Josephine Butler, Christian Feminist.

One of the courses we do specifically as part of our formation for ministry (as distinct from the university theology degree) is a course of lectures on the history of Anglicanism, and they've asked us to do group presentations on an Anglican woman of our choice.  My group picked Josephine Butler, and while the presentation will include a number of different angles, I went for Butler and women's issues.  I'm posting it here, because she's one of my heroes...

•••

Josephine Butler’s probably most famous for her campaigning on prostitution – an act which many of her contemporaries considered shocking.  Her activities among and on behalf of marginalized women only make sense if we look at them in the context both of her faith and her take on the question of women, which is part of her wider views on how Christians ought to behave, and what a Christian society ought to look like.

Butler first became conscious of the problems of women when listening to the colleagues her husband brought home.  She sat, silent and angry, as men criticized Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Ruth, which deals with a young woman who is seduced and abandoned, as indecent. They maintained a blatant double standard.  Women who sinned were evil and lost; men who sinned had just slipped up.  Butler only found her voice later.

There are two strands that can’t really be separated.  Firstly, after her daughter’s death, Butler sought to cope by finding ways to live out her faith among the poor and destitute.  Working in the ‘casual ward’ of the Liverpool poorhouse and in the jails, she attempted to show these rejected, vulnerable, criminalized women that they still had value in God’s eyes, and to teach them to pray.

But secondly, Butler realized that this suffering was the result of wider injustice, and that the problem could only be solved by social change.  She became involved in wider campaigns.  In the 1860s she was signing petitions for votes for women, petitioned Cambridge University for the right for women to take examinations, and became involved in running campaigns for the married women’s property act.  She published 90 pamphlets and books campaigning for women to be allowed to work freely and without restriction.  This was directly connected to her concern for the poor and marginalized.  When she received a letter defending the restrictions on women’s work on the grounds that ‘a women’s place was in the home’, Butler responded by calling such views ‘satanic’, providing detailed statistical evidence for how the restrictions on poorer women in particular led, not to a happy domestic life caring for children, but to struggling on starvation wages.  Should anything go wrong, they were left with little alternative but prostitution, and ‘the destruction of bodies, of consciences, of souls.’  As she sharply pointed out, men were not caught in the same trap.  Better-off women still had their dignity and self-respect destroyed by the necessity of marrying for mercenary reasons. 

Even when, later in her life, she campaigned for the raising of the age of consent for girls, she kept her distance from the ‘purity’ campaigners, not because she disagreed that promiscuity was morally wrong, but because they put all the blame on individuals.  For Butler, helping people to live as Christ called them meant helping them directly, and she recognized “fallen women” as victims of injustice who had very little choice.  Showing Christ’s love meant giving them a choice.  She criticized those who 'were ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures, in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.'  Instead, she argued, 'Economics lie at the very root of practical morality.'

Butler’s radical commitment to social action in the name of Christ, even at the price of public disapproval, comes out most clearly in her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act.  This legislation, initially affecting ports and garrison towns, took no action against men who bought sex, but mandated forcible medical and police inspection of women suspected of prostitution.  There was no right to refuse these very intrusive gynaecological exams; if you did not consent, you were imprisoned.  Butler became one of a coalition of middle-class feminists, radical working men, and non-conformists who spoke out.  The campaign was described at the time as ‘the revolt of the women’; press and public were astonished to see ‘respectable’ women talking about venereal disease.  Butler, recognizing that this law was just another instance of more powerful men blaming and exploiting vulnerable women, bluntly used the term ‘surgical rape’, which treated women as ‘foul sewers’ rather than moral agents.  Butler risked insult and injury – during one by-election, she had to escape from a barn which had been set alight by her opponents, while the police looked on – but stuck to her guns, trusting that God called her, like all Christians, to uphold the oppressed. 

When we were talking about Butler earlier, there was some resistance to calling her a feminist – but I think she only makes sense in the context of first wave feminism (although the term ‘feminism’ only came into use in the 1890s, it had a precursor from the 1860s on in ‘womanism’).  Yes, her life was dominated by a wish to serve the poorest and most marginalized of Christ’s people – but the concrete form that took was an authentic and distinctively Christian feminism, which proceeded from the recognition that the Kingdom of Heaven has no second class citizens, however much the world may degrade and misuse them.