Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  This was something Josephine was determined to achieve and she thought she saw a way of doing it. She had housed in a cottage in the precinct of Winchester Cathedral one Rebecca Jarrett, a reformed prostitute sent to her by Mrs Bramwell Booth. Rebecca ran a Mission for reclaimed prostitutes in the cottage, with Josephine’s help and encouragement, and had shown herself to be a tireless and most successful worker. Now Josephine approached Rebecca, who had herself once run a brothel, and asked her if she would go back to her old haunts and help Stead buy a child so that the whole wicked system could be exposed. Afterwards, Josephine wrote a short history of the affair in which she emphatically denied she had put any pressure on Rebecca. “Rebecca had lived sufficiently long with me to have learned to share my conviction and wishes concerning the mass of criminal vice existing in London”48 she wrote. Yet she herself also printed some notes of Rebecca’s which made it plain that it was Josephine’s personal wish that had made Rebecca agree. “In an exceptional enterprise we were forced to use exceptional means,”49 claimed Josephine defensively – and guiltily. At any rate, Rebecca agreed to act as an intermediary.

  A child of thirteen, Eliza Armstrong, was bought from her mother for five gold sovereigns, certified a virgin by a brothel keeper (one Madame Mourez, an old friend of Rebecca’s) and given to Stead masquerading as a customer. The story was then printed and led directly to the raising of the age of consent to sixteen in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. The price was higher than Josephine had estimated. What Rebecca had not realized was that Eliza had a known father, “Basher” Armstrong, who was produced by Stead’s enemies to claim Eliza had been abducted. Stead, and Bramwell Booth who had also been involved, went to prison for three months (which Stead greatly enjoyed) but the real scapegoat proved to be Rebecca Jarrett. Under cross-examination she was, wrote Josephine, “put in an exceptionally difficult position for a person of her poor education and miserable antecedents. Her head ached and her brain reeled . . .” Instead of refusing to answer irrelevant questions about her past life she was “very stupid – very blundering.”50 Seething with rage at how Rebecca was treated Josephine sat in court regretting her own “imprudence . . . in asking Rebecca to undertake this difficult work.” Across the courtroom Rebecca “looked at me with an expression on her pale face which I shall never forget.”51 She was sent down for two years during which she suffered terribly but more from the thought of what she had done to poor Eliza than from the physical hardship. “I have been so tired and knocked about,” she wrote from the dock to Josephine, still her idol. “I do feel I would like to be alone with God in the prison . . .”52

  The royal assent was given to the Bill for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in April 1886. Josephine was in Italy and wrote, “I hardly felt as if I cared . . . Much of the joy of the triumph seems to have been lost in being deferred.”53 Everything in any case was overshadowed by George’s serious illness. He had collapsed with rheumatic fever while Josephine was in London, visiting and supporting Rebecca Jarrett through the trial, and although she had taken him to Italy to recuperate he was still far from well. She was frightened and remorseful. She obtained the best medical advice but even though the fever seemed to be successfully treated she wrote, “his dear face bears traces of much suffering. He cannot use his hands; he can only look on while we do everything for him.”54 She would never leave him again. At last, she began consistently refusing all invitations. “My choice was deliberate,” she wrote firmly. When George was stronger they returned to Winchester and Josephine stayed dutifully close, insisting on frequent holidays in the sun to conserve her dear husband’s strength. In January 1889 she took him to Cannes, to the Hotel Continental, and “basked in the sun” with him. But it became obvious that George must retire and on August 25th, 1889 he was helped up the steps of the pulpit, his arm in a sling, to preach his last sermon. There was a last family party before the Butlers went abroad for another long holiday. In November, at Amalfi, George was laid low by influenza. Josephine was told there was not the slightest chance of recovery. George, who knew it, expressed a wish to die at home but did not quite make it, dying in London, with Josephine holding his hand, in March 1890.

  The shock was appalling and Josephine suffered acutely. She was almost sixty-two and had been married for nearly forty years to a man she had adored. What was there left for her? “I am terribly lonely now,” she wrote. “I feel as if I can hardly go on.”55 She and George had shared everything – thoughts, ideas, hopes and especially work. Few understood the nature of their union. Between them there had been a balance of uncanny delicacy which in any age is rare but in Victorian times was extraordinary. Their life had been fitted round Josephine’s work – it was she who had travelled, George who had stayed at home – yet nobody had made the mistake of thinking George was a cipher. He was strong, not weak, a rock in the background not a shadow. When people expressed amazement that he should “allow” his wife such freedom he told the truth: he was as much part of the campaign she headed as she was. He held no contemporary notions of a wife’s place, never expected her to be immured as the “angel in the house”. He did not think it demeaning to be the one who for long stretches of time looked after his children – he regarded it as a privilege. When Josephine wired she was delayed and could not return as promised he told the boys “we must manage as best we can” and proceeded to do so. Nor did he hold it against her that after he was ordained she was rather less than the perfect Church of England wife. “I thought everyone knew I am not of the Church of England and never was,” she wrote. “I go to the church once on Sunday out of a feeling of loyalty to my husband – that is all . . . I inherited from childhood the widest ideas of vital Christianity. I have not much sympathy with the church.”56 This George respected. Other people’s opinions never worried him. When his old colleagues at Harrow pointedly rose and turned their backs on him, because of his wife, during a return visit to the school he was not hurt – it was Josephine who was cut to the quick on his behalf at such an insult.

  For a long time Josephine was restless and wretched and her sons did not know how to console her. Charlie was in the Transvaal, a constant source of worry to her (and a drain on her purse) as he tried to make a career for himself in mining, but George and Stanley were attentive. George, who was a Civil Service commissioner, was the most like his father but Josephine, although she loved him dearly, did not find him nearly as congenial as Stanley. Once her husband had died Stanley became her chief support. “You are the dearest of my sons,” she wrote to him. “Since Father died you are the only one of my family to whom I can turn in the certainty of your sympathy and of you understanding me.”57 She also liked Rhoda, the woman Stanley married in 1886, and doted on their two children, Josephine and Bobby. But she would not make her home with them in St Andrews (where Stanley was a lecturer at the University). She preferred to flit about from one lodging to another for ten years until in 1901 she returned to Cheltenham where she wrote to Stanley she had no friends any more – “no, not one, but I don’t much care to make new friends now . . . I have a curious comforting feeling of companionship in being so near Eva’s grave . . .”58

  There had also been comfort in a return to work. After George’s death she felt she never wanted to work again – she was weary, discouraged and entirely lacking in any kind of energy. But at the annual general meeting of the Ladies’ Association in May 1891, an address was presented to her which was “like a resurrection”. She felt the old sense of urgency returning and turned to helping with the production of The Stormbell and to involving herself with the outcry over the sale of women to soldiers in India. She was back in the movement again and within a very short time once more producing articles and pamphlets rousing others to action. Her family were delighted at the change in her. She became the centre of their own family activities and proved a wonderful grandmother. George’s three children (he married in 1893), Charles’ two (he married in 1897) and Stanley’s children all worshipped h
er. She took them on outings, wrote them long letters, looked after them when they were ill and was a delightful and cheerful companion to them whenever they visited. As she grew older she felt a great wish to return home to Northumberland. She left Cheltenham to go back to Northumberland in 1903 where she settled at Woller, near Ewart Park, the home of her son George whose wife had just died. Here, she kept up her interest in politics and world affairs writing, “I am not sorry socialism has got into parliament,”59 and other comments on what was happening which revealed her sympathies. But she was “so tired” and wrote to Stanley in December 1906, “I think I may have to die. Don’t mourn too much.”60 She died on December 29th, aged seventy-eight, quite reconciled to the idea of death, but with no delusions that she had achieved what she had set out to achieve. True, the Contagious Diseases Acts had been abolished, never to appear on the statute books again, but state-regulated vice still flourished elsewhere in the world and the double standard lived on.

  * * *

  But Josephine Butler had achieved for feminism more than she knew and much more than she has ever been given credit for. The campaign she so bravely led alerted people to the knowledge that sex legislation existed – legislation, that is, against one sex only. She made her audiences understand that the woman was made the victim and that this made the whole female sex into a commodity for men’s use. Parliament, consisting entirely of men, had been compelled to see the truth of this and they had not liked it. Every man there had daily experiences of the “double standard” but had thought nothing of it: it was the way of the world, men were born with “natural urges” and these had to be satisfied. In order to satisfy them, which was not always possible within, never mind without, marriage, prostitutes must exist. If they existed they must be kept clean or men would become diseased. It was all quite simple. But then came Josephine Butler and her many helpers and suddenly it was not quite so simple. The idea that prostitutes might not wish to be prostitutes but were driven to it as an alternative to death by starvation was alarming; that clean prostitutes did not guarantee clean men even more alarming; and that there was no justification whatsoever for the existence of prostitution the most alarming of all. Slowly, by infinitely painful degrees, the double standard was shown up for what it was: a sham. Men and women so far as prostitution was concerned could not be judged separately. The prostitute was no more wicked, no more deserving of punishment, than the customer. Women had not been created for the gratification of male lust.

  This was a startling line of thought and quite contrary to informed medical as well as to popular opinion. The idea that the prostitute is wicked and the customer exploited (because he is only satisfying “natural urges”) still exists: the double standard survives. But Josephine Butler’s contribution was to make sure it came out into the open. Before she spoke out it was hidden, never properly acknowledged for what it was, continually disguised by other names. Afterwards, society knew what it was dealing with – one rule for men, one for “good” women, and one for “bad” women. A very long time indeed had to elapse before these distinctions became blurred which they did through a change in sexual mores of which Josephine Butler would have emphatically disapproved. Never for one moment did she wish women to treat sex as simply an urge which they had the right to satisfy as men did. She did not want women to share men’s sexual freedom because she did not see it as freedom. She wanted purity for both sexes. Sex and love, in her opinion, were inextricably connected and both could only find true expression within a Christian marriage. Yet she never saw the prostitute as wicked, was never interested in persecuting the species. Her principle was not to pursue them (prostitutes) with any outward punishment, nor drive them out of any place so long as they behaved decently, but to attack organized prostitution, “that is when a third party, actuated by a desire of making money, sets up a house in which women are sold to men, or keeps any place for his own gain which is a market of vice.”61 In short, what concerned her most was the exploitation of women by men.

  Josephine Butler knew more about this subject than she was ever able to reveal. After visiting the prison of St Lazare in Paris she believed she had plumbed the depths of what men could do to women. She saw children of five and six, arrested as prostitutes, kept in cages like animals. She saw girls who she said were just “shells”, bodies so wrecked by depravity that the minds in them had become completely vacant. After Stead’s campaign she said she never again would wonder what hell was like because she had seen it here on earth. The contrast with her own experience made what she saw seem all the more terrible. She had enjoyed, in her marriage, the love of a man who had never treated her with anything but consideration and tenderness, for whom the words of the marriage service – “with my body I thee worship” – had literal meaning. The letters which passed between the Butlers never speak overtly of physical passion but their harmony is easily read between the lines in that, as in all other, spheres. They “longed for” and “yearned” to be “once more, alone, together”; they wrote of hardly being able to bear a longer separation; they reminded each other of “joyful” reunions; they missed each other’s “tender ministrations”. So Josephine Butler knew what the sex act could be. She was no prudish spinster but a married woman passionately in love with her husband. But she was also an extremely beautiful and attractive woman who knew her own sexual power. No other feminist leader ever aroused men in quite the way Josephine Butler did. The impact of this elegant, lovely, utterly virtuous, upper middle-class married lady earnestly talking about prostitution was devastating. Men she addressed individually on the subject of “natural urges” hardly knew where to put themselves. Men who jeered and leered at her in public meetings left her in no doubt of the thoughts she gave rise to – she could not for one moment forget the existence of sex. What disturbed and disgusted and ultimately terrified her was the element of torture in sex. She knew the facts and the reality of rape. What she tried so hard to convey to people was the horror implicit not just in the organized rape of virgins but in the surgical rape practised under the CD Acts.

  The hardest step for Josephine Butler to take was to start calling a spade a spade. Euphemisms, in her day, were all. The sexual act, prostitution, venereal disease, all bodily functions were covered by endless euphemistic talk. When Josephine Butler first began her campaign she bowed to convention and conceded that she too protected the susceptibilities of women like her mother-in-law. But she soon grew tired of this. Her own sex could not go on being protected – it only did them harm, made them even more the dupes of men. So she began to speak plainly. Words like “prostitute”, “rape”, and “venereal disease” were in the end freely used by her. A kind of contempt for her own sex and particularly for her own class began to distinguish her speeches and writings. She despised women for playing into men’s hands by pretending to be virtuously ignorant of the facts of life. Towards the end of her life she wrote, “Where are we? All these ‘forward women’ movements, political and other, seem not to have done much to correct certain men of their determination to enslave women to their lusts by law. I have some anxious feelings about our women. I see a tendency even among the best to knock under too much to male opinion.”62 It was a tendency which led her to believe that female suffrage was more important than she had ever thought. As early as 1873 she wrote, “I feel more and more anxious to get woman’s suffrage . . . it is a more urgent matter than I once thought”63 and “if I were not working for repeal I should throw my whole force into getting the suffrage.”64 By the 1880s and 1890s she was even more convinced that votes for women were essential and might achieve more than she had ever done.

  Yet more important than votes, in her opinion, was a sense of identification with each other for all women. She breached the high walls of class prejudice fearlessly in this respect, making middle-class women see not just how their sisters suffered but how their own standing was attacked by these sufferings. There is an impression in everything written about Josephine Butler that she was
guided in her work by some sort of mystical, religious fervour – that she was carried away on an emotional tide of religious ecstasy. Nothing could be further from the truth. She indignantly resented any suggestion that her religion was an emotional response. “I think there prevails among clever men,” she once wrote, “who do not know intimately the hearts of many women an idea that women generally accept Christianity without a thought or difficulty; that they are in a measure instinctively pious and that religion is rather an indulgence of the feelings with them than anything else . . . for myself, I can say that to be guided by feeling would be simply dangerous . . . I sometimes gave whole nights to prayer . . . Do not imagine that on these occasions I worked myself into any excitement.”65 But people did. Religious excitement and a hysterical reaction to Eva’s death are advanced as explanations for Josephine Butler’s commitment. What is left out is her deeply feminist belief that women as a sex must all help each other. She had no time at all for emotional nonsense and could be extremely cutting about any attempt to base arguments on feelings. In 1883 she tore to shreds a draft manifesto because “I could not endorse the style. It was the wildest, massinian ‘high fallooting’ style – ‘we solemnly declare by the sacred womb of maternity’ – and half of it would not have been understood by the MPs and others to whom we wish it to go. My idea of a manifesto is that it should be dignified and somewhat formal in style while leaving no doubt whatever as to its meaning . . .”66 She wished to tell people the facts of the case in language which needed to be all the more plain and sober because those facts were dramatic and shocking.

  She succeeded. She made all women who heard her care about what happened to some women. She made most men who heard her ashamed of some of their sex. She made everybody examine the existing moral basis to society and, if she failed to make them totally reform it, she at least encouraged them to begin to think that they should do so. The way to do it was believed, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, to be through obtaining female suffrage. Then, all else would follow.