Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  The Ladies’ Association had all this time been trying, with considerable success, to organize resistance to arrest among the women of the regulated towns themselves and now they redoubled their efforts. They knew that from 1869 onwards large crowds of furious women had daily gathered in the streets to watch alleged prostitutes being dragged off and they realized that if this fury could be harnessed the authorities would be greatly embarrassed. The Shield, the Association’s own newspaper begun in 1869, urged women to resist and a support system to help them do so was organized. Paid agents were employed and flysheets distributed. (“Many ladies have taken great trouble, have been put to great expense to come and speak to you . . . Are you glad they are come? Are you grateful to them? Then Reform and Resist! Don’t go willingly to the examination or to the Hospital but let them make you go.”) Gradually, women began to take this advice. The Association provided legal aid for them when they were brought to trial and the trial proceedings in turn provided wonderful propaganda. The definition of what constituted a prostitute was forever under dispute just as Josephine Butler had known it would be. Some women were arrested because it was alleged they looked or dressed like prostitutes. Justice Liddell of Devonport pronounced that “gaily dressing” did not provide grounds for arrest “for it so happens nowadays that there was such peculiarities in dressing even by persons of good character that it would be difficult to draw the line.” Then there was the even more important question of how VD was to be defined. In the case of Harriet Hicks the Association’s lawyer made a fool of the resident medical officer who said Harriet was diseased because she had a vaginal ulcer. Pressed to define VD this officer offered “All genital diseases in men or women arising from excessive or impure sexual intercourse.” “Excessive?” inquired the defence, incredulous. Harriet Hicks was discharged. Afterwards, a report of the trial was distributed as a flysheet. In the following months twenty-nine women summoned to attend for examination stoutly refused. Mary Jeffries, mother of a girl summoned for examination, called the police constable who came for her “a black looking bugger and a bloody sneak” and threw him out. That, said the Association, was the spirit.34

  Yet the beginning of 1874 saw Josephine Butler at her lowest ebb. She was utterly exhausted. She felt unable to refuse any request to address a meeting, which imposed upon her endless travelling. “The middle of the day is my most weary time,” she wrote to a friend organizing a meeting, “. . . if I might have a bit of food to go to my room to rest for an hour I shall be able to be all alive about 3 or half past.”35 She usually then began meetings at four pm, finished at six and if humanly possible travelled home. George was always at the station to meet her, or standing at the door at home. Once “I came home to find my dear husband ill in bed. I am nursing him today and trying to get through immense accumulations of letters. He is hardly ever ill. I felt a pang of fear when he failed, for the first time in his life, to meet me either at the station or at our own door.”36 She knew she was not being fair to George or to her children. “I want a bit of rest at Easter,” she wrote in 1873 “When our boy George comes home. He only has a week and I don’t see him so much now . . .”37 George, as dutiful and serious as ever, was at Trinity, Cambridge, where “his chief motive, dear lad, is to get some money to make it easier for us . . .” She was thrilled when he won the Bell Scholarship. More worrying was Charles, the youngest, about whom she wrote “I am so sad – he is so delicate.”38 He did not seem to thrive in Liverpool and was sent, in 1874, to school at Clifton College near Bristol. If anything, Josephine fretted even more. “Don’t think me weak,” she wrote to the friends putting Charles up for his interview “if I ask you to send me the enclosed telegram as soon as Charlie arrives – you need not tell him . . . I am afraid of his cold making him sick as it generally attacks his stomach.”39 Those who accused her of being an uncaring mother never knew what a stupidly wrong conclusion they had drawn from her absences.

  Thoughts of what was still happening under the operation of the CD Acts preyed on her mind endlessly. William Acton, doyen of medical writers, had written, “The inspection, for which the speculum is frequently used, is performed with all the delicacy consistent with accuracy and great despatch; the average time occupied being three minutes which includes filling up the papers.” Josephine’s growing experience was that what women suffered in that three minutes was “worthy of the Spanish Inquisition.” She had heard, first-hand, of what awaited any women taken to the police station “on suspicion”. She was put on a surgical couch, her legs parted by clamps, her ankles tied in leather stirrups, and then held down while surgical instruments, dipped in boiling water, were used to inspect her. If she struggled a strait jacket was always at hand for use. Sometimes, if a girl was not only not diseased but a virgin the inspection would rupture her hymen and produce a flood of blood. Then, she was usually told she was a good girl and given five shillings to buy herself a hot dinner. Sometimes a miscarriage was brought on, sometimes such internal injury was done that the woman had to be removed unconscious. Josephine had been told by hardened prostitutes that they had to make themselves drunk to go through with it. She would not accept that these examinations were mere formalities and the vast majority over, painlessly, in seconds. At their best they were degrading and at their worst brutalizing. They treated women’s bodies as pieces of meat.

  The effect that carrying out these inspections had on the men who were obliged to make them also concerned her – they too were brutalized. It made her furious to hear uninformed people talk as though the whole experience was no worse than going to the dentist and much less painful. As more and more reports came in from field workers on the spot in the affected towns she began to be haunted by the fear that this monstrous treatment could not be stopped. Every day, some innocent women suffered, every day womanhood was being insulted. Worrying about it made her ill and she felt she ought to redouble not decrease her own personal efforts for repeal.

  But she was incapable of doing so. Worry about the victims of the Acts, worry about her sons, worry about her husband and her own ill-health made her increasingly depressed. She found it hard to put up with the stories which circulated about her marriage too. “A certain class of our enemies,” she wrote bitterly, “thought themselves happy it seemed in inventing a dart which they believed would strike home in our case; they sought diligently to spread an impression that some tragic unhappiness in our married life was the impelling force which had driven me from my home to this work; and coarse abuse was varied by hypocritical expressions of pity and sympathy. But they were the most unworthy of all – the ‘lewd fellows of the baser sort’ naturally – by whom this kind of scourging was inflicted or attempted.”40 What hurt most was that these “lewd fellows” were often clergymen and members of the aristocracy who ought to have known better. Not only did these people vilify her but they pilloried George.

  In 1872, when George had obtained leave to read a paper at the annual church congress on the subject of “The Duty of the Church of England in Moral Questions”, he was howled down as soon as he mentioned the CD Acts, and the Bishop of Lincoln, who was in the chair, ordered him to abandon his lecture. The outlook for his career if he went on supporting his wife’s campaign was bleak. Often, George was left to face hostility while Josephine was away and it placed a great strain on him. They both found the constant partings almost unbearable. “I feel ridiculously much this parting,” wrote Josephine “. . . about him I have the yearning of heart.”41 Wherever she went she carried a special prayer George had composed for her – “to my dear wife, to use when we are apart.” She had had to use it far too often. With George at Cambridge, Stanley about to go up to Oxford, and Charlie at Clifton, her husband was all on his own in a home which was suddenly desolate.

  In October 1874, just in time to save her health and sanity, Josephine thankfully relinquished the leadership of the campaign against the CD Acts to Sir James Stansfield, MP for Halifax. Gladstone had that spring been defeated, to be succe
eded by Disraeli which depressed the repealers, but this released many Liberal MPs from the parliamentary restraints necessary to a party in power. In opposition, many more felt free to support Josephine Butler, and the battle shifted from the hustings to the floor of the Commons. But, instead of this releasing Josephine to go home to George and stay with him, it drove her to quite another course of action. In the winter of 1874/5, after a brief holiday, she undertook a continental tour to seek international support. How she found the strength to contemplate it, considering that only a few months before she was complaining of feeling so giddy she could hardly see and suffering from “congestion of the brain” which only total rest would cure, is difficult to understand. Her secretary had just replied to an invitation from the American suffragists saying Mrs Butler was “too frail” ever to be able to even think about an Atlantic voyage, yet, compared with what she then undertook, such a trip would have been a rest cure.

  She began her tour in Paris, where she visited St Lazare – “an immense prison, hospital and general depot for all the unhappy women of Paris” – and had an interview with Lecours, the head of the Police des Moeurs, who made the mistake of trying to flirt with her. Afterwards she went on to Lyons, Naples, Rome and Geneva in one of the hardest winters of the century. Everywhere she went she visited prominent people trying to enlist their support, addressed meetings of working people and, wherever she was allowed, visited the prisons and workhouses where prostitutes were suffering under the law she hated. On her return, she formed an International Society against State Regulated Vice which held its first congress in Liverpool in 1875. Not surprisingly she was ill again. “Stronger lungs than mine might have been injured,” she commented “if you consider how often I have spoken – long addresses in large rooms with a naturally weak voice, and how often I have had to come out of heat into bitter, cold winds or damp air – how often on long railway journies [sic] I have slept from sheer exhaustion and awoke shivering violently.”42 Once more, George nursed her back to health. For a while she rested and turned to writing but, with the return to power of the Liberals in 1880, she was once more back at the heart of the struggle. The CD Acts had stood for ten years: this time, they must be repealed.

  The House of Commons was by then heartily sick of the subject. The idea of the CD Acts being extended to cover the whole country had long ago been abandoned and it seemed pointless to go on defending such a half-hearted operation. In addition, a Minority Report had been produced which revealed that disease among prostitutes was actually worse in the regulated areas. Another Select Committee was appointed, this time with members much more sympathetic to the repealers. Josephine again gave evidence, but on this occasion much more effectively. She described her work in Chatham clearly and unemotionally. “I spent one whole night in going into the brothels in the town,” she said “. . . I was introduced to low, dancing saloons, drinking saloons and wretched theatres in connection with the brothels and with doors leading into them . . . I saw there evidence of the degradation of the young soldiers who first join the army . . . There were boys who appeared to be not more than thirteen . . . a look of perfect innocence . . . I gathered them round me . . . it was as solemn as hell itself . . . a business-like exhibition of superintended vice.” The committee was impressed and hopes ran high that success was only a matter of waiting for the report. Josephine worked frantically to rally support in the crucial debate which would follow but she was held back from total commitment by the illness of Stanley. “Tell the public that domestic troubles hold me back,”43 she wrote and then worried that she would be despised for putting her family first for once. But in April, when the debate at last took place, she was in the gallery of the House of Commons watching and listening. On the afternoon of April 20th, a week after her fifty-fifth birthday, she made her way there through thick fog to hear a Bill to repeal the CD Acts read. At six, when it was clear the debate would go on all night, she went to the Westminster Palace Hotel to hold a prayer meeting with George. At midnight he stayed while she returned. As she climbed the stairs to the Ladies’ Gallery the steward whispered he thought she was going to win. He was right. At 1.30 am when the figures were called it was 182 to 110 in favour of immediate suspension. Josephine went out onto the terrace of the House. “The fog had cleared away and it was very calm under the starlit sky. All the bustle of the city was stilled and the only sound was that of dark water lapping against the buttresses of the broad stone terrace . . . it almost seemed like a dream.”44

  The Butlers celebrated by going on holiday to Switzerland. George had resigned from Liverpool College in the autumn of 1882 and had been appointed to a canonry at Winchester. It upset Josephine to realize his work at Liverpool had never properly been appreciated. “He rarely absented himself from his post at the college for even a short hour,”45 she wrote, but people acted as if he had subordinated his work to hers. Yet she was relieved to leave Liverpool where she said there were “too many calls on our purse” and too much constantly expected. Winchester would give both of them some peace in their approaching old age. A period of calm was to be inaugurated for them both, in which Josephine was determined to put George first whatever others said – but she was highly sensitive to what they would say. In the summer of 1885 when she went with her family to Scotland while the actual repeal Bill for the CD Acts was going through Parliament (and proving a more tedious process than anyone had suspected) she wrote, “I dread so that some of our committee should accuse me of deserting them in a crisis . . .”46 She resolutely kept her vow to stay with George in the precincts of Winchester Cathedral but this did not prevent her from embarking on another cause connected with her life-long work which shattered the peace she had promised him.

  In 1876 the famous journalist W. H. Stead had written to Josephine saying that what her crusade needed, to make it catch the public imagination, was an Uncle Tom and would she provide it? Josephine declined, but kept in correspondence with Stead who was then editor of the Northern Echo in Darlington. He had been a firm supporter of her cause ever since his mother had gone round collecting signatures for a petition after hearing Josephine speak in 1870. In 1885 Stead, now editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in London, formed a Secret Commission to investigate West End prostitution. Josephine had of course been acquainted with the true facts of prostitution for a very long time. All her speeches and writings had constantly striven to inform people about the circumstances in which girls became prostitutes and to demonstrate that it had become an organized trade in which girls were victims. She had always been particularly concerned by the evidence of the existence of child prostitution. She knew there was an international traffic in young girls, in which they were enticed into the hands of unscrupulous women who sold them to both private customers and brothel keepers. Now Stead was willing to take on the job of exposing this trade if she would help. Josephine was more than willing and so was George. They left the holy atmosphere of Winchester Cathedral, assumed disguises and gained access to brothels and “private” houses. The three Butler sons all helped. The investigations, led by Stead, began on the Saturday before Whit and took six weeks to complete at the cost of £300. The results were printed in the Pall Mall Gazette in four issues throughout July entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” with an introduction by Lord Shaftesbury. The disclosures were devastating – it was investigative reporting at its sensational best.

  The revelations shocked the uninformed and excited the knowledgeable to come forward with more evidence of corruption. Josephine Butler said “a gentleman” offered to sell her “a photograph and other authentic proofs of Mr Gladstone’s orgies in a brothel.”47 She declined them. Stead’s report was sufficient, proving that “the violation of virgins” was systematic and “constantly perpetrated with absolute impunity.” Stead asked for three virgins to be delivered to him and they duly were complete with promissory certificates (“I hereby agree to let you have me for a present of £3 or £4. I will come to any address if you give me two d
ays notice”). The system of procuring was revealed with precise details as to how it operated – how women made friends with young girls in the park, asked them home to tea, chloroformed them and then held them down to be raped. The existence of houses where “used” virgins were “patched up” to be resold was described. Most pitifully of all, the extent of the girls’ ignorance was established. Many of them were indeed willing to be seduced but what they thought of as seduction was the medical examination to prove they were virgins. When the examination was over they were very relieved, put their clothes on and asked for their money commenting they were glad it was done with. By that time they were literally trapped and the actual violation inescapable. They were kept in locked rooms without any but the scantiest clothing and, since they were almost always homeless girls who had left their families, without anyone trying to track them down. All Stead failed to prove was that it was also possible to buy a child of, or under, thirteen. He knew and Josephine knew that it could be done but he failed to secure one. This in itself was useful proof that raising the age of consent had been worthwhile and that if it was raised higher to sixteen as the Vigilance Committee, formed by Mrs Wolstenholme Elmy, wanted then legislation would be even more protective.