In her memoir, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, Butler described her deliberations as filled with angst. She and her husband, a headteacher in Liverpool, knew it would harm his career. But neither was in doubt that the acts had to be fought. They gave the police the power to carry out compulsory genital examinations of women they believed to be prostitutes – but not their male customers. If the women refused to be checked, they were sentenced to jail with hard labour. If found to have a venereal disease, they were forcibly detained in a “lock hospital”.
In 1870, the LNA seized the chance of a byelection in Colchester. Sir Henry Storks was the Liberal candidate and a former governor of Malta, where he had introduced similar laws. He was also on record as arguing that the acts should be applied to soldiers’ wives – a suggestion which appalled Butler, who took it as proof that the acts were an insult to all women and potentially the start of something even more broadly threatening.
Convinced that MPs had deliberately avoided publicity when the laws were passed, Butler and her supporters organised prayer meetings and gave out thousands of leaflets. This provoked a furious response and repealers were repeatedly attacked. Butler was forced to hide from an angry crowd in a grocer’s cellar, and to leave a hotel in which she had booked under a false name in the middle of the night. But when the votes were counted, it was clear that the bold tactics had succeeded. Storks lost.
When the “first wave” of feminism is referred to, it is usually suffragettes that people have in mind. Less often remembered is that this was not the first time the British women’s movement rejected the reformers’ tactics of petitions, letters and lobbies in favour of a much more direct challenge.
At the root of her determination to overthrow the laws lay her conviction that they violated women’s civil rights. In speeches and writing, she cited the principle of habeas corpus – the prohibition of unlawful imprisonment – that she saw as fundamental to the British constitution. While advocates of women’s rights had long recognised the myriad ways in which women were disadvantaged, the repeal campaign was the first time that the forceful and legal operation of a sexual double standard was publicly challenged by women themselves. The coalition of police, military and courts that promoted the CD Acts, Butler told supporters, was “a diabolical triple power”; the forcible inspection of genitals was itself an assault.
Evidence heard by a Royal Commission pointed to the different way of doing things in Sweden. There, free advice and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases were offered in clinics to all who sought them. This, rather than unrealistic demands for total abstinence, was the model proposed by the reformers – and one far closer to a modern public health approach.
But such progressive notions were ignored, as was a recommendation that the age of protection (consent) be increased from 12 to 14. Instead, MPs chose to retain the status quo whereby men could legally have sex with children (which we would now call rape; the age was raised to 13 in 1875). It took more than a decade of campaigning by more than 100 local groups, and many years’ worth of evidence showing that the acts had failed to curb disease, before parliament backed a motion to suspend them in 1883. Butler was in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons, where women were allowed to watch from behind a screen, when the cheer went up.
Of course Josephine Butler has not been forgotten by those wishing to denigrate her by asserting she was a ‘wowser’ and opposed to women’s sexual freedom – when of course as this article points out the opposite was the case. Josephine Butler has neither been forgotten by those of us who do acknowledge her vital work, her strength of purpose, and her courage.