Josephine Butler(1828–1906)

Josephine Elizabeth Grey was born at Milfield in north Northumberland on the thirteenth of April 1828, seventh of the ten children of John Grey of Dilston, a leading agricultural reformer of the Northumberland Greys and a first cousin of Earl Grey the Reform Prime Minister, and Hannah Annett of Alnwick. She was raised at the Dilston estate in the Tyne valley, educated at home by her parents and at a Newcastle-upon-Tyne boarding-school, and in 1852 in her twenty-fourth year married the academic and Anglican clergyman George Butler (later Canon of Winchester), then a tutor at Durham University. They moved to Oxford on his appointment as Public Examiner in 1857, to Cheltenham on his appointment as Vice-Principal of Cheltenham College in 1857, and to Liverpool in 1866 on his appointment as Headmaster of Liverpool College.

Her work as a social reformer began in Liverpool. From 1866 in her thirty-eighth year she took up the systematic visiting and rehabilitation of the prostitutes of the Liverpool docks, established the Brownlow Hill Home for fallen women, and through the Liverpool Ladies Education Association from 1867 founded the campaign for the higher education of women that led to the establishment of the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women under her presidency in 1867 and to the founding of Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1871.

In 1869 she took up the campaign for which she is universally remembered. The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, passed by Parliament without public debate as a public-health measure to control venereal disease in the Royal Navy and the Army garrison towns, had given the police in eighteen designated garrison towns the power to subject any woman they suspected of prostitution to compulsory genital inspection and to compulsory confinement in a lock hospital for up to three months. No comparable provision applied to the men who frequented the women. Butler convened on the thirty-first of December 1869 the founding meeting of the Ladies' National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts at Bristol, issued the foundational manifesto The Ladies' Protest published in the Daily News on the first of January 1870, and led the campaign for repeal for the next sixteen years.

She conducted across those sixteen years one of the most sustained and disciplined parliamentary lobbying campaigns of the late nineteenth century: she gave public lectures across forty English and Scottish towns, intervened personally in eight parliamentary by-elections to defeat ministerial candidates who supported the Acts, produced through the LNA's weekly bulletin the Shield the most-circulated single-issue political weekly of the 1870s, took the campaign across the Continent in the foundation of the International Abolitionist Federation at Geneva in 1875, and gave four sets of formal evidence to two Royal Commissions and one Select Committee of the House of Commons on the operation of the Acts. The Acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in April 1886; the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (provoked partly by the parallel W. T. Stead Maiden Tribute campaign that Butler had supported) raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.

She continued through the 1890s the international work of the Abolitionist Federation against state-licensed prostitution in Continental Europe, the British Indian regulation system and the Belgian Congo. She retired to Wooler in north Northumberland on her husband's death in 1890, and died at the family house at Galewood near Wooler on the thirtieth of December 1906 in her seventy-eighth year. She is buried at the parish churchyard at Kirknewton, looking south to the Cheviot Hills. The Butler name in modern English-language women's-rights history carries the weight of the seventeen-year campaign and the Daily News protest of January 1870.