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Josephine Butler
A Passionate Advocate for Prostitutes
She stood at the bottom of the staircase and watched helplessly as her six-year-old daughter tumbled over the second-floor banister and hit the tile floor. The sight of the girl’s limp and lifeless body, her blonde hair matted with blood and draped over her husband’s arm, remained with Josephine Butler forever.
Her daughter’s death left Josephine nearly paralyzed with grief. The home where the accident had occurred became a place of dread and horror, and shortly after their daughter’s death, the Butler family moved from the small town of Cheltenham, England, to the larger, more industrial city of Liverpool. In an attempt to stave off her own pain, Josephine decided to dedicate her life to those who suffered even more than she did. “I became possessed with an irresistible desire to go forth, and find some pain keener than my own—to meet with people more unhappy than myself,” she wrote. “I only knew that my heart ached night and day, and that the only solace would seem to be to find other hearts which ached night and day.”1 Josephine’s search for pain led her to Liverpool’s prostitutes.
A Passion for the Poor
As the daughter of a wealthy landowner, Josephine was accustomed to a comfortable, stimulating life as a child. Her father, John Grey, was the cousin of Earl Grey, the British prime minister who led the Whig administration between 1830 and 1834. John himself was a strong advocate of social reform and played a significant role in the campaign for the 1832 Reform Act and the repeal of the Corn Laws. John Grey was also an unusual Victorian father in that he encouraged the political and social education of his daughters. As a result, Josephine grew up to share her father’s religious and moral principles and his strong dislike of inequality and injustice.
When she was seventeen years old, Josephine suffered through a “dark night of the soul,” a period of several months in which she became obsessed with the question of why suffering existed. She spent hours alone in the pine forest near her home, wrestling with God and seeking an answer to her soul’s conflict. Years later, when she looked back on this period, she concluded the struggle and despair had been sent by God himself, and she saw this period of darkness as essential in preparing her for her life’s work.
In 1852 Josephine married George Butler, an academic and a clergyman. Though quite different in temperament—George was quiet and even-keeled, while Josephine was more dramatic and outspoken—the pair was well suited. They shared a common passion for the poor and both firmly believed that to be a follower of Christ required not only faith but action. George was also an advocate of an egalitarian marriage, and he was never anything but wholly supportive of his wife’s work. “I am content to leave you to walk by yourself in the path you shall choose,” George wrote to Josephine before they were married, “but I know that I do not leave you alone and unsupported for His arm will guide, strengthen and protect you.”2 As biographer Joseph Williamson points out, this was not merely the passing zeal of a keen lover; it was a lasting promise that George kept for their entire marriage.
Josephine and George spent the first five years of their married life in Oxford, where George was a fellow at Exeter College. Oxford was a man’s world—in fact, women were not allowed to dine in Christ Church until 1960—but that didn’t dissuade Josephine from making her mark. She was the first woman to apply—and be accepted—for a library card at the Bodleian, the university library, and she breezed in and out of this male preserve with an armload of books on a regular basis. The Butlers also made a name for themselves when they allowed a “fallen woman”—the mistress of an Oxford professor—to live in their home after she was released from jail.
The Butler family spent eight years in Cheltenham, where George was vice principal of Cheltenham College. But after the untimely death of their daughter, Eva, in 1864, they couldn’t bear to stay in the familiar surroundings any longer. When George was offered the position of principal at Liverpool College in 1866, they fled small-town life for the bustling urban seaport. Josephine was in search of human misery, and she didn’t have to look far to find it in Liverpool.
Presumed Guilty
Liverpool was a huge seaport, with as many as ten thousand sailors in port at any given time. As Lisa Severine Nolland notes, “The combination of under-employed, unemployed and unemployable women with legions of sexually frustrated sailors with money in their pockets resulted in a thriving subculture of prostitution; indeed, the city was reputed as being ‘the most immoral of all immoral places.’”3
The nature of the occupation makes it difficult to establish the exact number of prostitutes working in England during the Victorian period. Estimates range from 50,000 to 368,000. But one thing was clear to British authorities during the 1860s: the spread of venereal diseases, especially among the British Army and Royal Navy, was on the rise. In an effort to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among the armed forces, Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA) in 1864, with amendments in 1866 and 1869. Not only did the acts allow the establishment of official brothels where prostitutes were under medical supervision, it also empowered police officers to arrest any woman suspected to be a prostitute and force her to submit to a medical examination. The CDA effectively abolished habeas corpus in Great Britain. A woman’s guilt was presumed until she could prove herself innocent.
Josephine was quick to recognize the abuses that could, and did, result from the passage of the CDA. Innocent women and young girls were arrested on the whims of corrupt police officers or as the result of false information and were subjected to humiliating and painfully invasive medical procedures. Once branded as a prostitute, however innocent she was, a woman was doomed to a life of prostitution, as no other employment would be open to her. Women who refused to consent to the medical examination were imprisoned. Women found to be infected with venereal diseases were locked in a hospital for three months to be cured.
Incensed by what she considered a blatant violation of women’s civil rights, Josephine knew immediately that leading the charge against the CDA was her God-given calling. At the same time, she feared what such leadership would require. “This is perhaps after all the very work, the very mission, I longed for years ago, and saw coming, afar off, like a bright star,” she wrote in her journal in 1869. “But seen near as it approaches, it is so dreadful, so difficult, so disgusting, that I tremble to look at it.”4
You can imagine her dread. Human sexuality and the details of venereal diseases aren’t dinnertime topics, even today. And Josephine lived in Victorian England, a time when such subject matter would have been taboo. But unsavory conversations were the least of her worries. Both the British government and the medical professionals were interested only in slowing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, regardless of whether their efforts deprived women of their civil liberty or whether their measures were successful. Josephine knew the entire male-dominated British government and the medical establishment would stand against her call for the repeal of the acts. In spite of all this, she stepped forward.
She Lived Love
Josephine accurately predicted her fate. When she spoke publicly against the CDAs, she was slandered and ridiculed, heckled and harassed. On more than one occasion she was pelted with dung and stones as she walked through the city streets. At a hotel where she was scheduled to speak, an angry mob broke through the windows and cornered her, threatening to set the building on fire if she went through with her speech. At another meeting in a hayloft on the outskirts of town, protesters sprinkled cayenne pepper over the floor in the hopes that the pungent spice would cause significant eye, nose, and throat irritation and render Josephine unable to speak. When that failed, they attempted to smoke Josephine and a group of women out of the building by igniting bundles of straw below them. She escaped by jumping through the trapdoor to the ground floor, then went ahead with the meeting at another hotel.
In her speeches Josephine emphasized the gender discrimination inherent in the CDAs. In the manifesto she wrote as head of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, she noted that it is “unjust to punish the sex who are the victims of vice, and leave unpunished the sex who are the main cause of the vice and its dreaded consequences.”5 She also warned that the acts set a dangerous precedent, implying that if a woman’s rights could be violated, so could anyone’s. “This legalization of vice, which is the endorsement of the ‘necessity’ of impurity for man and the institution of slavery of woman, is the most open denial which modern times have seen of the principle of the sacredness of the individual being,” she declared.6
After thousands of miles traveled, thousands of petition signatures gathered, and hundreds of speeches given, Josephine and her repeal supporters finally declared victory. The Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in 1886, seventeen years after Josephine launched her campaign. “Looking back over those years we can now see the wisdom of God in allowing us to wait so long for the victory,” Josephine wrote in retrospect.7 What started as a simple initiative for legislative repeal had grown into a movement with lasting impact, which, she later realized, had been God’s intent all along.
Through it all, Josephine never lost faith in the belief that she was carrying out God’s work. Asked to state her case before the twenty-five members of the Royal Commission, she spoke frankly and with conviction:
Allow me to say . . . that all of us who are seeing the repeal of these Acts are wholly indifferent to the decision of this Commission. . . . We have the word of God in our hands, the Law of God in our consciences. . . . You may be sure that our action in this matter will continue to be exactly the same, even if the Commission pronounces the Acts to be highly moral. We shall never rest until this system is banished from our shores. I am able to speak with calm confidence, yet with humility, because I believe in the power of prayer. There are tens of thousands throughout this country, men and women who are daily praying to God that this legislation may be overthrown. The Acts are doomed for this country and for the colonies.8
Josephine Butler possessed a tremendous faith, a faith born out of tragedy and grief and fueled by her love for God and her desire to heal the brokenhearted. Like Jesus, she was particularly devoted to the outcasts, those shunned and disdained by the rest of society. And like Jesus, she was able to see past their degradation to love them as children of God, created in his image. “Love to the fallen, the outcasts, even the madly sinful,” she once wrote. “Love to every human being however degraded who bears the impress of the Divine image.”9 Josephine Butler’s philosophy of love and compassion wasn’t empty rhetoric. She didn’t merely preach love. She lived it.10