Josephine Elizabeth Butler was born in Milfield, England, and grew up in Dilston. Her father was a social reformer and advocator against the slave trade, and all their seven children received equal education. Having been homeschooled most of her childhood, Butler learned politics and social issues from her parents. At 19, at the height of the Great Famine, she visited her brother in Ireland, where her awareness of social injustice had deepened.
In 1850, at the age of 21, she began a relationship with George Butler, an academic and clergyman, who shared her opinions and commitment to liberal reforms. Two years later, they got married. The newlyweds settled in Oxford, where Butler encountered misogyny and was often the only woman at social gatherings. In 1853, the Butlers were part of a discussion about the novel Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell, when the men criticized the “immoral behavior” of the heroine that was seduced and then abandoned by a wealthy man. Butler not only voiced her opinions but decided to take action, and she and her husband began to help women in similar conditions, especially prostitutes, inviting some of them to live in their home.
In 1856, aged 28 and a mother of two, Butler began to have health issues caused by the damp atmosphere in Oxford, and the family moved to Clifton. There, the couple continued with their social activism, helping women in difficult situations. In 1864, her fourth child and only daughter died after falling 40 feet of a banister. Butler fell into a years-long depression, and her health declined. Two years later, the family relocated to Liverpool, where her husband received a teaching position. Still grief-stricken, she committed herself to charity work. She regularly went to sit, talk, and learn the bible with women who lived in workhouses, a living, and a working place for people who were unable to support themselves. She housed many women in her home, many of them were prostitutes who suffered venereal disease. When she realized she couldn’t provide shelter to all of them, Butler established two hostels that provided a place to live and appropriate work, such as sewing and envelopes manufacturing.
Butler was also a loud advocate for women’s rights to vote and education. In 1867, 39 years old Butler, together with Anne Clough, founded the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women and served as president for its first six years. Her first pamphlet, The Education and Employment of Women, argued that women deserved equal access to higher education and jobs as much as men. To further the effort, she initiated a petition for the senate of the University of Cambridge to allow women to take exams, which led to the establishment of the Cambridge Higher Examination for women the following year. And this has led to the foundation of the Newnham Women’s College in 1871.
In 1869, Butler began a two-decade campaign to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts. Introduced five years earlier as a means to reduce venereal disease, the act authorized the police to arrest and physically examine women who were suspected of prostitution, a conduct Butler referred to as surgical rape. She founded the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA), wrote dozens of letters, pamphlets and petitions, and traveled 3,700 miles across the UK to give speeches on the subject. She mainly focused on working-class family men, who were shocked that a woman had spoken publicly about sexual matters. She faced many oppositions, often life-threatening, including smashing the windows of her hotel room and arson attempts. But this did not make her stop, and she continued her campaign until the act got repealed in 1886.
Butler took her social activism overseas, and throughout the 1870s-1880s, she traveled to France, Switzerland, and Belgium to speak against licensed brothels and underage prostitution. Her acts led to the establishment of many organizations and committees devoted to ending child trafficking, including the International Abolitionist Federation for the Abolition of Government Regulation of Prostitution. She became involved with the campaign of journalist William Thomas Stead against child prostitution in London in 1885, which led to the raising of the consent age from 13 to 16 years of age.
She moved to London after her husband died in 1890 and lived with her son and his wife before returning to Northumberland, where she grew up. Butler continued to write pamphlets and books, and in 1896, at the age of 68, she published her most known work – Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade. She also initiated more campaigns to promote various causes, including women’s suffrage, Irish Home Rule, eliminating police corruption, and regulating prostitution in India. She died at the age of 78.
This post is also available in:
Español
This post is also available in:
Español
