Josephine Butler and the Women No One Defended

In Victorian England, when a respectable woman was expected to say nothing about anything indelicate, there lived a woman who refused to be silent. Her name was Josephine Butler. She was the wife of a clergyman, a mother, a believer of deep and unembarrassed faith. And she chose to spend her good name on the women that polite society had thrown away.

Here is the world she lived in. A set of laws had been passed in England called the Contagious Diseases Acts. On paper they were about public health. In practice they did something monstrous. A woman in a garrison town could be pointed out, seized, and registered by the police as a suspected prostitute. She could be forced to submit to invasive medical examination by the state. If she refused, she could be imprisoned. And the men who bought and used these women, the soldiers, the gentlemen, the respectable husbands? They were touched by nothing. The law reached only for the woman. It shielded the man.

Butler saw it for what it was. Order on the surface. Cruelty underneath. Respectability used as a cloak.

So she did the unthinkable for a woman of her station. She spoke. She stood up in public halls and named, out loud, the sexual injustice that everyone preferred to keep behind closed doors. And the cost came at once. She was mocked in the press. She was called indecent for daring to discuss it. Crowds were turned against her. Stones and worse were thrown. On one occasion a barn where she had taken shelter was set alight. Men were paid to break up her meetings.

And still she went on, town to town, year after year, listening to women whose stories no one else would hear. She did not approach them as a lady doing charity from a height. She sat with them. She took the dying and the despised into her own home. She had buried her own small daughter, who fell to her death before her eyes when Josephine was still young, and that grief had hollowed out a place in her where the grief of other women could be received. She knew what it was to be broken open. She would not look away from the broken.

Her weapons were not stones but petitions, pamphlets, prayer, and plain truth spoken to men of power who wished she would stop. She gathered women into an army of letter-writers and witnesses. She forced the conversation into Parliament itself, where the subject was supposed to be unspeakable. And she made it speakable.

It took the better part of two decades. But in 1886 the Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed. The law that punished the victim and protected the buyer was struck from the books. And Butler did not stop there. Her campaign reached on into the fight against the trafficking of young girls, work that helped raise the age of consent and exposed a trade in children that the comfortable had refused to see.

Pull back, and consider what one woman had done. She had taken the most shameful subject in Victorian England, the subject respectable Christians were sure a respectable Christian woman must never touch, and she had turned it into a matter of righteousness before God. She insisted that holiness could never mean guarding the reputation of powerful men while abandoning powerless women. She believed God hears the cry of the disposable, and she made herself the echo of that cry until the law itself had to answer.

Josephine Butler died in 1906, weary and largely out of the public eye. But the women no one would defend had, at last, been defended. And the wall of silence that men had built around their own sin had been broken by a clergyman's wife who simply would not stop telling the truth.