The truly great women of history are not celebrated as they should be.  Look at the furore when a number of women campaigned to get one – one! – of our bank notes to commemorate Jane Austen, a writer universally acknowledged (pretty much) to be one of the giants of English literature.  Whilst statues and street names grant immortality to men whose deeds have been pretty much forgotten and would hardly be celebrated today – ‘heroes’ of war and empire for the most part – very few women make the grade.

Josephine Butler certainly has been consigned to the shadows for far too long.  She was once described as ‘the most distinguished Englishwoman of the nineteenth century’ (by Millicent Fawcett).  There have been a number of books about her, and the Church of England commemorates her, appropriately enough, in prayer on a dedicated day in the church calendar.  The University of Durham has named a College after her, and there’s a Josephine Butler Primary Campus also in Northumberland, her birthplace.  But still, we should know more, we should celebrate this truly remarkable woman.

As her latest biographer, Helen Mathers, says, ‘her achievements had lasting impact.  Her name deserves to be remembered by all who value women’s struggles to improve their lives’.  Helen’s book both justifies that claim, and explains why she is so much less well-known than her contemporary, Florence Nightingale, for example.

Because Josephine Butler, whilst epitomising many of the virtues expected of Victorian womanhood (piety, purity, motherhood and devotion to her husband), also broke all the rules.  She went into places where respectable women should never venture, precisely because that was where she found the women she spent her life defending and supporting.  Not only that but she spoke in public about their plight, about the abuses of the system which forced internal examinations – ‘steel rape’ – on suspected prostitutes in order to protect their male clients from disease, and the inequalities which trapped so many women in situations where prostitution might seem their only option.    A contemporary journalist described her as ‘an indecent maenad, a shrieking sister, frenzied, unsexed, and utterly without shame’.  She minded that, terribly.

Josephine was driven by her convictions to go on, despite the cost to her family, to her health, to her reputation, because she believed utterly in her crusade.  She saw not only the immediate injustices but the underlying systemic ones that allowed these abuses to continue – the separate spheres for men and women which kept so many women ignorant and denied them a voice, the lack of educational opportunities,  of voting rights, of rights for married women.    And she was part of all of those campaigns – all of the movements which laid the foundations for the legislative and cultural changes which swept through the twentieth century.

But her support for the most despised of women was at the heart of her life’s work.  She ‘made no distinction between “respectable” and “fallen” women’, identifying with those whose bodies were subject to abuse by men, the men who had forced them on to the streets in the first place and/or abused them whilst they were there, and the doctors who enforced surgical treatments to control them.

Helen Mathers vividly describes how Josephine’s own desolate sense of loss after the death of one of her children drove her to ‘find some pain keener than my own’.  She wasn’t some pious do-gooder, despising the very people she set out to help – from the start she risked her reputation, her dignity, her health and her personal safety by going into the workhouse, sitting on the floor of the oakum shed with the women and girls who worked there (prisoners, or workhouse inmates) and talking to them, alone with them.

Her faith was integral to her campaign, and her marriage was essential to it.  In many ways, George Butler was as remarkable as Josephine.  He must have been dismayed, surely, by her campaigning, by the effects of her work on their sons, by the cost to her health, and the damage to his own career of having such a notorious wife.  But he stood by her, supported her unshakably and she could not have done what she did without him.

If she were with us now, what would she be doing?  She would be in Rotherham, and Rochdale, where vulnerable young girls have been abused on an unthinkable scale and ‘the authorities’ have turned blind eyes.  She would be working with refugee organisations to help protect young women who arrive here after terrible trauma and find themselves destitute, or threatened with removal to the country where they were subjected to violence.   She would be campaigning against trafficking and sex tourism.  Wherever the struggle is, she would be there.

I wondered what Josephine herself might have wished for as a memorial to her achievements.  A University College would certainly please her, and a day of Anglican prayer.  She would be happy that the Josephine Butler Society continues to campaign on the issues closest to her heart.   Would she want to be commemorated on a bank-note?  Would she want a statue?  Perhaps not, who knows.  But for us, who have inherited the world that she fought for, but who see around us daily the evidence that her victories were not absolute, and that the fight must continue, it would be good to see reminders of her in Liverpool, perhaps, where her work really began.  And if that prompted people to ask, who was Josephine Butler, and what did she do, then this book will provide the answers.

It’s a profoundly moving story, astonishing and inspiring.  We can despair that the evils Josephine Butler poured all of her energies into fighting are still with us, or we can hope that there are and always will be people who will take up those battles on behalf of the most vulnerable, the excluded, the despised. As a humanist, I believe passionately that this is so, that knowing that this life is all we have makes what we do with it matter more, not less, that it can make us kinder, and braver.  Josephine Butler was no humanist, believing that both the struggle and her strength to pursue it came from God, and in her honour I will, just this once, conclude with a prayer:

God of compassion and love,
by whose grace your servant Josephine Butler
followed in the way of your Son
in caring for those in need:
help us like her to work with strength
for the restoration of all to the dignity
and freedom of those created in your image;
through Jesus Christ our Saviour,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

(Church of England Common Worship texts, 30 May, Collect)

Patron Saint of Prostitutes: Josephine Butler and a Victorian Scandal by Helen Mathers was published by The History Press on 11 August, 2014.  ISBN: 9780752492094  It is currently available from all UK booksellers and will be published in the USA in November.

A Kindle edition is available from Amazon.     Order a Kindle edition

Signed copies are available from the author at:

£11.50 + postage. Email helenmathers1@gmail.com.