“What worthy offering can I make to one I love so well
My heart seems nigh to break when on her love I dwell
When I think of how she found me so wretched and so low
So torn with pain and sickness, so plunged in guilt and woe
How sweet she said she loved me, even me, the wicked one
And answered my despairing words with joyous hopeful tones.”22
But in fact Josephine was far from feeling joyous. She was exhausted both mentally and physically. As well as her work among prostitutes she had also been drawn into the educational reform movement by Anne Jemima Clough and had accepted the position of President of the North of England Council for the Promotion of Higher Education for Girls in 1867. She wrote an introduction for “Women’s Work and Women’s Culture” in which she drew from her direct experience to argue, as Emily Davies had done, that without wider employment opportunities for women, and training to equip them to take these opportunities, there could be no hope of a different and better future for the great mass of the female population.23 On top of her regular work looking after her Magdalenes this administrative and writing work took its toll. She was driving herself hard and already George was helping domestically in a way few Victorian husbands were called upon to do. When she was once away from home in 1867 he wrote, “The boys did justice to their provisions and had a good play in my lecture room afterwards. They seemed very happy.”24 He sent her “a triple bouquet of love” from her sons as well as from him.
But the strain was obvious as Josephine tried to balance her dual role. In February 1868 she wrote she had consulted nine doctors about her heart and none of them could help her. In May she was so ill that she wrote, “I am nearly blind with the pain behind my eyes.”25 She had terrible dreams about her reclaimed girls and in the night “I used to cry out for some way of escape for starving women and saw thousands of them being swept up with a broom and hidden like ashes under a huge grate by political economists and I kept saying O take care they are tenderer than you.”26 Dr Moore visited her four or five times a day throughout that period. She went away for a rest but while she was absent all the servants fell ill with diphtheria and George had to farm the boys out which made her feel guilty, and so back she came.
By the following year she was even worse. To her mother-in-law she wrote, “I try to hide from George as much as I possibly can what I suffer. I sleep alone now and his dressing room is a long way off so he cannot hear me cough at night and I am always down at half past seven every morning. I sleep very little . . . The other day he saw me very weak from loss of blood and not able to hold myself up . . . Life is short, and I dread separation prematurely . . .”27 And yet at the same time she told old Mrs Butler that even though her breathing was so bad she was “the merriest person in the house” and “wonderfully tough”. She worried more about her mental state than about her physical condition. She had, she wrote, been making “the most extraordinary mistakes” all the summer – misdirecting letters, forgetting names, becoming in general confused and erratic. The reason for this was the appalling struggle she was having with herself ever since she had heard of the passage of the second Contagious Diseases Act in 1866. “For three months I was very unhappy,” she wrote later “. . . the toils and conflicts of the years that followed were light in comparison with that first plunge . . .”28
Josephine Butler was by no means the first to feel unease or to express alarm. She was not even the first woman. In 1862, when a committee was appointed to look into the state of disease in the Army and Navy and to report on the working of the Regulation of Prostitution abroad, Harriet Martineau had written four leading articles on the subject in the Daily News. When the committee reported in favour of regulation and the 1864 Act was passed, followed by the 1866 Act which widened its scope, she protested strongly. So did two Nottingham doctors and Mr Daniel Cooper, who was in charge of a large institution devoted to the rescue of young girls. He had realized what was going on and had managed to get a copy of the Acts. What he read so alarmed him that he called a conference in Bristol for all other Reformatory Associations to attend. They worked out a protest which was then sent to every single MP, with no result whatever. What they needed, they decided, was a wife and mother who would come forward to lead a repeal movement and mobilize outraged female opposition. The Third Act of 1869 made this need even more imperative because it signified that the government meant to add to the places where the Acts operated until the entire country was covered. Before she was ever asked Josephine Butler had a terrible sense of destiny. She had read the Hansard reports on the passage of the Acts, she had read the report of the Bristol conference, she knew her work for prostitutes was by then common knowledge among reformers and she waited for the inevitable.
But what finally made Josephine take the job on was anger. Anger, not pity or duty or moral fervour. She wrote in September 1869, “Nothing so wears me out body and soul as anger, fruitless anger; and this thing filled me with such anger, and even hatred, that I fear to face it. The thought of this atrocity kills charity and hinders my prayers.”29 The way in which these revolting Acts had been passed particularly disgusted her. “These Acts were passed in a Parliament of men,” she wrote, “no woman knowing anything about them. At the very base of the Acts lies the false and poisonous idea that women (ie ladies) have ‘nothing to do’ with the question and ought not to hear of it much less meddle with it. Women have unfortunately accepted this dictum for generations back . . .”30 But she had no illusions about her fate if she stepped forward to show her sex how it should act. It was not just courageous to contemplate leading a Ladies’ Association against the CD Acts but almost insane. Not only her own reputation would be vilified but so would her husband’s. His career would be ruined. Her three sons, aged seventeen, fifteen and twelve would be exposed to merciless abuse if their mother spoke out on the subject of prostitution. Her entire family, who were not as radical as she was (except for Hatty, and her parents who were by then both dead) would suffer by their connection. Could she do it to them all? Had she the right to do it? At this juncture George’s advice and encouragement were crucial. He not only did not object he actively urged her on, fully aware of what it would mean. So, at the end of 1869, Josephine Butler, aged forty-one, accepted the urgent invitation of Daniel Cooper and friends to lead a Ladies’ Association against the CD Acts. She knew, as did her family and friends that as one observer put it she was stepping “straight into the jaws of hell.”
But the minute the deed was done Josephine felt a great surge of energy. On January 1st, 1870 her newly formed Ladies’ Association issued an eight point protest against the CD Acts, which was published in the Daily News, signed by 2,000 women including Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau. This protest attacked the Acts on every possible count – that they had been passed furtively; that the offence women were accused of was not defined; that they did not punish men who were partners in the professed “crime”; that it made vice easier for young men (who believed themselves safe); that the object, to control venereal disease, could not be attained (the history of such regulation on the continent was cited); that the real evil, which was moral, was not touched. It was a splendid, hard-hitting, cool, intelligent, rational indictment. It had no effect whatsoever. The government greeted it with total silence. Josephine’s letters to every MP and other notables received few replies. Her personal appeals did no better. Even the press, initially intrigued by the prospect of salacious copy, soon lost interest. If anything, this fuelled Josephine’s anger. She decided that her tactics were much too genteel and predictable – something else was needed. She must go to the people affected most by the Acts, to the working people whose wives and daughters were at risk. The prospect of making speeches in public filled her with terror and the thought of travelling around doing so made her feel faint but she saw no other way. Leaving George at home in charge of the boys, and telling her mother-in-law only that she was going off on “a sort of
preaching tour of a delicate nature” she went off to Crewe, Leeds, Newcastle, Sunderland and Darlington where she addressed large groups of working-class people. It was the beginning of three years “on the road” throughout England. In the first year alone Josephine attended ninety-nine meetings and travelled 3,700 miles.
At first, Josephine was hopeful that her meetings and the collection of petitions would be effective enough. She was not a good speaker but she was surprised herself at how well she was received wherever she went. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later in Josephine’s career thought her mode of address “like a methodist minister’s” and was unimpressed by her low voice but she admitted that she had a certain power growing out of her obvious “deeply religious enthusiasm.”31 This communicated itself to her listeners and made them so carefully attentive that Josephine had no need, as she had feared, to “speak down” to her audience. But when, in spite of the spate of petitions, still no action was taken by a complacent Liberal government it was obvious something more drastic must be tried. Interference in by-election campaigns was the next step and it was one which pushed Josephine Butler into a glaring and much more dangerous limelight.
Until the Newark by-election (in May 1870) she had suffered discomfort and some distress. She had slept in cold trains on her many trips and experienced rowdyism (though not much) at first hand. But once she began interfering in by-elections the full weight of vicious attacks crashed down upon her. She was no longer speaking to respectful, respectable working people sitting quietly, by arrangement, in a hall to hear her speak on an issue to which they were already sympathetic. Instead, she was standing outside on street corners, whenever a hall was refused her, facing gangs of louts hired to silence her by any means they chose. The fact that she was a well-dressed middle-class lady simply made her better game. Now she had to speak against constant barracking, against vulgar abuse shouted out to coarse laughter, against dirt of every kind flung at her. Mobs filled the street outside every hotel in which she attempted to stay. Stones were thrown through windows and she had to have a bodyguard to get her to and from meetings. And back home George began to receive obscene drawings of his wife through the post.
But at last there was a glimpse of success. The government were furious when their candidate, Henry Storks, a great supporter of the CD Acts, was defeated. They began to sit up and take notice. A Royal Commission was hurriedly appointed to look into the working of the Acts in the hope that it would keep the ladies happy. It did not. Josephine Butler was against commissions, committees, reports or any other measures less than total, absolute, instant repeal. She herself was called to give evidence and made a poor showing because she could not control her fury that a body of men who did not know what she knew could be appointed to sit in judgement. She hated the impression she got, which was perfectly correct, that these men thought she was making a fuss about nothing. Their questions she interpreted as impertinences and she resented bitterly the way one of her mistakes was jumped upon. She had wrongly accused the Secretary of State for War, Sir Edward Cardwell, of malpractice in a certain case concerning a Mrs Heritage and the details of this were dragged out apparently to illustrate how unreliable she was. Though she knew that she had indeed been wrong Josephine also knew this one instance was irrelevant compared to the many, many proven cases of innocent women being seized and forcibly examined. It was anger at the sneer implicit in the line of questioning which drove her to burst out that if anyone doubted her she would expose the doings of half the upper-class gentlemen in the country to prove what prostitution was really about. The final report was as useless as she had known it would be and satisfied nobody, containing as it did the statement “there is no comparison to be drawn between prostitutes and men who consort with them. With one sex the offence is committed as a matter of gain, with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse.” The Home Secretary, Henry Bruce, began to prepare a new Bill on the basis of the report but meanwhile Josephine herself was preparing an answer.
She published two pamphlets in the next two years. The first was The Constitution Violated (1871). Its 170 pages argued from a historical standpoint that although the moral and health aspects of the Acts had been endlessly stressed nobody had yet pointed out that for the entire female population they amounted to a virtual suspension of Habeas Corpus, that cornerstone of freedom. Security from arbitrary imprisonment and spoliation was the foundation of Habeas Corpus and, by allowing women merely suspected of being prostitutes to be arrested, to be forcibly examined and to be imprisoned if they resisted, this security was breached. It amounted to trial without jury. Nor was it any excuse to say the offence came under the heading of minor cases for which trial by jury was not needed. A woman’s honour was not a minor affair to be equated with petty thieving. “These Acts,” wrote Josephine Butler, “virtually introduce a species of villeinage or slavery. I use the word not sentimentally but in the strictest legal sense.” If the Acts were allowed to stand a momentous decision had been made against the freedom of the individual. It was a straight choice: “Shall we have liberty in lust or shall we have political freedom? We cannot retain both.” But the most interesting aspect of The Constitution Violated was the attack Mrs Butler made on the concept of prostitution.
Parliament, she said, had acted as if there was no doubt – “the upper classes talk as if there was the same difference as between a negro and a white man.” This was absurd. There was the widest possible variety of opinion as to who was a prostitute. The CD Acts could only have been respected if either they had defined a prostitute as any woman found associating with a man to whom she could not prove she was married or as any women who voluntarily assumed the name. What the Acts did was confuse the distinction between vice and virtue. Under them, there was now state-regulated and unregulated vice. The report on the operation of the Acts had mentioned “the women now look fresh and healthy” in the towns where the Acts operated. The implication was that if prostitutes were made pleasant creatures everything was all right. “Obedience to the Acts will be mistaken for moral rectitude,” wrote Mrs Butler in disgust. She extended this disgust to all those who thought prostitutes should be treated as “foul sewers”. Sewers, she reminded her readers, had neither souls nor rights. The CD Acts amounted to a corruption of the law and people were urged “to awe the legislature” by withholding their confidence. The mistake was to imagine Parliament was infallible.
The second pamphlet, The New Era (1872), was written specifically to deal with the medical problem. Again and again Josephine had heard the claim that the CD Acts were “medically necessary”. It was the government’s strongest card. People really had come to believe that only by enforced medical examinations of prostitutes could the floodgates against rampant venereal disease be closed. The pamphlet gave a detailed history of what had happened in Germany to show how regulation did not control disease. It cited the evidence of a Dr Simon, six years resident in Berlin, who had written a pamphlet himself proving statistically that VD increased under regulation of vice because it drove prostitution underground and in these conditions VD became uncontrolled and endemic. The trouble was that regulation applied to women only. It was time for a new era in which the voice of women would be heard and that voice would proclaim the injustice as well as the uselessness of legislating against women only. The medical board of New York had claimed “for 100 years the governments of Europe have tried in vain to dry up the sources of prostitution” but this was a gross lie, and so was the assertion that in the state regulation of vice there was no aggrieved person. On the contrary, “never has there existed on earth a class of wronged or injured persons whose silence was less voluntary and more enforced, or a class whose history presents more than this, the rebellion, the wretchedness and the agonised writhings of tortured humanity.” But to attempt to legislate about prostitution in any way whatsoever was pointless. “I am deeply convinced, “Josephine Butler wrote, “that the state cannot with profit to our moral well being in any way
whatsoever deal with the question of prostitution. A parliament of men, if it deals penally, admitting no protective element whatsoever, will deal penally with woman only.” She did not even want legislation on soliciting because it fostered “in the minds of men the unequal standard which is at the bottom of the whole mischief.” England, she said, would no longer stand for it.
In fact, England was more than prepared to stand for it. Another by-election success for the abolitionists at Colchester (1872) only gave a false sense of triumph, although it amounted at the time to a decisive victory and Josephine mistakenly thought it ushered in the new era of her pamphlet in which complete repeal was imminent. At Colchester, Storks was again defeated amid “a saturnalia of rioting” during which Josephine’s life as well as her honour were put at risk. Before one meeting in the town she was penned into her hotel by a mob whose “deep throated yells and oaths and the horrible words spoken by them sounded sadly in my ears.”32 She had to hide in an attic while the men of her party went out to see if the meeting could safely be held anywhere. They returned bruised and battered and in need of “a good deal of lint and bandages”. When she did finally manage to get out herself and address a gathering she had to leave by a back way and was pursued by a gang of men. She sheltered in “a dark, unused warehouse filled with empty soda bottles and broken glass” until a poor forlorn “woman of the town” rescued her and took her to safety.
But the worst experience of any she ever had was at Pontefract, the same year, when another by-election gave her party the chance to interfere again. There she became trapped in a hayloft with some other women. A gang of men (hired by brothel keepers) set fire to some straw beneath to smoke her out and then “to our horror, looking down the room to the trap door entrance, we saw appearing head after head of men with countenances full of fury . . .”33 There was no escape. She and her friends were “like a flock of sheep surrounded by wolves.” She stood there, terrified, and just as “these men’s hands were literally upon us” the men of her party arrived to rescue the ladies. Unfortunately, they were easily overpowered by the ruffians but it gave the ladies time to “make a rush for it.” The people of Pontefract, she said, were “outraged”. This comforted her, but she was disappointed to find that ultimately the outrage felt at Pontefract, or Colchester, or Newark always seemed to peter out. The CD Acts were still on the statute books in spite of the abolitionists stumping the country, in spite of two well-received pamphlets, in spite of hundreds of petitions. What more could be done?
Significant Sisters Page 23