Josephine Butler

Josephine Butler
File:Josephine Butler - portrait.jpg Josephine Butler
Born	Josephine Elizabeth Grey (1828-04-13)13 April 1828 Milfield, Northumberland, England, UK
Died	30 December 1906(1906-12-30) (aged 78) England, UK
Cause of death	Natural death
Nationality	British
Occupation	Social reformer
Years active	1869–1890
Known for	Victorian feminist Contagious Diseases Acts International Abolitionist Federation
Spouse	George Butler (m. 1852 – 1890 [his death])
Children	George Grey Butler (1852-1935) Arthur Stanley Butler (1854-1923) Charles Augustine Vaughan Butler (1857-1929) Evangeline Mary Butler (1859–1864)
Parent(s)	John Grey (1785–1868) Hannah Eliza Annett (1792 – 15 May 1860)

Josephine Elizabeth Butler (née Grey) (13 April 1828 – 30 December 1906) was a Victorian era British feminist Christian and social reformer who was especially concerned with the welfare of prostitutes. Along with other charity efforts, she led the long campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts both in Britain and internationally from 1869 to 1886.

Family life

Josephine Elizabeth Grey was born at Milfield House, Milfield, Northumberland and was the seventh child of John Grey (1785–1868, b. Milfield, Northumberland) and Hannah Eliza Annett (b. 1792, Alnwick, d. 15 May 1860). The couple married in 1815. John Grey, son of George Grey (d. 1793) and Mary Burn, was an agricultural expert, and the cousin of the reformist British Prime Minister Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey and a slavery abolitionist himself. He played a significant role in Catholic emancipation, and also worked for the Reform Act 1832. In 1833 he was appointed manager of the Dilston Estate (Greenwich Hospital), near Corbridge, Northumberland, and the family moved there. He lost most of his savings in the fall of 1857, with the failure of the Newcastle Bank.

Josephine married George Butler (1819–1890 b. Harrow, Middlesex), a scholar and cleric, in 1852. They shared an Evangelical approach to Christianity and a cultural attachment to Italy, as well as a strong commitment to liberal reforms. George Butler encouraged his wife in her public work, and he suffered set-backs in his own career on account of his wife's notoriety. She gave birth to four children: George Grey (b. 1852, Oxford); Arthur Stanley (b. 1854, Oxford); Charles Augustine Vaughan (1857, Clifton, Gloucestershire); Evangeline Mary (Eva)(1859–1864), Cheltenham]. The Butlers had strong radical sympathies, including support for the Union in the American Civil War.

Their only daughter, Eva died in 1863, following a fall from the staircase at their home. This led Josephine to seek solace by ministering to people with greater pain than her own. She began visiting Liverpool's Brownlow Hill workhouse which led to her first involvement with prostitutes. She set up a House of Rest and an Industrial Home for them.

Feminism

Bust of Josephine Butler in 1865, aged 36, by Alexander Munro

From her twenties on, Butler was very active in feminist movements. This was particularly spurred by the accidental death of her five-year-old daughter Eva in 1864 when the Butlers were living in Cheltenham, where George served as vice principal at Cheltenham College. In 1866 George Butler was appointed headmaster of Liverpool College, and the family moved to Liverpool. Josephine now became involved in the campaign for higher education for women, and in 1867 together with Anne Jemima Clough, later principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, she was instrumental in establishing the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. However, she had also been very closely involved with the welfare of prostitutes; as a passionate Christian, she abhorred the sin, but she also regarded the women as being exploited victims of male oppression, and she attacked the double standard of sexual morality. So when a national campaign was begun in 1869 to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, she was an obvious woman to lead it.

Contagious Diseases Act

Josephine Elizabeth Butler in old age, by George Frederic Watts, 1894

The Contagious Diseases Acts had been introduced during the 1860s (1864, 1866, 1869) as a form of state regulation of prostitution, to control the spread of venereal diseases, especially in the British Army and Royal Navy. This gave magistrates the power to order a genital examination of prostitutes for symptoms of VD, and detain infected women in a lock hospital for three months to be cured. Refusal to consent to the examination led to imprisonment. An accusation of prostitution by a police officer was sufficient to order an examination; women so accused often lost their livelihoods, and notoriously, one woman committed suicide.

Butler's description of this at a public meeting – she had been known to refer to the procedure as "surgical rape" – caused Hugh Price Hughes, Superintendent of the West London Mission, who was thanking her formally on the platform, to leave the stage in tears — something most unusual in those days and commented upon widely at the time.

The various Acts only applied to certain specified areas such as ports and garrison towns – but in 1869 the "Association for the Extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts" was formed to campaign to extend their operation over the whole of the United Kingdom. This led to vehement opposition from Christians, feminists and supporters of civil liberty and to the setting up of two organisations: the National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, led by doctors, and the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, led by Josephine Butler. Josephine threw all her energies into the campaign despite vilification and occasional physical assault, and the Acts were finally repealed in 1886.

In 1885 she was drawn into another related campaign led by the campaigning editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead. He had published a series of articles entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon exposing the extent of child prostitution in London. As a result of this campaign, the age of consent in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was raised from 13 to 16 that same year.

Josephine was also very active in spreading the campaign internationally, and travelled to the French Third Republic and Switzerland where she met with hostility from the authorities, and strong support from feminist groups. As a result of her efforts, international organisations including the International Abolitionist Federation that she was a founder of, were set up to campaign against state regulation of prostitution and the traffic in women and children. Also, in 1897 in British Raj India, new Contagious Diseases Acts were imposed by the British government, and she led a new campaign against this.

Meanwhile George had retired from Liverpool College and been made a Canon of Winchester Cathedral, and he died 14 March 1890. Josephine continued campaigning until the early 1900s, and died in 1906.

Legacy

Josephine Butler was not only a vehement feminist but a passionate Christian; she once said "God and one woman make a majority". This probably explains why her importance in the history of feminism has only gradually come to be acknowledged. She is now considered to have invented many of the strategies that would later be used by the suffragettes and it has even been argued that her alliance with the "new journalism" of W.T. Stead initiated the methods of sociological enquiry. In the Church of England she is celebrated with a Lesser Festival on 30 May and 30 December. She is also represented in windows in Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral, and St Olave's Church in the City of London.

The Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics, holds a number of collections related to Josephine Butler. These include the Records of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (3AMS)renamed the Josephine Butler Society in honour of its founder; Over 2,500 letters in the Josephine Butler Letter Collection (3JBL); and the Josephine Butler Society Library consisting of books and pamphlets collected by the Society.

In 2005, the University of Durham honoured her by naming Josephine Butler College for her. This reflects the fact that she was married to a Durham University lecturer, and was a local of the North-East.

Josephine Butler House after Maghull Group removed the cladding.

Her connections to the UK city of Liverpool were also once memorialised. One of the "Faculty of Business and Law" buildings of Liverpool John Moores University was named "Josephine Butler House". The building, at the centre of the Cultural Quarter, Hope Street, Liverpool, and which dated back to 1867, was controversially due to be demolished (as at early 2009) and replaced with a six-storey block of flats. That plan was then changed and the City of Liverpool has (April 2009) given developers permission to raze Josephine Butler House (previously the first Radium Institute in the UK) for the site to become a car park.

Josephine Butler's house in Cheltenham, The Priory in London Road, was demolished in the 1970s. However, there remains a blue plaque on the apartment building which now occupies the site.

Selected writings

• The Education and Employment of Women (1868)
• Memoir of John Grey of Dilston (1869)
• An Appeal to the People of England on the Recognition and Superintendence of Prostitution by Governments, by an English Mother (1870)
• The Constitution Violated (Edmondson and Douglas. 1871)
• Une Voix dans le Désert (1875)
• Catharine of Siena. A Biography (1878)
• Recollections of George Butler (1892)
• Personal reminiscences of a Great Crusade (Horace, Marshall and Son, 1896)
• Josephine Butler, an autobiographical memoir (edited by George and Lucy Johnson, London: J.W. Arrowsmith Ltd., 1913)

See also

• Millicent Fawcett
• History of feminism
• Emma Pieczynska-Reichenbach
• Anne Jemima Clough
• James Stuart MP
• James Stansfeld MP
• Contagious Diseases Acts

Archives

The archives of Josephine Butler are held at The Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics, ref 3JBL There are also important collections at the University of Liverpool, [1] and the Northumberland Archives, Woodhorn, Ashington, Northumberland. [2]

Further reading

• Boyd, Nancy. Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World: Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale (Oxford University Press, 1982)
• McHugh, Paul. Prostitution and Victorian social reform (Routledge, 2013)
• Mathers, Helen. Patron Saint of Prostitutes: Josephine Butler and the Victorian Scandal (The History Press, 2014)
• Neal, Diana, eds Sex, Gender, and Religion: Josephine Butler Revisited (Peter Lang, 2006)
• Petrie, Glen. A singular iniquity: the campaigns of Josephine Butler (Macmillan, 1971)
• Strachey, Ray. The Cause: A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain (1928) pp 187-222
• Walkowitz, Judith (2004; online edn, May 2006). "‘Butler , Josephine Elizabeth (1828–1906)’". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press).

Primary sources

• Butler, Josephine Elizabeth Grey. Personal reminiscences of a great crusade (H. Marshall, 1896)

External links

• Josephine Butler Memorial Trust
• Works at the Victorian Women Writers Project
• Works by Josephine E. Butler at Project Gutenberg
• A paper on the life of Josephine Butler
• The Josephine Butler Society Library
• Josephine Elizabeth Butler (née Grey) portrait by George Frederic Watts, oil on canvas 1894.
• Josephine Butler Collection. Archive held at University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives
• Correspondence of Josephine Butler Archive held at Leeds University Library