Hendrik Pierson (10 July 1834 – 7 August 1923) was a Dutch Lutheran minister and member of the Réveil religious revival movement.

[1] Prostitution was no longer listed as a criminal offense in the 1811 penal code of the Netherlands, and was allowed to take place in semi-regulated brothels.

[5] Ottho Gerhard Heldring (1804–1876) was the first social activist in the Netherlands to advocate providing care to prostitutes rather than punishing or repressing them.

Heldring was supported by the Amsterdam Réveil circle, which established the Association for the Encouragement of Penitent Fallen Women in 1846.

The women and girls at the asylum stayed in an austere environment, were given basic education, read the Bible and sang.

"[8] Heldring had established his asylum to save women, but also testified about the evils of prostitution and tried to stir up public opinion against it.

Pierson's future son-in-law, Willem van den Bergh, had done research at Steenbeek for a dissertation on prostitution and had been invited to the congress by Aimé Hubert.

Pierson was greatly impressed by Butler's speech where she discussed the God-given right of a woman to have control over her body.

[1] In 1877 Pierson published a translation of Butler's Une Voix dans le Désert (A Voice in the Desert), an account of a tour of Europe she had made a few years earlier to visit sympathizers of the abolitionist cause.

He impressed his audience with his opposition to legislation that treated prostitutes as "pariahs", and showed a strong belief in one moral standard for both rich and poor, men and women.

[14] Pierson carefully studied the scientific literature on prostitution and official, legal and medical arguments for or against regulations.

Against the law because the woman lost her liberty, against hygiene because it fostered a false sense of security and against morality because it encouraged adultery.

He spoke against the double standard in which the man was innocent but the woman guilty, and said that there was only one moral law for both men and women.

[1] In his pamphlet Legalized Vice and his articles in Testify and Save he wrote that regulated prostitution was adultery made legitimate by the state.