This is the first book to explore women's leading role in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Its originality lies in uniting feminist perspectives with the fast-developing field of animal-human history, and it opens up rich archival sources for further research. Women founded charities devoted to animal protection, such as the Battersea Dogs' Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and anti-vivisection societies. They intervened directly to stop abuses, passionately advocated greater kindness to animals, schooled the young in humane values, wrote imaginative stories that pictured animal suffering, and debated the causes of human cruelty in polemical works of intellectual depth and originality. In all these enterprises they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female 'sentimentality' or 'hysteria'. However, the gradual emancipation of women in the later Victorian era led also to the formulation of a body of feminist theory on the centrality of 'sentiment' or spontaneous sympathy as a positive, moving force in animal advocacy. The power of patriarchy in repressing women's aspirations to personal freedom, independence and voting rights gave them a sense of common cause with animals, who equally suffered from the dominance of male values in society, and from an assumption that humans were entitled to exploit animals at will. As an interdisciplinary, groundbreaking work, Women against cruelty is highly relevant to academic research and degree studies in the fields of animal history, feminist theory, women's history, nineteenth-century literature and Victorian society and institutions.