Mrs Josephine Butler

Other sources: https://www.parliament.uk/1866
http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/collections/collection-highlights/prostitution-and-trafficking
https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/QRnZ4fYt
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (2006); Helen Mathers, Patron Saint of Prostitutes: Josephine Butler and a Victorian Scandal (2014)

Database linked sources: https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3212/to-what-extent-did-women-have-different-views-aims-and

Family information: She married George Butler in 1852.

Additional Information: Josephine signed the 1866 suffrage petition, having recently moved to Liverpool with her husband and children. She spoke and wrote in favour of women's suffrage throughout her career as a social and political reformer (see Other Activities). Her reasoning for women's suffrage was justified in terms of bringing women's 'nuturing' instincts to political life to improve social conditions and welfare. This traditional gendering of women's roles and contributions to society irritated some campaigners like Emily Davies, who argued that women should be equal to men in all matters.

Other Suffrage Activities: Josephine was a tireless campaigner for poor women and children's welfare. She witnessed the accidental death of her small daughter in 1864, turning the grief and pain she felt towards helping others. In Liverpool, she regularly visited workhouses and opened up the family home to care for prostitutes dying from venereal disease. While she was active in many other feminist and social reform causes, including educational reform, it was prostitution and leading the Campaign to Repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) for which she is most famed. The CDA criminalised women prostitutes and blamed them for venereal disease among men. Any woman suspected of prostitution could be seized, forced to undergo an internal medical exam and 'locked up' for six to nine months until 'clean', often with no one to represent or help them. The men who trafficked women and those who paid for sex with them (and with children) were not subject to the same treatment. Josephine was infuriated by this unfair situation, which privileged men, and set about changing it. This was at great personal risk, as it was unseemly for a woman of her class to be involved in 'sex' matters, leading MPs in the House of Commons to describe her as ?a woman who calls herself a lady? and to comment ?I look upon these women who have taken up this matter as worse than the prostitutes?. Despite the odds against her, and with women not even having the vote, Josephine successfully repealed the CDA in 1886, although it had taken her 16 years of relentless campaigning. She was described after her death by suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett as 'the most distinguished Englishwoman of the nineteenth century'.