Josephine Butler, Christian Feminist
Nov. 11th, 2010 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafIt's certainly too long so will need a bit of trimming, but:
Josephine Butler’s probably most famous for her campaigning on prostitution – an act which many of her contemporaries considered shocking – and her activities among and on behalf of marginalized women only make sense if we look at them in the context both of her faith and her views on the wider question of women, which is part of her wider views on how Christians ought to behave, and what a Christian society ought to look like.
Butler first became conscious of the problems of women in Victorian society when listening to the – male, naturally – colleagues her husband, who at the time was working for Oxford University, brought home. She sat, silent and angry, as men criticized Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Ruth, which deals with a young woman who is seduced and abandoned, as indecent, and maintained a blatant double standard. Women who sinned were evil and lost; men who sinned had just slipped up. However, it was only somewhat later that Butler found her voice.
There are two strands that can’t really be separated. Firstly, after her daughter’s death, Butler sought to cope by finding ways to live out her faith among the poor and destitute. Working in the ‘casual ward’ of the Liverpool poorhouse and in the jails, she attempted to show these rejected, vulnerable, criminalized women that they still had value in God’s eyes, and to teach them to pray.
But secondly, Butler realized that it was no good to merely try to put plasters on injuries. She became involved in wider campaigns. In the 1860s she was signing petitions for votes for women, petitioned Cambridge University for the right for women to take examinations, and became involved in running campaigns for the married women’s property act. She published 90 pamphlets and books campaigning for women to be allowed to work freely and without restriction, and for a decent wage. This wasn’t just middle class activism, but directly connected to her concern for the poor and marginalized. When she received a letter defending the restrictions on women’s work on the grounds that ‘a women’s place is in the home’, Butler responded by calling such views ‘satanic’ and then providing detailed statistical evidence for how the restrictions on poorer women in particular lead, not to them leading a happy domestic life caring for their children, but to struggling on starvation wages – and, should anything go wrong, left with no alternative but prostitution, and ‘the destruction of bodies, of consciences, of souls’ – as she sharply pointed out, men were not caught in the same trap. Better off women still had their dignity and self-respect destroyed in the scramble to get a husband and in the necessity of marrying for mercenary reasons. Even when, later in her life, she was campaigning for the raising of the age of consent for girls, she kept her distance from the ‘purity’ groups, not because she disagreed that promiscuity was morally wrong, but because they put all the blame on individuals. For Butler, helping people to live as Christ called them meant helping them directly, and she recognized “loose women” as victims of injustice who had very little choice. Showing Christ’s love meant giving them that choice – whereas she criticized those who “were ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures, in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.” Instead, she argued, “Economics lie at the very root of practical morality.”
Butler’s radical commitment to social action in the name of Christ, even at the price of public disapproval, comes out most clearly in her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act. This legislation, initially affecting ports and garrison towns, though expansion to the North of England was planned – made the forced medical and police inspection of women suspected of prostitution legal. There was no right to refuse these very intrusive exams; if you did not consent, you were imprisoned. Even setting aside the obvious potential for abuse, the legislation was outrageous, and Butler became one of a coalition of middle-class feminists, radical working men, and non-conformists who spoke out. The campaign was described at the time as ‘the revolt of the women’; press and public were astonished to see ‘respectable’ women talking about venereal disease. Butler, who recognized that this law was just another instance of more powerful men blaming and exploiting weaker women, bluntly used the term ‘surgical rape’, and arguing that it was inhumane to treat women as ‘foul sewers’ rather than moral agents. Butler risked insult and injury – during one by-election, she has to escape from a barn which had been set alight by her opponents, while the police looked on – but held to her guns, upheld by her faith that God called her, like all Christians, to uphold the oppressed.
When we were talking about Butler earlier, there was some resistance to calling her a feminist – but I think she only makes sense in the context of first wave feminism (although the term ‘feminism’ only came into use in the 1890s, it had a precurser from the 1860s on in ‘womanism’). Yes, her life was dominated by a wish to serve the poorest and most marginalized of Christ’s people – but the concrete form that took was an authentic and distinctively Christian feminism, which proceeded from the recognition that the Kingdom of Heaven has no second class citizens, however much the world may try to degrade and misuse them.
"
Josephine Butler’s probably most famous for her campaigning on prostitution – an act which many of her contemporaries considered shocking – and her activities among and on behalf of marginalized women only make sense if we look at them in the context both of her faith and her views on the wider question of women, which is part of her wider views on how Christians ought to behave, and what a Christian society ought to look like.
Butler first became conscious of the problems of women in Victorian society when listening to the – male, naturally – colleagues her husband, who at the time was working for Oxford University, brought home. She sat, silent and angry, as men criticized Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Ruth, which deals with a young woman who is seduced and abandoned, as indecent, and maintained a blatant double standard. Women who sinned were evil and lost; men who sinned had just slipped up. However, it was only somewhat later that Butler found her voice.
There are two strands that can’t really be separated. Firstly, after her daughter’s death, Butler sought to cope by finding ways to live out her faith among the poor and destitute. Working in the ‘casual ward’ of the Liverpool poorhouse and in the jails, she attempted to show these rejected, vulnerable, criminalized women that they still had value in God’s eyes, and to teach them to pray.
But secondly, Butler realized that it was no good to merely try to put plasters on injuries. She became involved in wider campaigns. In the 1860s she was signing petitions for votes for women, petitioned Cambridge University for the right for women to take examinations, and became involved in running campaigns for the married women’s property act. She published 90 pamphlets and books campaigning for women to be allowed to work freely and without restriction, and for a decent wage. This wasn’t just middle class activism, but directly connected to her concern for the poor and marginalized. When she received a letter defending the restrictions on women’s work on the grounds that ‘a women’s place is in the home’, Butler responded by calling such views ‘satanic’ and then providing detailed statistical evidence for how the restrictions on poorer women in particular lead, not to them leading a happy domestic life caring for their children, but to struggling on starvation wages – and, should anything go wrong, left with no alternative but prostitution, and ‘the destruction of bodies, of consciences, of souls’ – as she sharply pointed out, men were not caught in the same trap. Better off women still had their dignity and self-respect destroyed in the scramble to get a husband and in the necessity of marrying for mercenary reasons. Even when, later in her life, she was campaigning for the raising of the age of consent for girls, she kept her distance from the ‘purity’ groups, not because she disagreed that promiscuity was morally wrong, but because they put all the blame on individuals. For Butler, helping people to live as Christ called them meant helping them directly, and she recognized “loose women” as victims of injustice who had very little choice. Showing Christ’s love meant giving them that choice – whereas she criticized those who “were ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures, in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.” Instead, she argued, “Economics lie at the very root of practical morality.”
Butler’s radical commitment to social action in the name of Christ, even at the price of public disapproval, comes out most clearly in her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act. This legislation, initially affecting ports and garrison towns, though expansion to the North of England was planned – made the forced medical and police inspection of women suspected of prostitution legal. There was no right to refuse these very intrusive exams; if you did not consent, you were imprisoned. Even setting aside the obvious potential for abuse, the legislation was outrageous, and Butler became one of a coalition of middle-class feminists, radical working men, and non-conformists who spoke out. The campaign was described at the time as ‘the revolt of the women’; press and public were astonished to see ‘respectable’ women talking about venereal disease. Butler, who recognized that this law was just another instance of more powerful men blaming and exploiting weaker women, bluntly used the term ‘surgical rape’, and arguing that it was inhumane to treat women as ‘foul sewers’ rather than moral agents. Butler risked insult and injury – during one by-election, she has to escape from a barn which had been set alight by her opponents, while the police looked on – but held to her guns, upheld by her faith that God called her, like all Christians, to uphold the oppressed.
When we were talking about Butler earlier, there was some resistance to calling her a feminist – but I think she only makes sense in the context of first wave feminism (although the term ‘feminism’ only came into use in the 1890s, it had a precurser from the 1860s on in ‘womanism’). Yes, her life was dominated by a wish to serve the poorest and most marginalized of Christ’s people – but the concrete form that took was an authentic and distinctively Christian feminism, which proceeded from the recognition that the Kingdom of Heaven has no second class citizens, however much the world may try to degrade and misuse them.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-11 08:25 pm (UTC)