Josephine Butler
1828-1906
b. Northumberland
Like so many feminists, Butler was raised in a liberal atmosphere and given an unusually good education. In her particular case, this education entailed Bible studies and Blue Books, foreign languages, history, and classics. Her socially conscious education and her religious beliefs prompted a crisis in the 18-year-old Butler. She sought an outlet for her talents and altruism, but found none. This period left her alientated from established religion, but with a firm individual faith.
At 22, Josephine married George Butler, beginning a loving and effective partnership. They moved to that distinctly male preserve, Oxford, where George took the position of examinor, one of the few lines of work open to married men at Oxford. While George included his wife in all of his socializing, research, and conversation, his colleagues often resented her presence as well as her defense of the woman's point of view. When one of the dons cast off his lover, who subsequently murdered her child by him, Josephine hired the girl as a live-in servant, for example. Josephine's outrage at this example of the sexual double standard, and her controversial activism in this instance were precursors of the things to come.
After the devastating death of her 5-year-old daughter, Butler felt the absence of a vocation all the more pressingly. She began visiting workhouses for prostitutes and poor women. Butler's acceptance of the women to whom she spoke and her physical manifestations of sympathy, including hugging and holding women who were neither clean nor healthy, won her their confidence. Butler began to research the lives of prostitutes, debunking prevalent prejudices that prostitutes were sexual predators and revealing the grinding and ineradicable economic pressures behind their trade. She also discovered that many prostitutes, especially ex-servants, were initially victims of rape or seduction.
Butler's experiences led her to oppose the Contagious
Diseases Acts (1864, '66, '69) fiercely. Some male reformers who were,
like Butler, involved in helping "magdalenes" (reformed prostitutes)
protested the 
passage
of each Act, but failed to stop them. Consequently, they felt they needed
an irreproachably respectable woman to head their movement, command the public's
attention, and demonstrate that the CD Acts were a ladies' issue. Thus
they prevailed on Butler.
The CD Acts were passed in 1864, 66, and 69. They were intended to help control the spread of venereal diseases in the armed forces, and so were only applied in a few port towns as test cases.
The Acts required that prostitutes be examined regularly for diseases; if ill, they would be locked in a hospital till declared clean; if they refused, they would be locked in prison for months. Those who agreed to the procedure had to sign a release form, and were assumed by society to be prostitutes. Particularly problematic was the fact that there were no guidelines about who constituted a prostitute - the police could pick up any woman who struck them as potentially being a prostitute and force her to choose between prison and forcible examination. They also acted on tips from informants, meaning that anyone with a grudge and no sense of decency could subject the object of his or her animosity to humiliation and social exile or incarceration.
The laws were also flawed in that they affected only women. As is widely known, the Victorians practiced a sexual double standard whereby the same sins committed by different genders entailed different penalties. For the men, the penalties were usually non-existent, while the opprobrium that ought to have been borne by both parties (according to the beliefs of the time about the importance of sexual purity) were endured solely by the women. The CD Acts reflected this same idea that the burden of blame in a mutually "guilty" relationship could be relocated from one partner and settled on the other - only in this case, the unconscious assumption was that the blame for the disease could be pinned on one gender alone. Obviously, a hygienic reform that only targets half of the participants can't be effective. Moreover, (what really exasperated Butler), it implicitly condones and in fact augments male patronage of prostitutes.
The final disturbing element of the Acts was the manner in which they were enforced. Says one account, "The exams were often brutal. Typically, the woman's legs were clamped open and her ankles tied down. Surgical instruments - sometimes not cleaned from prior inspections - were inserted so inexpertly that some women miscarried. Others passed out from the pain or from embarrassment. Some women with harmless conditions were misdiagnosed and locked in hospitals without recourse. Yet because the acts affected the working class - the women who had to walk and live in poor districts - the backlash against these measures produced few results at first. Those with political influence - middle- and upper-class men - were more interested in protecting 'their boys in service' from unclean women" (McElroy)
Butler's organized resistance to the Acts required incredible dedication and fortitude. She spent long periods of time traveling and lecturing away from her sons and husband (who were uniformly supportive). She faced emphatically and vulgarly expressed resistance wherever she went, and she and her husband received hate mail that graphically impugned Josephine's own chastity. She even faced physical violence and mobs.
The anger came, by her own account, partly from those elements of society that benefited financially from prostitution. However, So vehement and widespread was the backlash that another explanation must be sought. Butler was breaking the taboo on the subjects about which a woman could know, let alone speak. If a member of the "demi-monde" (those who lived outside of respectable society, esp. courtesans) broke this taboo, she could easily be dismissed as morally corrupt. But as Butler was self-evidently a virtuous and religious woman, her rebellion was that much more radical. She was asserting that respectable women could - indeed, morally should - undertake crusades on entirely new and forbidden territory. She also represented an inadvertent gender war in that she advocated women of different classes coming together to resist male (governmental) oppression. Butler's campaign was actually one of the first feminists to cross the class line in her reforms, and one of the first to claim that sex is an overriding condition uniting women in their sympathies and responsibilities, despite all other differences.
Source:
McElroy, Wendy. "The Contagious Diseases Acts." iFeminists.com. 5 March, 02. http://www.ifeminists.com/introduction/editorials/2001/0130.html
Links:
The
Ladies Protest - Josephine Butler, 'The Lovers of the Lost'
(et
al.) 'The
Ladies Protest', The Shield
