Josephine Butler

In 1869 she became involved in the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, legislation that attempted to control the spread of venereal diseases—particularly in the British Army and Royal Navy—through the forced medical examination of alleged prostitutes, a process she described as surgical or steel rape.

A campaign to combat the trafficking led to the removal from office of the head of the Belgian Police des Mœurs, and the trial and imprisonment of his deputy and 12 brothel owners, who were all involved in the trade.

Butler fought child prostitution with help from the campaigning editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, who purchased a 13-year-old girl from her mother for £5.

Her campaign strategies changed the way feminist and suffragists conducted future struggles, and her work brought into the political milieu groups of people that had never been active before.

[10][b] She became disenchanted with her weekly church attendance, describing the local vicar as "an honest man in the pulpit ... [who] taught us loyally all that he probably himself knew about God, but whose words did not even touch the fringe of my soul's deep discontent".

It was at the height of the Great Famine and the first time she had come into contact with widespread suffering among the poor; she was deeply affected by her experiences[16][17] and later recalled that "As a young girl, I had no conception of the full meaning of the misery I saw around me, yet it printed itself upon my brain and memory.

[19] The couple also both had a strong Christian belief and Josephine Butler later wrote of her husband that they often "prayed together that a holy revolution might come about and that the Kingdom of God might be established on the earth".

[23] Butler's later memories of Oxford were of a closeted and misogynist community lacking in family life; she was often the only female at social gatherings and would listen in anger to what her biographer Judith Walkowitz describes as "the open acceptance of the double standard by the gentlemen of the university".

Butler saw that the male conversationalists considered it natural that a "moral lapse in a woman was spoken of as an immensely worse thing than in a man";[24] she decided not to voice her feelings on the point but "to speak little with men, but much with God".

[37][38] Despite the new surroundings, Butler continued to mourn for Eva but focused her feelings on helping others; she later wrote that she "became possessed with an irresistible urge to go forth and find some pain keener than my own, to meet with people more unhappy than myself. ...

[47] In 1867, with the suffragist Anne Clough, she established the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, which aimed to raise the status of governesses and female teachers to that of a profession;[48] she served as its president until 1873.

[51] In April 1868 Butler and fellow suffragist Elizabeth Wolstenholme set up and became joint secretaries of the Married Women's Property Committee to pressure parliament into changing the law.

[57] Women who were subjected to the examination found their names and reputations affected and, according to the historian Hilary Cashman, "the Acts had the effect of turning them to prostitution by barring respectable ways of life to them".

She focused her attention on working-class family men, the majority of whom were outraged at the description Butler gave of the examination women were forced to undergo; she called the process surgical or steel rape.

[74] After Butler testified on 18 March, a member of the committee, Liberal MP Peter Rylands, stated: "I am not accustomed to religious phraseology, but I cannot give you an idea of the effect produced except by saying that the spirit of God was there".

After it was cleared away, her opponents set bales of straw alight in a storeroom below, which led to smoke rising through the floorboards; two members of the Metropolitan Police—specially drafted into the town for the by-election—looked on but took no action.

[87] The fall of the Liberal government in 1874, and its replacement with Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative administration meant that the repeal campaign stalled;[2] Butler called it a "year of discouragement" when there was "deep depression in the work".

At the start of December 1874 Butler left for Paris and a tour that covered France, Italy and Switzerland, where she met with local pressure groups and civic authorities.

[2] Another biographer, Helen Mathers, believes that "in emphasising that she and Catherine were born to be leaders, of both men and women, ... [Butler] made a profound contribution to feminism".

[101] She visited Brussels where she met the mayor and local councillors and made allegations against the head of the Belgian Police des Mœurs and his deputy as to their involvement in the trade.

Following an investigation in Belgium, the head of the Police des Mœurs was removed from office, and his deputy was put on trial alongside 12 brothel owners; all were imprisoned for their roles in the trade.

[102] The 1880 general election had removed Disraeli's Conservative party from office; they were replaced by Gladstone's second ministry containing a high proportion of MPs who wanted to repeal the Acts.

[107] Along with Booth, Benjamin Scott the City Chamberlain and several supporters from the LNA, she persuaded the campaigning editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, to help their cause.

[p] In July 1885 Stead began the publication of a series of articles entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon", exposing the extent of child prostitution in London.

[120] The passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act led to the formation of purity societies, such as the White Cross Army, whose aims were to force the closure of brothels through prosecution.

[128] Butler, at 62, felt she was too old to travel to India, but two American supporters visited on her behalf and spent four months building a dossier showing that the lock hospitals, compulsory examination and use of underage prostitutes—some as young as 11—were all continuing to operate.

She wrote that because of the work Britain had undertaken in making slavery illegal, "[w]ith all her faults, looked at from God's point of view, England is the best, and the least guilty of the nations".

The building, originally the first Radium Institute in the UK, in the Cultural Quarter in Hope Street, was built in 1867 and demolished in 2013 when the site became a car park[138][139] and subsequently student housing which opened in 2015.

[2][67] Butler's campaigning, says Walkowitz, "not only reshaped gender, class, and sexual subjectivities in late Victorian Britain but also informed national political history and state-building".

She fought with enormous courage and self-sacrifice in a battlefield where she was subjected to the fiercest antagonism ... She never faltered in her task, and it is to her in supreme that the English statute book owes the removal of one of the greatest blots that ever defaced it.