Strong religious convictions enabled the nineteenth-century feminist Josephine Butler to withstand the on-slaught of abuse that she received from those both inside and outside of the woman's movement. Other women's rights activists felt she was far too radical and her efforts would harm their attempts at extending educational and employment opportunities and fighting for legal and political rights for women Her opponents viewed her as a threat to the moral foundations of society itself.

      Butler was born and raised in the household of an upper- middle-class family: her uncle was the leader of the Whig party earlier in the century. Her family's wealth, her strongly religious demeanor, and her connections to the politically powerful provided enough of a shield for Butler to address the most forbidden of Victorian England's subjects: sex.

From Chapter XV: Woman, Church, and State of The History of Woman Suffrage, vol 1, 1848-1861 (1889) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage reprinted 1970 Source Books Press, NY, NY       A civilization which even there has not reached its lowest depths, but which has created in England, as a result of its highest Christian civilization, a class of women under the protection of the State, known as "Queen's women," or "Government women," with direct purpose of more fully protecting man in his departure from the moral law, and which makes woman the hopeless slave of man's lowest nature; a system not confined to England, but already in practice in France, in Italy, in Switzerland, in Germany, and nearly every country in Europe. A system of morality which declares "the necessity" of woman's degradation, and which annually sends its tens of thousands down to a death from which society grants no resurrection.       In a letter to the National Woman's Suffrage Convention, held at St. Louis, May, 1879, upon this condition of Licensed Vice, from Josephine Butler, Hon. Secretary of the Federation and the Ladies' National Association for the Protection of Women; a society which has its branches over Europe, and has for years been actively at work against this last most hideous form of slavery for women, Mrs. Butler says:       England holds a peculiar position in regard to the question. She was the last to adopt this system of slavery, and she adopted it in that through manner which characterizes the actions of the Anglo-Saxon race. In no other country has prostitution been regulated by law. It has been understood by the Latin races, even when morally enervated, that the law could not without risk of losing its majesty and force sanction illegality and violate justice. In England alone the regulations are law.       This legalization of vice, which is the endorsement of the "necessity" of impurity for man and the institution of slavery of woman, is the most open denial which modern times have seen of the principle of the sacredness of the individual being. An English high-class journal dared to demand that women who are unchaste shall henceforth be dealt with "not as human beings, but as foul sewers," or some such "material nuisance" without souls, without rights, and without responsibility. When the leaders of public opinion in a country have arrived at such a point of combined skepticism and despotism as to recommend such a manner of dealing with human beings, there is no crime which that country may not presently legalize, there is no organization of murder, no conspiracy of abominable thins that it may not, and in due time will not – have been found to embrace in its guilty methods. Were it possible to secure the absolute physical health of a whole province or an entire continent by the destruction of one, only one poor and sinful woman, woe to that nation which should dare, by that single act of destruction, to purchase this advantage to the many! It will do it at its peril. God will take account of the deed not in eternity only, but in time, it may be in the next or even in the present generation.       The fact of governments lending their official aid to the demoralization of woman by the registration system, shows an utter debasement of law. This system is directly opposed to the fundamental principle of right, that of holding the accused innocent until proven guilty, which until now has been recognized as a part of modern law. Under the registration or license system, all women are held as morally guilty until they prove themselves innocent. Where this law is in force, all women are under an irresponsible police surveillance, liable to accusation, arrest, examination, imprisonment, and the entrance of their names upon the list of the lewd women of a town. Upon this frightful infraction of justice, we have the sentiments of Sheldon Amos, Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law College of London University. In "The Sciences of Law," he says, in reference to this very wrong:       The loss of liberty to the extent to which it exists, implies a degradation of the State, and, if persisted in, can only lead to its dissolution. No person or class of persons must be under the cringing fear of having imputed to them offences of which they are innocent, and of being taken into custody in consequence of such imputation. They must not be liable to be detained in custody without so much as a prima facie case being made out, such as in the opinion of a responsible judicial officer leaves a presumption of guilt. They must not be liable to be detained for an indefinite time without having the question of their guilt or innocence investigated by the best attainable methods. When the fact comes to be inquired into, the best attainable methods of eliciting the truth must be used. In default of any one of these securities, public liberty must be said to be proportionately at a very low ebb.       Great effort has been made to introduce this system into the United States, and a National Board of Health, created by Congress in 1879, is carefully watched in its action, lest its irresponsible powers lead to its encroachments upon the liberties and personal rights of woman. A resolution adopted March 2, 1881, at a meeting of the New York Committee appointed to thwart the efforts to license vice in this country, shows the need of its watchful care. Resolved: That this committee has learned with much regret and apprehension of the action of the American Public Health Association, at its late annual meeting in New Orleans, in adopting a sensational report commending European governmental regulations of prostitution, and looking to the introduction in this country, with modifications, through the medium of State legislative enactments and municipal ordinances, of a kindred immoral system of State-regulated social vice. (pp. 794-796)

      Butler was neither the first nor the last woman to examine the relationship between sex, sexual behavior, and economics. Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Frances Wright, and Margaret Fuller had all expressed the idea that women were divided into two classes by their sexuality: ladies who in return for their weakness and ignorance of sex were chivalrously protected and other women who were exploited by the richer and more powerful men. Butler iterated earlier their arguments of sexual economics - that women trade sex for money, either through prostitution or marriage, a concept that Adrian Rich would call compulsory heterosexuality.

      Butler's involvement in the sex trade began very simply: she wanted to "rescue fallen women" for Jesus. She would visit prisons and hospitals and take women into her home where she nursed the sick, gave the dying comfortable surroundings, and provided job skills and a job to the able-bodied. As her name became known to underclass women, they began to seek out her help, her understanding of the causes of prostitution and the life of women in the underclass increased, and her involvement in the reform of the sex trade deepened.

      In the second half of the nineteenth century in England, the Contagious Disease Acts created a class of women who were at the sexual mercy of any man in six military districts. According to that law, all prostitutes were required to have a government certificate which showed that they were free of disease, which on the face of its seems to be rather innocuous. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. Any man could denounce any woman as a prostitute for any reason. If she was a never married woman, public health officials would detain the woman and give her a virginity test, making sure that she failed the test and issued her a certificate indicating that she was disease free and therefore entitled to ply the trade of prostitution. Since the woman could be shown to have had sex outside of marriage, she was branded a prostitute and all opportunities for honorable employment were closed to her. Because she could not find employment because her reputation had been destroyed, she was essentially forced into prostitution to survive. Notice that the woman was never arrested and charged with a crime, she was never tried and convicted of anything; any man, a spurned lover, a pimp who needed more girls, or a jealous suitor could accuse the woman of having had sex outside of marriage and that was enough to ruin a woman for life. Also notice that men were not held accountable in any way for the spread of venereal disease, the ostensible justification for requiring the health certificates in the first place. Poor and working-class women could quite literally be snatched off the street and forced into prostitution. Butler's first public crusade was to halt the extension of the Contagious Disease Acts and then to repeal the existing laws.

      Laws similar to the British Contagious Disease Acts were in place on the Continent in France and Germany. Harassed, jostled, jeered, threatened, unable to find accommodations in many cities, smeared with excrement, even mobbed, Butler, "the moral reformer", toured the continent establishing committees in many cities to fight against such local laws. Returning to England, she founded an international organization to fight using pamphlets and the press, in the legislatures and the courts, against such laws. She even entered the fray when public health organizations in several American cities attempted to import the European styles into America, stopping the movement dead in its tracks before it was able to take root here. She fought the rich and powerful men in Parliament itself who didn't want to have their pastimes disturbed: her greatest support came from poor and working-class men who wanted to protect their mothers, their sisters, and especially their wives and daughters from a vicious system. Historically, poor, slave, and peasant women, and women of the artisan class had always been fair game for rich and powerful men. With universal male suffrage, the husbands and fathers of such women were empowered to finally end this prerogative of the rich and powerful.

      As time progressed and her reputation among poor women increased, Butler learned about rich men who could afford to pay to have female children kidnapped because they enjoyed raping virgins, about parlors of sado-masochism, and about international trading in white women for the sex slave trade. She fought all of these movements. Although she fought organized prostitution, she continued to work for improvement in the conditions of prostitutes themselves, for she understood that many of them were forced into prostitution by poverty.

      Josephine Butler had an enormous influence in western Europe. If you are a western woman descended from members of the poor or working-class, you can thank Butler that your great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, or even you yourself were not snatched up to become part of the sex trade. I think that warrants Butler a high place on any list of the most influential women of the second millennium. Unfortunately, there are many areas in the world today where the sex trade thrives, and Butler's work remains unfinished. Let us join with our sisters in less developed areas to extend to women around the globe our freedom to go about our business by walking down the street in order to go to work or to the store, to take our children to school, to visit the local library, to take evening classes at a local college, to visit our family, friends, and neighbors, to help the less fortunate, or to attend religious services without fear of being beaten, raped, or abducted into prostitution. And let us do what we can to alleviate the poverty around the globe which forces so many women into prostitution and to campaign against violence and misogyny against women in its many forms.

References

      Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, Pandora, 1982 pp. 463-481

      Glen Petrie, A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler, Viking Press: New York, 1971

On-line works by Butler

The Education and Employment of Women (HTML at Indiana)

Mrs. Butler's Appeal to the Women of America (HTML at Indiana)

Native Races and the War (HTML at Indiana)

The New Godiva: A Dialogue; and A Letter to the International Convention of Women at Washington (HTML at Indiana)

Social Purity (HTML at Indiana)

Some Thoughts on the Present Aspect of the Crusade Against the State Regulation of Vice HTML at Indiana)

Truth Before Everything (HTML at Indiana)

      As an added bonus, here are the notes I used when I wrote a series of articles on

"You are the devil's gateway...you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert- that is, death- even the Son of God had to die."

      Tertullian wrote many defenses of orthodox Christianity, of which 31 survive. A "zealous champion" of Christianity, "the first important Christian ecclesiastical writer in Latin," Tertullian through his writings influenced many orthodox theologians in his own time and in later ages. His writings are studied today beside the writings of the Fathers of the Church. Had he not embraced the Monanist heresy late in life, like them, he would be considered a Father of the Church.

"Tertullian," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.

"By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert."

      Blackstone's interpretation of English law was only one of many contemporary ways of analyzing English law. In America and Britain, however, Blackstone's Commentaries were used for more than a century as the foundation for all legal education. The Commentaries provided an introduction to English law in a clear style that was easily understandable to the public. The authority of his sources, the accuracy of his statements, and the relevancy of his point of view have subsequently been subjected to severe criticism.

"Blackstone, Sir William," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation.

      These are only two examples of the many ways that men's hatred of women, men's misogyny, has expressed itself through the ages as violence against women. The fact that many men have revered the writers of such words only shows how deeply ingrained violence against women is.

      Misogyny manifests itself in many ways in various times and in various cultures. A list of only some of the methods is given below:

Miscellaneous : using words that sting and burn to control women
      bound feet
      fashion such as corsets, high heals
      equating beauty with intelligence, goodness

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