When we talk about people who died before some great effort of theirs was realized, we pity them for not getting to see that effort come to fruition.
The person or pursuit matters little; we wish they had lived longer, we wish they had been born in a different time, we wish it could have happened earlier.
We miss the point of the pursuit. And today, we miss the point of Josephine Butler's work if we pity her for dying before women got the right to vote -- because she worked to advance the rights of women.
And she did.
Josephine Butler worked with whores. Today, we call them sex workers if we are being neutral. They work in the field of sex services; they are sex workers. In news reports, they are called prostitutes, call girls, hookers, whores, sex slaves (a term I find repugnant because of its conflation with something unrelated in the BDSM community) and escorts.
Two of my friends have been sex workers.
One was a hooker (she called herself a hooker, so I call her a hooker) for 18 months in New Orleans. She got into the business because she wanted to, and she got out of the business because she was ready to leave it. She has and had no regrets about doing it; indeed, when she talked to me about her experiences (she was hesitant to tell me even that she'd done it because she was worried that I would reject her), she spoke fondly of being some men's first sexual experience and helping them understand their bodies.
The other was an escort (he called himself an escort, so I call him an escort) for probably a year or so. He was gay in small-town Virginia, and when he accidentally came out to his mother, she kicked him out, he couldn't stay with his father (long story) and ... well, you have bills to pay, you have to pay them with something, and righteous indignation is not legal tender.
When he started escort work, he charged $75 an hour. A week or whatever later, he realized he was in such demand that he could charge double, so he did. His work consisted of, he told me, everything from dates to sex work. One event, held no later than 2003 and probably a year or two before, was an all-male dance at which he saw a high-ranking Republican with a young Asian date he figured was not older than about 14. (Do not ask me which one. You now know as much as you are ever going to know about this.)
Sex work is still seen by a giant percent of the population as somehow bad or wrong, and sex workers are still victimized by basically anyone who has a chance to victimize them. Does this mean Josephine Butler should have been born last century, not in the 1820s, so she could do more now to help? Despite her best efforts, sex workers are still targeted. Their work is still illegal in most places, they are denigrated, they are targeted in stings, their health care is atrocious, and I can't imagine how many bad first dates they have been on.
If there is no Josephine Butler to help spearhead efforts to deactivate the Contagious Diseases Acts, how exactly do we know it goes away as quickly as it does? How do we know women's rights activists can then turn their attention away from removing negative things and introducing positive ones?
Josephine Butler's fight against the Contagious Diseases Acts was part of a larger effort to help the sex work industry. That work as a whole started before she was born and will be going long after I die. That work in a developed country made doing that work in other countries reasonable. Doable. Remotely safe. That work will continue until sex work is always safe and an occupation of choice, not a last resort or a prison sentence.
Josephine Butler set the table for today's sex work advocacy by doing what could be done when she was around to do it.
Do enough reading about Josephine Butler and you will see what horrible pain she suffered.
Her bones did not creak as she walked; she did not care for a relative who had a wasting disease; and she did not struggle through work that got more difficult because she was doing it.
But while we rightly imagine as cruel a world in which women are seen sometimes as a necessary evil, and while we rail against societies in which women are blamed for what men do even as those societies forgive a culture that says men cannot control themselves ... we have each other, so to speak. We can look at that mess and work to clean it up. We can remind ourselves that we are better than that garbage -- but we do well to remind ourselves also of where we come from and where we must still go here.
And Josephine Butler grew up in a supportive family, and her husband supported her, and she spent her life learning how deeply people cared as she did -- but she spent just as long a time learning how deeply people just did not care as she did.
Josephine saw in one instance -- one of many -- what pain people can inflict out of convenience:
A few years later she discovered that [her husband's co-workers'] contempt for women had an even uglier side to it, when a local girl was sent to jail for infanticide after a don from Balliol College had got her pregnant and abandoned her. She was so shocked by the girl’s plight and the lack of sympathy for her at the University that she went straight to Benjamin Jowett, the Master of the College, and urged him to “suggest some means [...] of bringing to a sense of his crime the man who had wronged her” (quoted in Petrie 1971, p. 40). At this point she came face to face with the notorious Victorian double standard of morality. Jowett took the view that it was better to do nothing, and warned her that:
“It would only do harm to open up in any way such a question as this. It is dangerous to [arouse] a sleeping lion.”
(quoted in Pearson 1972, p. 59)
We would today, many of us, rally behind the woman and hold the man up to scorn.
Worse than the opposite happened then.
And worse yet, at least eight years later, was the pain life can inflict for any or no reason:
The greatest sorrow of Josephine Butler's life occurred at this time. The Butlers had three older sons, and a youngest child, a daughter Eva. One evening Josephine told her daughter to go away, for she was late to a tea; when the Butlers returned in the evening through the front door, Eva rushed out to the stairway landing to call to them, fell over the railing and plunged to her death. For the forty remaining years of her life Josephine Butler wished she herself had died instead, and blamed herself for rebuking the child. Soon afterwards her son Stanley had a near fatal attack of diphtheria, and while on a trip with her sister Harriet, on the way to Naples, Josephine experienced some kind of convulsive illness. In 1865 at the age of 37 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, and to say (as now I knew I could) to afflicted people, [']I understand; I too have suffered.[']"
Josephine Butler expressed that great sorrow in her autobiography:
These are but weak words. May you never know the grief which they hide rather than reveal. But God is good. He has, in mercy, at last sent me a ray of light, and low in the dust at His feet I have thanked Him for that ray of light as I never thanked Him for any blessing in the whole of my life before. It was difficult to endure at first the shock of the suddenness of that agonising death. Little gentle spirit ! the softest death for her would have seemed sad enough. 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 drooping head resting on his shoulder, and her beautiful golden hair, all stained with blood, falling over his arm. Would to God that I had died that death for her ! If we had been permitted, I thought, to have one look, one word of farewell, one moment of recognition ! But though life flickered for an hour, she never recognised the father and mother whom she loved so dearly. We called her by her name, but there was no answer. She was our only daughter, the light and joy of our lives. She flitted in and out like a butterfly all day. She had never had a day's or an hour's illness in all her sweet life. She never gave us a moment of anxiety, her life was one flowing stream of mirth and fun and abounding love.
She could have packed it in, and not a soul worth saving would have faulted her.
But rather than hiding herself or declaring that life could get no worse and resolving to live an ordinary life, she did what some of us do when pain finds us and teaches us anew how much a thing can hurt:
We find more pain. We find people who know that pain and know worse pain. We throw ourselves into as much as we can put up with.
She had felt pain and separation and disrespect and anything else you'd care to name.
And so she went out and looked for more and kept looking and became known for looking for it and took the opportunity to make something positive out of her pain.
And in among her work with British sex workers, she saw what we see: For being the world's oldest profession, it is sorely in need of a union.
Butler was especially moved by the dying, many of whom were victims of venereally-diseased unions. With the help of her sister Emily she acquired a house where these could await death in warmth and comfort.
Today we have women's shelters, where one hopes any sex worker would be welcome, given the dangerous nature of street work. But we also have an entire political party dedicated to making life as shitty as legally possible for anyone who is not a rich, white man.
Providing for the basic needs of people was a controversial and remarkable undertaking in the 1860s. One hundred and forty years later, we are still fighting that war as politicians move to defund health care for women and shift funds from one vital program to another vital program because oooooh, noooo, can't raise taxes!
It is enough to make a soul vomit.
"Let me look at your vagina."
The list of people who could say that to my wife and not get decked (at most merciful) is quite short.
The list of people who could say that without impunity to my mother or my sisters or my niece or my grandmother or my boss or my female co-workers or some woman I know only online ... is quite short.
Want to look? Better have a reeeeeeeeeeeal good reason, friend, or we're going to get quite unfriendly right quick.
You a doctor? No? You doing a forensic interview because the woman was assaulted? No? You paying for the privilege? No?
Then Step. Off.
... but in the 1860s in England, "policeman to arrest prostitutes in ports and army towns and bring them in to have compulsory checks for venereal disease. If the women were suffering from sexually transmitted diseases they were placed in a locked hospital until cured."
The law made no provisions for checking men for venereal disease. As such, as few as one very pushy man could infect one sex worker, get her put in a hospital -- a term I use as loosely as possible here -- and go on and infect another. And another. And another.
And would word get out? Yup. But what were you going to do? Refuse the work? Try to stick up for yourself? Even if you travel in packs, if the man is with several of his friends, you're going to need a mighty large group, and if a fight breaks out, I wonder with whom the local police will side -- the fallen women or the soldiers.
It gets worse:
It is awful work; the attitude they push us into first is so disgusting and so painful, and then these monstrous instruments – often they use several. They seem to tear the passage open first with their hands, and examine us, and then they thrust in instruments, and they pull them out and push them in, and they turn and twist them about; and if you cry out they stifle you.
Now, (a small) part of the reason this legislation was so bad is that it was passed with no publicity, no debate, no discussion and no dissent. Correspondingly, "the truth of the new law was known only by those who administered and applied it." And what's more:
On 30 September 1869 a meeting to oppose the Acts was held at the Royal Hotel, Bristol. Professor F. W. Newman and Robert Charleton attended. The first public criticism came from Dr Charles Bell Taylor (an ophthalmic surgeon) and Mr Charles Worth MRCS (a surgeon), who read a paper against the Acts at the Social Science Conference at Bristol in 1869. Most people did not even know the Acts existed, so quickly, privately and quietly had they been passed in parliament. Crucially, although the new law applied exclusively to women and not at all to men, no woman was consulted or allowed any input whatsoever in their passing. Elizabeth Wolstenholme heard the lecture and told her friend Josephine Butler about it the next day. She was incensed, and lost no time in forming a national association for the repeal of the Acts. By March 1870 the movement had its own weekly newspaper, The Shield, published by the Rev. Dr Hooppell of South Shields; six months later it began to be published in London.
I am no scholar on the printing process in 1860s England, but I have to think that five months in which to put together a weekly newspaper is a pretty short time. My newspaper started putting out a weekly a few years ago, and the process was not short. And my newspaper is owned by a giant media company. (No, I'm not going to tell you more than that.)
Yet more fun arrived with the efforts to repeal the acts:
Although many contemporaries were scandalized by genteel women speaking at public meetings about such inflammatory matters, others rallied to the cause, and these social activists acquired valuable political experience in organizing public rallies and speaking before large audiences.
I could set a record for longest DK diary by detailing more extensively the Contagious Diseases Acts fight and Josephine Butler's fight against it, or by comparing it to Arizona's immigration law, or by noting that it presumed guilt, but because I would like to sleep sometime today, I will sum up with the important thing:
She won.
Amid Josephine Butler's work with and for sex workers can be lost her work on education (much of which I covered specifically or generally two days ago) or her efforts on getting voting rights or property rights or how she influenced those who came after her. I have given you the information you need to find out about it and tell the stories to everyone who will listen. I will finish instead with not more storytelling but this short musing:
Josephine Butler, and Millicent Fawcett, and this crusader, and that advocate, and this person whose passion is other people's lives, was born into a family that showed her how to feel for people and encouraged her to want to help people and allowed her to find what she wanted to do and do it.
And in the midst of her fortune and her personality and her health providing for her so many opportunities to help people, we very quickly and easily lose sight of how very many people did not have her family or did not have her drive (innate or acquired) or did not have her health or did not have whatever else.
We shouldn't. While we do not know what we would have now without Josephine Butler working for decades to further civil rights in Britain, we must also remember that for every Josephine Butler are countless women who were kept from the work they could have done because of this or that circumstance.
But we can suppose that their children -- sons and daughters, for behind these good women are good men -- might not have been similarly constrained. Their children might have had more opportunities -- opportunities to improve civil rights, opportunities to see what could be and make it so, opportunities to begin in other countries the work started in Britain and elsewhere, opportunities to do as they dreamed because others fought to turn those dreams into goals.
Josephine Butler was tremendously lucky to have been born when and where and to whom and with whom she was born. Let not one person tell you anything else.
Josephine Butler was born in a house with a door open to a table built by the men and women who worked before and with her, and she set the table for the men and women who worked with and after her, and yesterday, and today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and until the work is done, that table (which is this table) will continue to find ever-increasing numbers of men and women coming to it, looking to make their mark on and find their place at a table that was once only even known of by a few people, work on it done furtively at night, then daringly in the light of day, and now around the clock in homes and Houses and Senates around the world
and
on
your
screen.
Further reading and action:
University of Iowa professor Florence Boos writes about Josephine Butler.
A seven-page paper on Josephine Butler, more of a broad view, and with its own bibliography.
A broad and brief biography with self-referential links, but good for surface treatment of a variety of issues.
Virginia Woolf's discussion of, among other things, the life that awaited the female version of William Shakespeare.
Another brief treatment, this of the Contagious Diseases Acts, and with more suggested reading.
More on the acts, with a lot more. This is a magazine worth a second look.
More on the acts. Phenomenal material. You could lose yourself for as long as you wanted on this site.
Josephine Butler's autobiography, which I discovered quite by accident.
More about sex workers' rights today.
The International Union of Sex Workers.
Protecting sex workers' health.
Sex Workers Without Borders.
The League of Women Voters.
Voting rights for women of color.
Latino civil rights.