Josephine Elizabeth Butler (1828 – 1906) makes it to Category 6 on the
Calendar (December 30 th ) but is not a Saint, per se.
An English feminist and social reformer, she campaigned for women's
suffrage, the right of women to better education, the end of coverture in
British law, the abolition of child prostitution, and an end to human
trafficking of young women and children into European prostitution.
She married George Butler, an Anglican
divine and schoolmaster, and the couple
had four children, the last of whom, Eva,
died falling from a banister.
The death was a turning point for Butler,
and she focused her feelings on helping
others, starting with the inhabitants of a
local workhouse. She began to
campaign for women's rights in British
law.
In 1869 she became involved in the
campaign to repeal the Contagious
Diseases Acts, legislation that attempted
to control the spread of venereal
diseases—particularly in the British
Army and Royal Navy—through the
forced medical examination of
prostitutes, a process she described as surgical or steel rape.
Butler had been appalled that some prostitutes were as young as 12, and
that there was a slave trade of young women and children from England to
the continent for the purpose of prostitution. Butler fought child prostitution
with help from the campaigning editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, William
Thomas Stead, who purchased a 13-year-old girl from her mother for £5.
The subsequent outcry led to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 which
raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 and brought in measures to stop
children becoming prostitutes.
Butler wrote more than 90 books and pamphlets over the course of her
career, most of which were in support of her campaigning, although she also
produced biographies of her father, her husband and Catherine of Siena.
After her death in 1906 the feminist intellectual Millicent Fawcett hailed her
as "the most distinguished Englishwoman of the nineteenth century".
Not only a staunch feminist but a passionate Christian, Butler’s own favourite
phrase was "God and one woman make a majority".
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