Off Dead,  examining the paradox between opposition to abortion but support for capital punishment.

Wendell Berry opposed coal

Wendell Berry returned to teaching in the English department at the University of Kentucky from 1987 to 1993,  then devoted most of the rest of his life to writing,  hobby farming,  and activism.

Among his activist projects,  also beginning in January 2009,  was promoting what he called “a 50-year Farm Bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation,  toxic pollution,  fossil-fuel dependency,  and the destruction of rural communities.”

Also in 2009 Wendell Berry helped to lead successful opposition to a proposed “National Animal Identification System” which would have enabled faster identification of disease outbreaks in farmed animals.  In this Wendell Berry was aligned with both small-scale farmers and some of the biggest “factory farm” conglomerates in the U.S.,  all of whom found the idea costly and intrusive.

Most of Wendell Berry’s later activism came in opposition to polluting and otherwise environmentally degrading aspects of the coal industry.

“Stupidity in Concentration”

Perhaps Wendell Berry’s last major denunciation of factory farming came in his essay “Stupidity in Concentration,”  included in CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations):  The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories,  a 2010 “coffee table” anthology chiefly of photographs,  edited by Daniel Imhoff.

“The principle of confinement in so-called animal science,”  Wendell Berry wrote,  “is derived from the industrial version of efficiency.  The designers of animal factories appear to have had in mind the example of concentration camps or prisons,  the aim of which is to house and feed the greatest numbers in the smallest space at the least expense of money,  labor,  and attention.

“To subject innocent creatures to such treatment has long been recognized as heartless.  Animal factories make an economic virtue of heartlessness toward domestic animals,  to which we humans owe instead a large debt of respect and gratitude.”

Never actually opposed either animal husbandry or slaughter

But Wendell Berry never opposed animal husbandry or slaughter themselves.

Vermont Packinghouse,  of North Springfield,  Vermont,  as of 2017 quoted Wendell Berry on a web page describing slaughter as a “sacrament,”  to be done “knowingly,  lovingly,  skillfully,  reverently.”

That ended after Mercy for Animals in 2017 filed complaints with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture and the Vermont Attorney General,  bringing citations and fines for 15 noncompliance violations over the previous two years and four violations over the preceding six months for repeated failure to properly stun animals.

Vermont Packinghouse was still in business as of April 2026,  but was sold to new owners,  who laid off 53 workers but announced expansion plans.

Honored by HSUS

Perhaps the closest that Wendell Barry ever came to standing in the same hell as animal rights advocates came in February 2019,  when the Humane Society of the United States’ Faith Outreach program “welcomed 100 faith leaders and family farmers from 42 states to Washington, D.C.,  for a Faith Summit on Creation Care,”  blogged HSUS president Kitty Block.

(Block has since then renamed the organization Humane World for Animals.)

“The event concluded with the Wendell Berry Faith & Farming Celebration Dinner,”  Block mentioned, “honoring the beloved Christian farmer and writer who has inspired a generation of Americans to reconnect through faith with the land and farming.”

“Creaturely life”

Land Institute founder Wes Jackson and co-author Robert Jensen in an April 2019 essay summarized Wendell Berry’s work as a protest of societal “change from a creaturely life,”  centered on animal husbandry,  “to a mechanical life,”  centered on use of devices.

Eileen Crist,  author of Animals: Anthropomorphism & Animal Mind (1999),  in a December 24,  2025 essay entitled “The Eight Freedoms of Farm Animal Wellbeing,”  praised “Husbandry—in farmer and author Wendell Berry’s sense:  ‘to care,  to keep,  to save,  to make last,  to conserve.'”

Wendell Berry died in  Port Royal,  Kentucky,  leaving as his last advice,  “Be cheerful,  even after considering all the facts.”

Gloria Steinem & Polly Strand

Gloria Steinem,  meanwhile,  became increasingly involved in animal advocacy in her later years,  but as early as the 1980s was a profound influence on Polly Strand (1932-2003),  a leading animal advocate in the San Francisco Bay area from 1987 to her death.

“Polly Strand was a charter member of the original Ms. magazine and its foundation and she made a major effort to unhook the magazine from tobacco revenue,”  recalled Eric Mills.

“This included having a personal meeting with Gloria Steinem where she told Gloria that Ms. accepting cigarette ads would be like Ebony accepting ads from the Klu Klux Klan.”

Gloria Steinem responded by suspending publication of Ms. in 1989,  relaunching it as a nonprofit project,  no longer dependent upon advertising,  in 1990.

Spay/neuter

Elizabeth Forel,  founder of the Animals Matter, NYC blog,  recalled that Gloria Steinem endorsed the work of the Carriage Horse Action Committee,  “in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

Gloria Steinem’s own personal foundation funded spay/neuter work.

And Gloria Steinem donated autographed copies of her books to Farm Sanctuary fundraisers.

Posted longtime animal advocate Mike Winikoff to Facebook,  “They say you should never meet your heroes because they will disappoint you.  The opposite was true when I met Gloria Steinem in 2001.  She was larger than life but 100% down to earth.

Genesis Awards

“We met at an animal rights event I was working on with the Ark Trust,”  host of the Genesis Awards program honoring mass media attention to animal issues,  founded in 1991 and headed by actress Gretchen Wyler until her death in 2002.

“Instead of talking about herself,”  Winikoff said,  “all she wanted to talk about was my animal rights investigations and how they intertwined with human rights and feminism.

“She was genuinely interested and engaged and asked great questions.  Also participating in our conversation was Julia Butterfly Hill,  the legendary tree-sitter who lived at the intersection of environmentalism,  animal rights,  and human rights.

Jennifer Conrad

“It was one of the most inspiring conversations of my life,”  Winikoff recalled,  “tied together by our mutual friend Gretchen Wyler.”

At that event,  posted Jim Jensvold,  “Jennifer Conrad,  founder of the Paw Project,  received one of the awards,  associated with the passing of North America’s first declaw ban,  that had been enacted in West Hollywood.  Gloria Steinem approached Jenny later in the evening,  shook her hand,  and said,  ‘You have accomplished some impressive work.”

This was approximately 16 years before Gloria Steinem’s observed in 2017 that,  “Cats don’t let you touch them.  Cats tell you what they’re going to do,  and that’s that.”

Endorsed Karen Dawn book

Dawn Watch blogger Karen Dawn remembered Gloria Steinem as “my dear friend and mentor,  whose generosity transformed my life and helped push animal rights toward the mainstream.”

Gloria Steinem contributed an endorsement to Karen Dawn’s 2008 book Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals.

Gloria Steinem outlined some of her perspective on the relationship between feminism and animal rights in an August 4, 2005 response to a Boston exhibit by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

“There is still slavery in the world,”  Gloria Steinem said.  “There is still a valuing of human beings according to their race or class or gender or culture or sexuality.  Part of the reason for this cutting off of empathy is the anesthetizing of our senses to the suffering of animals.  Once we grow callous, we cannot feel fully for anyone not even for ourselves.”

Email to Marti Kheel

Gloria Steinem more fully explained her views in a June 2009 email to Marti Kheel (1948-2011),  who in 1982 founded Feminists for Animal Rights,  and authored Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective (2008).

“The huge majority of people in the animal rights movement are women,”  Gloria Steinem observed.  “Females are far more likely to be vegetarians than males.  I also observe that feminist organizations and events are much more likely to offer a vegetarian option,  though I’m less sure about their being completely vegetarian or vegan.

“In addition to arguments about cruelty toward animals,”  Gloria Steinem wrote,  “there is the modern habit of shooting animals full of hormones,  thus increasing the risk of reproductive cancers in those who eat that meat.

“For example,  I became a full-time vegetarian twenty-three years ago after I had a small incidence of breast cancer.  Since then,  I’ve grown attached to being a vegetarian — or pescatarian;  I eat seafood––and would not enjoy eating meat,  yet health was my original reason.

“Women hunted too”

“There is also another anthropological argument,”  Steinem acknowledged,  “that because males hunted for meat,  its distribution became a source and enforcer of male power and privilege.  This is somewhat flawed by the fact that,  contrary to myth,  women in original cultures often hunted for meat, too;  indeed, the whole community hunted with huge nets.

            “I respect the remaining original cultures that eat meat sparingly and in an entirely different way,”  Steinem said,  raising a point of agreement with Wendell Berry,  “by raising animals naturally,  by killing swiftly,  and by apologizing to and honoring the animal spirit that is being absorbed.

“That is very different from the concentration camps of factory farms,  and the sadism of mass animal murder,”  Gloria Steinem suggested.  “I don’t think I could eat meat even if it were humanely raised,  but I also think it’s a difference worth fighting for.

“In the women’s movement groups as elsewhere,  vegetarian or vegan habits have greatly increased in the last twenty or thirty years,”  Gloria Steinem noted,  “whether the reasons are personal health, the global environment or cruelty to other sentient beings.”

Praised by PETA

Recounted PETA staff writer Elena Waldman on March 2, 2021,  “In addition to her advocacy for a wide range of women’s issues,  from underprivileged girls to the depiction of women in the media,  Steinem has spoken up about animal issues,  joining with PETA to call out the National Institutes of Health for putting women’s health at risk by funding cruel,  useless experiments on animals.”

Specifically,  Gloria Steinem said then,  “I am adding my voice to others calling for an end to these and other cruel and useless experiments—on behalf of the animals who are being pointlessly made to suffer and die,  on behalf of women whose health concerns are starved for funds,  and on behalf of taxpayers who are being defrauded.”

Recalled a September 3,  2026 PETA obituary for Gloria Steinem,  “When Steinem found out that one of the sponsors of a fundraising event she planned to attend subjected primates to cruel experiments,  she asked that the company be immediately disassociated from the event,  and it was.

“Steinem released a statement saying, “Animal abuse is so connected to domestic abuse—literally in a household,  but societally in a more general way,  too.”

“By doing so, she highlighted that cruelty to animals is a part of a larger issue of oppression and violence.”

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