Josephine Butler

English feminist and social reformer

• Born: April 13, 1828
• Birthplace: Milfield Hill, Northumberland, England
• Died: December 30, 1906
• Place of death: Wooler, Northumberland, England

Butler was one of the major British feminist leaders of her time, but she often went against the mainstream of the feminist movement and is best known for her battles against British laws that compromised the rights of women in the name of eradicating prostitution.

Early Life

Born Josephine Elizabeth Grey, Josephine Butler was the seventh of ten children of John and Hannah Annett Grey. Her father’s politics were exceptionally liberal by the standards of his time; he was linked by kinship with members of the government and was involved in the abolition of the English slave trade. Indeed, her father’s hatred of injustice was a powerful influence on his children. Josephine heard abolitionist speakers as a child, and in 1847, when she was nineteen, she was taken to Ireland at the height of the great potato famine and saw starving peasants.

Josephine’s father also believed in universal education and did not regard women as having inferior brains, as was commonly believed in his time. He provided for the education of all who worked for him. From her mother, Josephine gained the fervent religious faith that inspired her later activities. Her mother supervised her children’s education and instilled in them the desire to excel. Josephine mastered music, painting, and horsemanship but was physically fragile and throughout her life suffered from bleeding from the lungs.

While visiting Durham University, where a brother studied, Josephine met classics master George Butler. Butler came from a less aristocratic but intellectually distinguished family. In 1850, he was named public examiner in the schools of Oxford University. Josephine married him on January 8, 1852. Like Josephine’s father, George was unconventional in his hatred of social restrictions. He hesitated before joining the ministry because of his dislike of ministers, and he loathed the ritualism that then dominated much of the Church of England. His ideas about marriage were enlightened: He regarded the institution as the coming together of equals during an age when most wives were expected to be subservient. George supported his wife’s political campaigns throughout his life and suffered professionally because he would not stop her.

Life’s Work

When Josephine Butler settled in Oxford, she encountered a new and somewhat unpleasant way of life. Although she bore her first two sons in that town, she still expected to participate in Oxford intellectual life. However, she found that women’s opinions were not welcomed there. Her later activities were influenced by prejudices against women she heard expressed. She was especially angered by the sexual double standard that regarded sexual activities of women as unforgivable while condoning promiscuity on the part of men, who were thought to need releases for their animal feelings. When she attempted to find help for young women who were in trouble, she was advised to keep quiet. In Oxford, she began the first of her rescue activities, taking into their home a woman who had been seduced and abandoned and had then killed her baby.

In 1857, Josephine’s husband became vice principal of Cheltenham College, a private boys’ school. At Cheltenham, Josephine gave birth to her last son and only daughter, and the most traumatic event in her life took place. On August 20, 1864, her beloved five-year-old daughter Eva fell over a banister at the top of the hall stairs while excitedly awaiting the return of her parents. The child died three hours later. Josephine’s grief was so intense that her health broke down, and she sought the company of others who had suffered. With the assistance of a Baptist minister, she visited the Brownlow Hill Workhouse to share the unpleasant tasks of women who were being punished for various offenses and those who had voluntarily entered for food and shelter. She made friends, finding in the institution not the conventional figures of female vice but women who were the victims of social and economic forces beyond their control.

Afterward, Butler opened the first of a series of refuges for women, promising them love and help during an age when most refuges for indigent women generally offered only discipline and punishment. She also became involved in feminist causes. In 1846, she was one of the founders of the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. She also signed the first petition to Parliament in favor of woman suffrage. She was among the feminists who opposed the Factory Acts of 1874 and 1878 —laws that were supposed to protect women but that have limited their income by restricting their working hours. She was also among those opposing the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, considered by many feminists an attempt to blame the problem of infant mortality solely on women. Instead, feminists focused on the need to find employment for unmarried mothers and to force fathers to take financial responsibility for their children.

Butler left the feminist mainstream to oppose the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, which passed without parliamentary debate. These laws first applied to towns with military installations, but medical and political authorities proposed to extend them to all of Great Britain. Under the laws, any woman could be arrested on mere suspicion of being a prostitute and then be subjected to a physical examination and, if found to be diseased, imprisoned for up to six (later nine) months.

The first organization to oppose the Disease Acts, the National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1869), barred women from membership, so Butler founded a new organization, the Ladies’ National Association. She argued that the government legislation deprived women of basic civil rights available to men. She also argued that the laws placed the rights of women entirely in the hands of police. (The laws were enforced by plainclothes policemen.) Women who were arrested were not allowed to respond to the complaints against them. Butler also protested the brutal way in which the physical examinations were conducted by police and male physicians and argued that it was unjust to force examinations upon women and not upon their sexual partners. The laws, she believed, treated women as commodities and were designed to protect a supply of healthy prostitutes for men who could afford them. Moreover, she argued, the laws could not be shown to reduce venereal disease.

Butler was deeply opposed to any system that allowed police the power of arrest and conviction without proper hearing. Many people, including some feminists, objected to her speaking on such topics in public, and she was threatened by mobs of men intent on her death. Increasingly, she saw parallels between the Contagious Diseases Acts and slavery.

To learn about countries that regulated prostitution, Butler visited the Continent and came to see the commercial marketing of prostitutes as an international problem. She was appalled by the political corruption born of the profits to be made from the regulation and marketing of prostitutes and was horrified by the trade in children as young as three years old.

After the Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in 1883, Butler focused on raising the age of legal consent from age twelve and prohibiting women from being forced or defrauded into prostitution. London police minimized the problem, but Butler and her co-workers had seen evidence of the widespread use of children for the sexual gratification of adult males. Attempts to prosecute individual cases of girls who had been raped and discarded were thwarted when judges deemed the girls too young to give evidence. Butler gained an ally in Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead, who formed a secret commission with her and members of the Salvation Army to prove that children could be purchased for sexual purposes. He revealed his finding in a series of articles beginning with “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” Afterward, Parliament quickly passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, rising the age of consent to sixteen.

After long enduring failing health, George Butler died on March 14, 1890. By then, Josephine was out of touch with the times. She was still pushing for the eradication of the social and economic conditions that drove women into prostitution, but the public debate on prostitution was again focusing on its eradication. By the 1890’s, Butler’s own health was declining; she spent her last years adding to her formidable list of publications. She died on December 30, 1906.

Significance

Among nineteenth century feminists, Butler was almost alone in addressing problems of the impoverished. Most feminist agitation of that era pushed for rights that benefited mostly middle- and upper-class women. She differed from other social reformers of her time in her insistence that prostitutes could be converted, not with punishment, but with affection and the promise of gainful employment outside prostitution. Because she was convinced that she was carrying out God’s will, no criticism stopped her.

Bibliography

Boyd, Nancy. Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World: Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Discusses how the achievements of Butler, Hill, and Nightingale were inspired by their religious faith.

Caine, Barbara. Victorian Feminists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Uses Josephine Butler, Emily Davies, Frances Power Cobbe, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett as examples of Victorian approaches to feminism.

Fisher, Trevor. Prostitution and the Victorians. Stroud, England: Sutton Publishing, 1997. Discusses controversies involving prostitution with extensive quotation from original sources.

Jordan, Jane. Josephine Butler. London: John Murray, 2001. This is the best full-length study to date of Butler’s personal life and beliefs.

Petrie, Glen. A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler. New York: Viking Press, 1971. This biography is less accurate in its biographical facts than Jordan’s biography, but it offers a broad discussion of the Victorian attitudes and sexual beliefs that supported Butler’s beliefs and those of her opponents.

Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895. London: I. B. Tauris, 1989. Discusses Butler’s achievements in context of other legal reforms.