I’d just like to put some extracts from a short biography of Josephine Butler (nee Grey), the nineteenth century evangelical, (by Andrew Wilson), on this thread. Her story strikes me as relevant because she was a fine evangelical woman who overcame scruples about purity and decency to help those on the margins. There is no direct parrallel between her cnocern and the topic of our discussion; but she had to taek on huge prejudices to engage with the world in loving kindness - and here I do see a parrallel .{Hope you don’t mind the brief interlude – but no need to comment on this one necessarily}
**…Josephine Grey learnt the Christian religion. That religion has at its heart the belief that God who is rich for our sakes became poor. Those who respond most vividly or affectionately to the Gospel have almost invariable been drawn to identify with the poor. This has been fact which has linked many different Christians of widely various ethnic or cultural backgrounds. We see in the life of Francis Assisi, in General Booth of the Salvation Army, in Mother Teresa of Calcutta today. Because God loved the world, such Christians have believed that it was their duty to love the world too; for ‘in as much as ye have done it unto the least of these brethren ye have done it unto me’. The dichotomy in the minds of many people between ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ does not exist for these Christians. Probably neither word plays a large part in their vocabulary. But they are living in the world which they believe God has loved and inhabited, they naturally look for justice in society, relief for the poor.
In the early part of the last century this was particularly true of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. It was from this religious perspective that William Wilberforce brought about the abolition of the slave trade, and that, later in the century, Lord Shaftesbury prevented the use of children as what was no more or no less than slave labour force in British mines and factories. Josephine Butler was very much the heir to this way of reading the Gospel. What she saw very clearly was that, in spite of the misogynistic traditions of Christianity, the Gospel contains within it the seeds of that was later called feminism. Just as the equality of Jew and Gentile as proclaimed in the Gospel made it ultimately unthinkable for Christians to allow the continuance of the slave trade (though for 1800 years Christians did not see this!) so, for Josephine, the respect shown by Christ for women, in spite of the social conventions of His day, led inevitably to the conclusion that women – all women, not just the prostitutes with whom her name is associated – should enjoy equal rights with men.
Among the great typical acts of Christ which were evidently and intentionally for the
announcement of a principle for the guidance of Society, none were more markedly so than His
acts towards women: and I appeal to the open Book, and to the intelligence of every candid
student of Gospel history for the justification of my assertion, that in all important instances of
his dealings of women, His dismissal of each case was accompanied by a distinct act of Liberation
From an early age then, radicalism and evangelical piety were in Josephine’s blood. Evangelical piety, for those of us who are not used to it, can be embarrassing, even cloying. But she was never this. Feminist or political radicalism can often be strident. Josephine was never that either. For me, she was one of the most attractive people who ever lived: not merely beautiful, but one of those extremely rare people who is good through and though without for one second seeming ‘goody-goody’…
…The Butler’s theology was more ‘liberal’ than the Evangelicals of the early Victorian period, admitting and indeed welcoming the advances in Biblical scholarship which inevitably modified the way in which the Bible was viewed. But they were no less ardent in their insistence that Christianity involves a social commitment. Josephine with her inquiring mind and profound interest in society found no conflict of views in her marriage to George Butler which was idyllically happy for forty-eight years until his death in 1890. His words to her, some four years after they were married, are remarkable for the extent to which they recognise his wife’s equality.
No words can express what you are to me. I hope I may be able to cheer you in moments of gloom
and despondency... and by means of possessing greater physical strength... I may be enabled to
help you in the years to come to carry out plans, which may under God’s blessing, do some good,
and make men speak of us with respect....
…One evening, however, in 1863, something happened which was to change their lives forever. Returning home from a drive, the children rushed on to an upstairs landing to greet them as they entered the hall. Little Eva fell over the banister on to the hard, tiled floor below, and lay insensible at her parent’s feet. A few hours later she died.
Never can I lose that memory – the fall, the sudden cry, and then the silence. It was pitiful to see
her, helpless in her father’s arms, her little drooling head resting on his shoulder and her
beautiful golden hair all stained with blood, falling over his arm!
The torture of grief for this child was something which Josephine was unable to assuage. Never strong (she had poor lungs) she fell seriously ill. …
…Josephine decided that the grief she felt for Eva could find no outlet at home.
I became possessed with an irresistible desire to go forth, and find some pain keener than my
own – to meet with people more unhappy than myself (for I knew there were thousands of
such). I did not exaggerate my own trial; I only knew that my heart ached night and day, and that
the only solace would seem to be to find other hearts which ached night and day.
In the Liverpool of the 1860s, she did not have far to look. She began visiting vagrant women who had been rounded up into the notorious Brownlow Hill Workhouse, and establishment which makes the one in Oliver Twist seem positively benign. In exchange for a night’s lodging and a hunk of bread, the girls had to work in the sheds stripping oakum (tarry hemp) from piles of rope, the same tedious and painful work – it tears all the skin off your fingers – doled out to prisoners serving penal servitude (Oscar Wilde did it in Reading Gaol). Josephine was shocked at her first sight of the oakum sheds, but her immediate and characteristic response was not to enter then as a lady bountiful, dispensing good advice or soup. Instead, she sympathised in the literal sense of the word: she suffered with these women.
I went into the oakum shed and begged admission. I was taken into an immense, gloomy vault,
filled with women and girls – more than two hundred, probably, at that time. I sat on the floor
among them and picked oakum. They laughed at me, and told me my fingers were of no use for
that work, which was true. But while we laughed we became friends.
The unselfconscious Evangelical felt no difficulty, in these miserable circumstances, in speaking to ‘this audience – wretched, draggled, ignorant, criminal’ about her Christian faith. She got one girl, tall and dark, standing up amid the heaps of tarred rope, to repeat the words of St John’s Gospel – ‘Let not your heart be troubled. Neither let it be afraid.’ And then, prayed. ‘It was a strange sound that united wail – continuous, pitiful, strong – like a great sign or murmur of vague desire and hope issuing from the heart of desire.’ The scene reminds us of that of the prostitute reading St John’s Gospel to Raskolniklov at the end of Dostoyevky’s Crime and Punishment…
…There were far too many prostitutes in Liverpool for the Butlers to be able to take them all. What was worse, the longer Josephine worked among them, the more she discovered that it was not simply a matter of reclaiming individuals. These women and children were victims of precisely that attitude which she had heard expressed at Oxford when Mrs Gaskell’s Ruth was under discussion: ‘A moral sin in a woman was … immensely worse than in a man. ‘Women are temptresses, hoydens, harbourers of disease and corruption; men on the other hand will be men and must be indulged and forgiven. This was the ‘morality’ of mid-Victorian England…
…It was more than a mere piece of convention which you could ignore or follow at your choice. It was written into the law of the land. The first Contagious Diseases Act was passed in 1864, with the aim of reducing the spread of sexually-transmitted disease in the armed forces. In effect it ment the establishment of state brothels for the navel and military, but it also involved a gross violation of civil rights not only of prostitutes but, by implication, of every woman in Britain. In 1866 and 1868, with the passing of further Contagious Diseases Acts, its original powers were extended far beyond the confines of the military encampments.
The Contagious Diseases Acts effectively abolished Habeas Corpus in Great Britain. By the provocation of these Acts, special police were empowered to arrest any woman, compel her to submit to an examination for venereal disease, and require that she should present herself to the Justice of the Peace. Her guilt presumed unless she could prove herself innocent. No witnesses were require, and no evidence on the part of the officer making the arrest. If the woman protested or refused to co-operate with the law, she was liable to a period of penal servitude. If she did submit to the examination, it was in the eyes of many who investigated the matter little better than an ‘instrumental rape’. The woman was forced into a straightjacket to prevent her from struggling. Her legs were forced apart by metal clamps. One girl interviews by Josephine Butler after such a ‘medical ‘examination had rolled off the couch with a ruptured hymen. She turned out, as it happened, to be a virgin. The police paid her a few shilling’s hush money, but she went at once to Josephine Butler. Another woman, walking innocently along one evening with her daughter, was arrested and charged by the special police with being a ‘common prostitute’. This was how all women were now defined by the law of England unless they could prove to the contrary. This particular woman committed suicide rather than submit to the horrors of the examination.
These are the matters about which many people today still find it difficult to speak in public without embarrassment. How much truer that was in Josephine Butler’s day! She was not a strident, foul-mouthed woman who found it easy to mention matters normally only spoken about in the doctor’s consulting-rooms (if there). But a vitally important matter of human liberty was at stake, one which would never get reformed unless someone were brave enough to challenge it. To do so would be to risk the charge of prurience and impropriety. When it was further discovered that Josephine was protecting ‘immoral women’, she would obviously be charged with wickedness. She was an upper middle-classed woman with a position to maintain. This meant little to her personally, but the reputations of her sons and their husband meant everything. George was a clergyman and a schoolmaster with responsibility for the care of the young. His entire career was put in jeopardy by the very idea of having a wife whom ‘he could not control, who was prepared to peer so mercilessly beneath the respectable surface of Victorian life and reveal the cess-pit which lurked there. What should she do?
She put the problem to George. She knew that he was sympathetic to the cause, but was he prepared to risk the obloquy and anger which the campaign against Contagious Diseases Acts would provoke? Josephine now knew more, from first-hand experience, than any other educated woman in England about the plight of urban prostitutes. The feminist campaigner, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, wrote to her in 1869 and asked her to lead the protest again the Acts. George had no doubt about where her duty lay. Quoting Saul’s words to young David when he went forth to fight the giant Goliath, he told her, ‘Go, and the Lord go with you.’...
…The Goliath whom Josephine had to fight represented almost the entire male-dominated British Establishment. This was not just a case (brave as that would have been) of standing up to the pimps, and the brothel-keepers and madams. She had, for one thing, the medical profession against her. Since thousands of young men in the armed forces were suffering from venereal disease, it was felt that anything justified the halt of it; and for the doctors of Victorian England, who saw things from so one-sided a point of view, that merely meant controlling the prostitutes. ‘It is only insofar as a woman exercises trade which is physically dangerous to the community that Government has any right to interfere,’ conceded The Lancet of 27 November 1869. But the notion that that Contagious Diseases Acts in effect deprived women in garrison towns of civil liberty, where they were prostitutes or not , and that it had no effect on combating the spread of sexually transmitted diseases did not seem to have occurred to the author of the article. Most doctors reacted as Dr Preston of Plymouth, who wrote on 24 June 1870
I will pass over Mrs. Josephine Butler’s address in public before men ...because I believe that a
very large majority of our sex ...can only characterise it as the height of indecency to say the
least. But it is my opinion that women are ignorant of the subject ... but not Mrs. Josephine
Butler and Company – they know nothing about it ... Certainly if such women as Mrs. Butler
continue to go about addressing public meetings – they may ultimately do so but at present I
venture to say that they are ignorant and long may they remain so. No men, whomever they
may be, admire women who openly show that they know as much on disgusting subjects as
they do themselves, much less so those who are so indelicate as to discuss them in public.
But Josephine risked the extreme ignominy of making speeches about venereal disease because she knew she was right, even though none of the medical profession would support her. The very few women doctors who were struggling into existence at this period were frightened of their positions vis-a-vis their male colleagues. Only Dr Elizabeth Blackwell was brave enough to oppose the Contagious Diseases Acts from the first, followed eventually by Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who had been the first woman to qualify as a doctor in 1865…
…Josephine Butler was eventually to collect some influential male allies - such figures as F.D. Maurice, James Stansfeld (a Liberal MP) and the philosopher John Stuart Mill. But many whom one might have thought would be sympathetic were not. None of her old friends at Oxford would lend their support. Benjamin Jowett, for example, the liberal-minded Master of Balliol, was priggish enough to say, ‘Mrs Butler takes an interest in a class of sinners whom she had better left to themselves.’ More surprisingly, Gladstone, himself so keen on rescuing prostitutes, was deeply unsympathetic to her cause. He considered it unfortunate that she should try to make it a political issue.
But of course it was a political issue, since her aim was to repeal a series of Acts of Parliament. This could only be done by scaring the Liberal government of the day into some kind of action. Since women did not have the vote, Mrs Butler had to appeal to men – and that meant extensive travelling around the country to speak to frequently bawdy or hostile audiences, as well as a ceaseless stream of written campaign material, largely gathered up in her news-sheet, The Shield. In her speeches and articles, she was punctilious in her collection of evidence; and what she began to reveal, with hideous clarity, was not the narrowly important question of the Contagious Diseases Acts and their injustice, but also the much wider question of double standards in Victorian society. This, beyond question, is why her campaigns, from the very first, got so many people on the raw. One of her friends who was sent to prison for soliciting on 2 March 1870 told The Shield, ‘It did seem hard, ma’am that the magistrate on the bench who gave the casting vote for my imprisonment had paid me several shillings, a day or two before, in the street, to go with him.’
This double standard was extremely widespread. In a society where men were supposed to delay marriage until they could afford to maintain a household, and in a society where marital breakdown was not relieved by divorce, prostitutes provided an essential role in keeping the whole facade of ‘Victorian values’ unscathed. It was, moreover, the prostitute who supposedly made sure that the promiscuous middle-class man did not infect women of his own class – the sort of woman he might dance with, play croquet or bridge with, or escort into dinner.
In an age when there was no cure for the rampant disease of syphilis, it is easy to see how these standards grew up. It is equally easy to see how Josephine Butler’s attempt to expose the standards was seen, and intended, as a political act. She saw the Contagious Diseases Acts as ‘a tyranny of upper classes against the lower classes’. And that is why she got the Liberal Party on the run.
Realising that something had to be done, but wanting to put off the evil day, the Government set up a Royal Commission. Josephine Butler was summoned before it in 1871 to face a panel which was made up of bishops, doctors, naval and military experts and MP’s. Every member of this Commission was declaredly opposed to repealing the Acts and when she stood before them, she was made conscious of their hostility. ‘It was distressing to me owing to the hard, harsh view which some of these men take of poor women, and the lives of the poor generally ... I felt very weak and lonely. But there was One who stood by me.’
Josephine meant this sincerely and literally. She and her husband were both of the view that Christ’s mortality was simple, and obligatory on all Christians. They were impatient of the doctrinal wrangling which so interested Roman Catholics and High Churchmen. ‘I am sure’, George once wrote, ‘Mary who sat at the feet of Jesus would have been puzzled by the reading over to her of the Athanasian Creed and the injunction to accept it all at the peril of the loss of her soul; but she understood what Jesus meant when He said “One thing is needful”.’Josephine felt that ‘those who profess the religion of Jesus must bring into public life and into the legislature the stern practical social, real side of the Gospel’. And this in turn brought the realisation that ‘economics lie at the root of practical morality’.**
). But this question burns in me so deeply that I feel like screaming it in the face of the homophobes. What exactly do you find so threatening in same sex relationships?
(I belong to the men behaving mildly perservation society. at least some of the time) 
)
– but ‘ methinks the lady doth protest too much’ sometimes 
. But I’m sure not all righteous homophones have sexual skeletons in their closet by any means. Rather they have big issues about not begin loved by God, and needing to feel secure in their self righteous fury at outsiders (because they are in competition for God’s love in a twisted sort of way – ‘He loves me more than he loves you so ‘ner ner ne ner ner’ 
