Anglican Commemoration
Social Reformer
May 30 · d. 1906
also known as Josephine Grey Butler, Josephine Fawcett Butler
Josephine Butler (1828-1906) was an Englishwoman who spent seventeen years campaigning against laws that subjected women suspected of prostitution to compulsory medical examination. She began the work in Liverpool in 1866, in the year after her only daughter died. She is commemorated in the Church of England on 30 May, the day of her baptism.
Josephine Butler had four children, and the youngest was a girl named Eva. In August 1864, when Eva was five, she fell. Josephine wrote about it afterwards to someone she trusted, and what she wrote was this: "Never can I lose that memory, the fall, the sudden cry, and then the silence."
Two years later the family moved to Liverpool, where Josephine's husband George became Principal of the college there. Every morning he and their three sons went off to the college early and came home in the evening, and Josephine was left alone in a new house in a strange city, hour after hour, with nothing to do and nothing to think about except the daughter who was not there. She tried music. She tried reading. She tried painting. None of it worked. She said later that a grief like hers comes in waves, and that the second wave is worse than the first, because it has been gathering strength all the while you thought it had gone.
And then she did something that almost nobody does. She wrote: "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." She did not have a plan. She said so: no clear idea beyond that, no scheme for helping anybody. She only wanted to find someone whose heart ached worse than hers did, so that she could say to them, and mean it, "I understand: I too have suffered."
So she went out into the Liverpool docks and found the poorest women in the city, the ones nobody else would touch, and brought them home.
What she learned from them changed the rest of her life. There were laws then, the Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed the police in certain towns to seize any woman they suspected of being a prostitute and have her examined by force. The men who bought from those women were not touched at all. In December 1869 Josephine drafted a protest against those laws and published it in a newspaper, and 124 women signed their names to it, Florence Nightingale among them. One of its clauses says the whole thing plainly: "it is unjust to punish the sex who are the victims of a vice, and leave unpunished the sex who are the main cause, both of the vice and its dreaded consequences."
Respectable Victorian ladies did not write sentences like that in newspapers. For years afterwards Josephine was slandered, threatened, shouted down, and mobbed. She said something surprising about all of it. She said it was the easy part. The hard years, she wrote, had been the silent ones before, when she saw the wrong and no one would say anything about it and there was no fight to join. "Those alone who have trod the silent and secret 'way of Calvary' will fully understand me." Being hated was a relief. It meant the battle had finally started.
In February 1883, standing in the lobby of the House of Commons beside her husband, she watched a petition go past with 1,553 names on it from West Ham, gathered in less than a week by poor working parents whose own children had been taken. She wrote to her son Stanley that the mood of Parliament had changed, and that she could feel something more than politics in the room: "it was when the great Incarnation of purity drew near to the 'possessed' man of old that the 'unclean spirits' cried out." That May the forced examinations were suspended. In 1886 the Acts were repealed altogether.
She had not done it alone; James Stansfeld carried the argument through Parliament while she carried it through the country. And she did not stop when it was won: the next year she took the same fight to India. But the shape of it was set in that empty house in 1866, by a woman who went looking for a pain worse than her own and found a whole city of it, and never once suggested that her own sorrow had been cured. She wrote that the inward sorrow had been necessary, that it was what made the action real and gave it depth and constancy. The grief was not taken away from her. It was given somewhere to go.
You will probably not be asked to change a law. But you will be given, sooner or later, a grief that does not lift and cannot be argued with, and you will be told by everyone kind that the thing to do is rest, distract yourself, wait. Josephine Butler did the opposite, and she was honest about why: she went looking for people whose pain was worse than hers because her own was unbearable, not because she was good. What she found was work that outlasted the grief without curing it. That is a strange kind of comfort, and a truer one than the sort that promises the ache will stop. When the thing you are carrying will not be put down, where might you carry it?
Josephine Butler is one of the very few commemorated figures who can be followed almost entirely in her own words. She published more than forty titles between 1868 and 1900, and two long first-person volumes carry the whole career: Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896) and the posthumous Josephine E. Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir (1909), assembled by George W. and Lucy A. Johnson chiefly out of Personal Reminiscences and her earlier Recollections of George Butler (1892). Against those stand two near-contemporary reference accounts, the Dictionary of National Biography's 1912 notice of her and its 1901 notice of her husband, written within a decade or so of each death. Modern scholarship rests on a five-volume documentary edition by Jane Jordan and Ingrid Sharp (2002/2003).
The outline is firm. Born Josephine Elizabeth Grey at Milfield, Northumberland, on 13 April 1828, fourth daughter of John Grey of Dilston (1785-1868), a land agent, agricultural reformer, and ally of Wilberforce in the anti-slavery cause; married to George Butler at Oxford on 8 January 1852; at Cheltenham from 1857, Liverpool from 1866, Winchester from 1882 when Gladstone offered her husband a canonry there. Eva's death in August 1864 is given by the DNB itself as the turn toward rescue work, and it is also Butler's own account of it, which is worth saying because the two are not always the same thing. She died at Wooler on 30 December 1906 and was buried at Kirknewton, Northumberland; her husband, who died in London on 14 March 1890, lies at Winchester.
Two things in the record are commonly told wrong. The first is the repeal, which was not one event: the compulsory examinations were suspended in May 1883 and the Acts were fully repealed only in 1886, and James Stansfeld carried both stages through the Commons on statistical evidence of the laws' medical failure. The second is a date Butler got wrong herself. Writing in 1896, she opens her account of the Women's Protest with "On the 1st January, 1870," and speaks of two thousand signatures; the Protest actually ran in the Daily News on 31 December 1869 with 124 signatories, the larger figure being a later cumulative total. It is a useful caution about memoirs generally, and about this one in particular.
Two episodes resist tidying. In 1885 W. T. Stead, seeking to prove that a child could be bought in London, staged the purchase of thirteen-year-old Eliza Armstrong from her mother for five pounds. The woman who carried out the procurement was Rebecca Jarrett, a former brothel-keeper and Salvation Army convert then living at Butler's Winchester refuge, whom Butler had recommended to Stead. The resulting outcry forced through the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 14 August 1885, raising the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Stead and Jarrett were then convicted of abduction; he served three months, she six at Millbank. Butler was questioned and never charged, and afterwards published a defence of Jarrett as the case's scapegoat. Both halves are true: the law was a real and lasting achievement, and the pressure that produced it used a real child as an instrument.
Butler is not a canonised saint. There is no cause, no shrine, no pilgrimage, and no relics; there is a Grade II listed gravestone in the churchyard of St Gregory the Great at Kirknewton, about five yards west of the tower, where her son George buried her. What exists instead is a modern liturgical commemoration and a good deal of memorial and educational infrastructure: a window in the Lady Chapel at Liverpool Cathedral, her name added in 1907 to the Reformers' Memorial at Kensal Green, a Durham college opened in 2006, a memorial trust in Liverpool, and the Josephine Butler Society, which descends from her own Ladies' National Association by way of a 1915 merger and a 1953 renaming and remains a secular advocacy body rather than a devotional one.
Her commemoration entered the Church of England's calendar with the first edition of Exciting Holiness in 1997, alongside the Common Worship Calendar, Lectionary and Collects authorised from Advent that year; she was part of the original slate, not a later addition. She keeps 30 May as a Lesser Festival, "Social Reformer, 1906." The Anglican Church in North America commemorates her on the same day as a "Renewer of Society." The date is not the day of her death, which falls deep in Christmastide, but the day of her baptism in Northumberland in 1828.
Josephine Butler's own account of her turn to rescue work, including the passage beginning "I became possessed with an irresistible desire to go forth and find some pain keener than my own," is at pages 58-59 of Josephine E. Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir, edited by George W. Johnson and Lucy A. Johnson with an introduction by James Stuart (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith; London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1909). Her words on Eva's death, "Never can I lose that memory, the fall, the sudden cry, and then the silence," are at pages 49-51 of the same volume, from a letter written at Cheltenham in August 1864. The letter to her son Stanley of 27 February 1883, with the West Ham petition and the line "it was when the great Incarnation of purity drew near to the 'possessed' man of old that the 'unclean spirits' cried out," is at page 174; it had already appeared in her Recollections of George Butler (1892), where the wording reads "two days ago" rather than "a few days ago."
The Via Crucis passage, "Those alone who have trod the silent and secret 'way of Calvary' will fully understand me," together with her statement that the inward sorrow "had been necessary for the vitalising of righteous action, and the insuring of depth, reality and constancy," is at pages 16-17 of Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1896), under the running title "The Via Crucis." The Women's Protest, drafted by Butler and signed by 124 women, is reproduced at pages 17-20 of the same volume; the clause quoted here is its fourth head. It was first published in the Daily News, 31 December 1869, page 5. Her phrase "the best, and the least guilty of the nations" and her remark on the purity societies' "fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force" are reported in the modern secondary literature rather than located in these two volumes.
Both first-person volumes are public domain and are also available from Project Gutenberg. The standard modern edition of the campaign material is Jane Jordan and Ingrid Sharp, editors, Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns: Diseases of the Body Politic, five volumes (Routledge, 2002/2003). Her own life of Catherine of Siena, Catharine of Siena: A Biography (1878), which Glen Petrie calls probably her best work, is the one place where she takes an earlier commemorated woman as an explicit pattern for public speech.
The second is empire. Butler carried the campaign to India from 1886-87, publishing The Queen's Daughters in India in 1887 and helping secure a unanimous Commons vote in June 1888 against the analogous colonial legislation, which the India Office then circumvented. She was nonetheless an explicit supporter of British imperialism, writing that England was "the best, and the least guilty of the nations" for having abolished slavery, and publishing Native Races and the War in 1900 in criticism of racial prejudice but in support of British policy in South Africa. She was not an anti-colonial figure and did not claim to be. She applied one principle as far as the framework she lived inside would carry it.
A last correction, since it bears on how she is remembered. The phrase most often put in her mouth, "God and one woman make a majority," appears in neither of her large first-person volumes and no source that repeats it names a work, a letter, or a speech. It may yet be hers. It cannot be cited.
Almighty and everlasting God, you kindled the flame of your love in the heart of your servant Josephine Butler to manifest your compassion and mercy to the poor and the persecuted: Grant to us, your humble servants, a like faith and power of love, that we who give thanks for his righteous zeal may profit by his example; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Renewer of Society
Exodus 3:7–12Psalm 145:1–13vRomans 12:9–21Luke 6:20–38