Before going vegan, UW-Madison junior Becky Rauwald was inspired to join the Madison Coalition for Animal Rights after hearing feminist author Carol Adams speak about her book, “The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory.”

Rauwald recalled Adams displaying an assortment of slides of advertisements for meat followed by slides of various advertisements featuring parts of a woman’s body “as if it were a slab of meat.”

Project Assistant Associate Lecturer Betty Barrett, from the Women’s Studies Program, taught a course focused on the link between the oppression of animals and the oppression of women this past summer.

According to Barrett, this particular movement has been administered by eco-feminists-feminists who believe the oppression of women corresponds to the exploitation of the environment.

She also added that feminism has broadened its horizons in the past 20 or 30 years, focusing on all forms of oppression rather than just “the hierarchy between men and women.”

“Historically, meat has been associated with power,” she said. Barrett justified this theory by explaining that whenever there has been a shortage of meat, “men get the meat and women don’t.”

In tune with the recent expansion of feminism emerges another argument in support of veganism: workers’ rights.

“There’s also this concern… about how much [workers who produce meat] get compensated for doing [their jobs] and how their working environment is,” Barrett said.

She said that although her summer class read “some pretty radical things,” the material on the animal-oppression-feminist connection “was the thing that kind of stood out.” She also pointed out that many of her students were adamantly opposed to this theory.