‘Chickens’ Lib’, and the protest against battery cage eggs in Britain, 1971-1988.

Описание: On the evening of Saturday 11 October 1975, viewers of the BBC’s Open Door were confronted with distressing images of a neglected, featherless battery hen. Chickens’ Lib, the women-led activist group behind the broadcast, used this television appearance to launch their sustained campaign against battery-cage egg production. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the group sought to expose the realities of industrial farming to public view, challenging its normalisation within Britain’s food system.

This paper examines Chickens’ Lib’s opposition to battery-cage egg production, situating their work within the broader context of sociocultural change in postwar Britain. While the impact of Ruth Harrison’s ‘Animal Machines’ (1964) has received scholarly attention, the welfarist discourse and grassroots protest that accompanied the continued rise of factory farming has not. Drawing on newly available internal documents from Chickens’ Lib and contemporary media coverage, the paper argues that the group brought the hidden costs of egg production into public view at a time when intensively produced food had become the norm for many British consumers. Through protests featuring live battery hens and striking media campaigns, they confronted the disconnect between consumers and the realities of industrial agriculture. It contends that conceptions of domesticity, modernity, and health were central to the moral framing of Chickens’ Lib’s campaigns and public food discourse. In doing so, the paper contributes to scholarship in food and environmental history by demonstrating how industrial eggs became a flashpoint in broader debates about post-war progress, sustainability, and the ethics of eating.