Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Josephine Butler
-
Standard Name: Butler, Josephine
Birth Name: Josephine Elizabeth Grey
Married Name: Josephine Elizabeth Butler
Used Form: an English mother
Used Form: the author of the Memoir of John Grey of Dilston
Social reformer JB
is primarily remembered for her unrelenting efforts in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts during the second half of the nineteenth century. She was both a gifted orator and a prolific writer on the many causes she espoused. Author of nearly forty pamphlets, she also composed books of political and personal writings: essays, biographies of people whose lives influenced her own, and an autobiography. Almost all of her writings address questions of social and political import—the repeal campaign, the double sexual standard, women's rights, and religious issues.
Petrie, Glen. A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler. Macmillan.
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
Textual Features
Christabel Pankhurst
CP
alleges here that 75% to 80% of all Englishmen at this time consorted with prostitutes, caught sexually transmitted diseases, and then infected their innocent wives. She argues that two things are necessary to end...
Literary responses
Christabel Pankhurst
Nearly twenty years later Sylvia Pankhurst
accused this book of sensationalism and of preaching the sex war deprecated and denied by the older Suffragists.
Purvis, June, and Maureen Wright. “Writing Suffragette History: the contending autobiographical narratives of the Pankhursts”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
14
, No. 3/4, pp. 405-33.
419
In the later twentieth century it was dismissed by a...
FMR
became deeply interested in political debates and struggles around the issue of home rule for Ireland, and went so far as to carry secret messages back and forth between England and Ireland. This...
Textual Production
Maude Royden
MR
was sensitive to the damage done by cultural stereotypes, prejudices, and assumptions about female sexuality. Much of her work argues defiantly against the sexual double standard and the widespread condemnation of female sexuality in...
Publishing
Menella Bute Smedley
During the same year she contributed a serial story, Lucy Ferrars, to a feminist journal sponsored by Josephine Butler
. MBS
's serial spanned two successive titles of this journal, appearing in issues of...
politics
Flora Annie Steel
FAS
continued her advocacy for Indian causes after her return to England, through the medium of letters to the Times. She wrote in January 1897 to support Indian cottage industry by seeking customers for...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Stott
Here MS
writes grippingly of her own life, and illuminatingly about myriad subjects of public or cultural interest: the lives, customs, and deaths of newspapers, the conspiracy of silence about sex which had not dissipated...
Stories of ACS
's extreme drinking habits and talk of his immoral personal life (largely sparked by the scandal associated with his publications) spread. Though many tales were untrue, he is said to have sometimes...
Publishing
Julia Wedgwood
JW
contributed Female Suffrage, Considered Chiefly with Regard to its Indirect Results to Woman's Work and Woman's Culture, a volume of feminist essays edited by Josephine Butler
.
As a direct result of such work, she became a friend of such women as Josephine Butler
and Frances Power Cobbe
.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
