Josephine Butler

Josephine Butler by George Richmond, 1851

Josephine Elizabeth Butler (nee Grey; 13 April 1828 – 30 December 1906) was an English feminist and social reformer in the Victorian era. She campaigned for women's suffrage, the right of women to better education, the end of coverture in British law, the abolition of child prostitution, and an end to human trafficking of young women and children into European prostitution.

Quotes

• We read of strong men bowed down with woe, weeping as women weep, turning homewards in the hear-sickness of unavailing search, or with a certainty worse than suspense.
  • (1870)

• Hearing, one day, that a poor young girl of her acquaintance had been enticed to a fashionable house of ill-fame, she ran to the place, entered the house, and claimed the girl. She found there several gentlemen of the Court, whom she rebuked with a severity, the justice of which they confessed by sudden and precipitate flight; she then took the young girl by the hand and led her from the abode of shame.
  • (1874)

• It is a fact, that numbers even of moral and religious people have permitted themselves to accept and condone in man what is fiercely condemned in woman.
  • (1886)

About Josephine Butler

• She won enormous support over the years from individual politicians, radicals and medical people, but also became the target of violent hatred. There were several lucrative brothels in Liverpool and those who profited did not take kindly to Butler's interference in their trade. She was once pelted with cow dung by pimps at a rally she was addressing. Another time, a group of men smashed the windows of a hotel where she was staying, trying to get to her and threatening to set it on fire.
• In 1880 Butler turned her attention to child prostitution, and was instrumental in the campaign to raise the age of consent from 12 to 16 to protect girls from sexual abuse.
  • Julie Bindel "A heroine for our age", The Guardian (21 September 2006)
  • On Butler's campaigns against prostitution, then legal in the UK.