George was a scholar and cleric and shared with his wife a commitment to liberal reforms and a love of Italian culture. Their third son, Charles, was born in In Butler gave birth to her last child, a daughter, Evangeline Mary. The parents lost two of their four children, Arthur and Eva, in young age. Because of the deteriorating health Josephine Butler the couple moved from Oxford to Clifton, near Bristol, in ten years later to Liverpool, where George Butler was appointed headmaster of Liverpool College.
In Liverpool, the Butler continued the social work they had jointly started before in Clifton: To provide shelter in their own home for some of the homeless women in the city, often prostitutes in the terminal stages of a venereal disease. It soon became clear that there were more women in need than they could provide for, so Butler set up a hostel, with funds from local men and women of means; more followed in other cities. Josephine Butler, c.
Josephine Butler was born on 13 April in Northumberland. Her father John Grey was a strong advocate of social reform and a campaigner against the slave trade. His cousin was Earl Grey, British prime minister between and Josephine married George Butler in He was an academic with similar political views to her own. Together they had four children but in , their six year old daughter died. Twenty-three members were appointed to the Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Acts, including the scientist T.
Huxley, one avowed Abolitionist and one anti-Abolitionist. The evidence seemed to suggest that the Acts did lessen venereal disease but encouraged prostitution. Men felt much safer in protected districts, but women felt shame at undergoing the examination, and often became half-drunk before submitting to the ordeal.
After twelve weeks Mrs. Butler testified, bringing letters from working men to the Commission. The Commission at length agreed that there should be regulation, but seducers should be punished; the age of consent was to be set at 12 for this purpose, and this one only , , The Commission recommended a return to the first Contagious Diseases Act; no periodic enforced examination; and the placement of the police directly under the Home Office.
The preamble of the report insisted on a distinction in the treatment of the sexes However Josephine was angered at the fact that the Commission refused to deal with the fact that women could still be reported on by others , She began increasingly to see parallels between prostitution and the slave trade, viewing prostitution as a capitalist enterprise conducted for the benefit of middle- and upper-class males.
Bruce's Bill. This bill caused division among the repealers, for some supported it, but Josephine Butler and others opposed it. The bill contained some obvious reforms, e.
In other words, prostitution was at last minimally regulated. But other clauses in the bill provided for a uniform inspection and hospitalization through the entire country.
If a woman convicted of prostitution was found to be infected, she was to be detained until cured, or for 9 months, or until she convinced a judge that she would not return to prostitution. In Butler's view, this act would extend the Acts to the entire country, and was designed without regard for the health and safety of the prostitute and her future husband and children, but only that of her clients. Most of the parliamentary repealers accepted Mr. Butler wrote letters defending her position , In Josephine Butler published The New Era , the best presentation of her case, less sermonic and Biblical and more factual than many of her speeches and other writings.
This examined the result of state regulation of prostitution in Germany, which according to her argument had never been able to limit either syphilis or prostitution. Interestingly she predicted that Prussian moral hypocrisy and faith in their police would eventually result in an international war. For first time in her writings she discussed whether morality could be legislated, deciding in the negative. Her next political campaign was staged in Knottingley, against Hugh Childers, a very lukewarm supporter of the new Act.
Butler recounted a physical assault on herself and her followers a few days before the election The Repealers encouraged abstention, and in the election, the Liberal majority fell greatly without aid to the Tories, so clearly there were many abstentions as Josephine Butler had advocated. Childers was so shaken that he changed his position--advocating confining the regulations of the new Act to the thirteen areas where they were presently applied. He even stated in Parliament that the Acts treated the sexes unequally, and advocated penalizing men offenders.
In he joined the majority who voted for repeal. Through all this the newspapers gave her little or hostile coverage In George addressed the meting of the Annual Church Congress advocating repeal, but was jeered and abused.
He was increasingly given to understand that he would lose preferment in the Church if his wife continued her activities, but he seemed content with this. He described himself as wanting to be useful, and felt no endeavor more useful than that of a teacher. Froude, the historian and biographer of Carlyle, and they spent part of summers together. The Butlers' was the reversal of the usual Victorian home, since he provided peace and security while she travelled, and he met her at the Liverpool station on her return, and he aided her in his free time.
The Butlers entertained Gladstone at their home, where Mrs. Butler refrained from arguing about the issue of Repeal, though she did argue with him at Downing Street. In Josephine Butler relinguished the headship of the English campaign to Stansfield, the statesman eventually successful in obtaining repeal of the Acts, sacrificing his political career to do so.
In the Liberals suffered a landslide defeat at the polls; the Tories were of course not interested in repeal, and Mrs. Butler was very depressed. However, freed from duties to their party, several Liberals declared for repeal, including then-radical Joseph Chamberlain. Sir Harcourt Johnson presented a repeal bill in , and even Gladstone voted for its second reading.
In Gladstone offered Stansfield a high cabinet post provided he would refrain from speaking on the Acts although he could vote for Repeal, but he refused.
Around this time the case of Mrs. Percy broke. Butler had raised the destitute Jenny Percy until her marriage. A major protest rally was held with George Butler reading out a statement by Jenny Percy describing her arbitrary apprehension, and a bill for the extension of the Acts to major seaports was quietly dropped.
After this the fight was for repeal, not against expansion--a major victory in itself. In the meantime Josephine Butler began her second major campaign, against continental regulation. Continental regulation had existed for centuries, but in a report at the International Medical Congress suggested that an international law of regulation be established, and along with other evils, this prompted the fear that Britain might be eventually induced to join. Josephine Butler wrote all reformers on the continent whose names she could learn, and set off on a winter visit to France, Italy and Switzerland.
She was able to set up deputy organizers in each country, including Yves Guyot in France, later a senior member of the French government, M. Humbert in rural France, and Guiseppe Nathan, a thirty-year old Italian politician who had supported Garibaldi, and who devoted the last six years of his life to this cause.
In Paris she met the director of the Police de Moeurs, M. Lecour , She learned of the demand that policemen fulfill quotas for arrests, and the pressures caused by the fact that they received below-subsistence pay Butler attempted to intervene in a case in which police were besieging the house of a seduced girl to force her to be registered.
She visited Lecour, who was leering and flirtatious, and tried to assure her that he too was religious. Butler always looked young; when she was almost 50 she was rounded up by a patrol to protect girls and young women from procurers at the railway station at Lausanne.
Upon revisiting Paris she went to see the prison of St. Lazare, where conditions so depressed her that she could hardly speak of them Guyot describes these, , She had travelled from the beginning of December until the end of February , and was forced to rest upon return.
Butler also became involved in the campaign against child prostitution. Stead , the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette , to expose what had become known as the white slave traffic.
As a result of the publicity that the Armstrong case generated, Parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.
After the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act in , Josephine spent her time nursing her sick husband. In her last few years of her life, Josephine became a supporter of the National Union of Suffrage Societies. However, now in her seventies, Josephine was too old to take a prominent role in the movement's activities.
The love of justice was a passion with him. Probably I have inherited this passion. When my father spoke to us, his children, of the great wrong of slavery, I have felt his powerful frame tremble and his voice would break. He told us sad stories of the hideous wrong inflicted on negro men and women.
I say women, for I think their lot was particularly horrible, for they were almost invariably forced to minister to the worst passions of their masters, or be persecuted and die. In the pre-educational era for women at least , we had none of the advantages which girls of the present day have. She would assemble us daily for the reading aloud of some solid book, and by a kind of examination following the reading assured herself that we had mastered the subject.
The lady at the school was not a good disciplinarian, and gave us much liberty, which we appreciated. The visit of Anne Clough to the Butlers in led to the formation of the 'North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education for Women', a body representing associations of school-mistresses in several large northern towns.
Josephine Butler was President of this Council from to , and Anne Clough was Secretary for the three first strenuous years of its existence.
The first work of the Council was to organize lectures for women, which had already been begun by Mr.
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