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.
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.
Leisure and Society
Algernon Charles Swinburne
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
politics
F. Mabel Robinson
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 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...
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...
Occupation
Susan Miles
The Robertses were succeeding a clergyman who also had liberal views. He had caused some offence by holding the funeral of Emily Davison
, the suffragist who was killed on the Derby racecourse.
Miles, Susan. Portrait of a Parson. George Allen and Unwin.
56
Here...
Publishing
Harriet Martineau
HM
was one of the first to be aware of the movement towards regulating prostitution in Britain by means of instituting in military districts the arrest and medical examination for syphilis of women who were...
Timeline
1866: Anne Jemima Clough and Josephine Butler founded...
31 December 1869: The Daily News published the Ladies' Protest,...
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31 December 1869
The Daily News published the Ladies' Protest, a document signed by 124 women which outlined their arguments for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.
1870: The National Association for the Promotion...
Hunt, Alan. Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation. Cambridge University Press.
157
26 February 1870: Josephine Butler wrote to the Dover News...
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26 February 1870
Josephine Butler
wrote to the Dover News complaining of a conspiracy of silence
Walkowitz, Judith R. ’We Are Not Beasts of the Field’: Prostitution and the Campaign Against the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1869-1886. University of Rochester.
117
emanating from London papers regarding the controversial Contagious Diseases Acts.
7 March 1870: The Shield, Josephine Butler's periodical...
Building item
7 March 1870
The Shield, Josephine Butler
's periodical organ of the anti-Contagious Diseases Act forces, began publication in South Shields.
Butler, Josephine. A Letter to the Mothers of England. 1881.
Butler, Josephine. “A Letter to the Mothers of England”. The Campaigners: Women and Sexuality, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta, Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994.
Butler, Josephine. An Appeal to the People of England on the Recognition and Superintendence of Prostitution by Governments. Frederick Banks, 1870.
Butler, Josephine. “An Appeal to the People of England on the Recognition and Superintendence of Prostitution by Governments”. The Sexuality Debates, edited by Sheila Jeffreys and Sheila Jeffreys, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, pp. 111-50.
Butler, Josephine. Catharine of Siena. Dyer Brothers, 1878.
Wedgwood, Julia. “Female Suffrage, Considered Chiefly with Regard to its Indirect Results”. Women’s Work and Women’s Culture, edited by Josephine Butler, Macmillan, 1869.
Butler, Josephine. Government by Police. Dyer Brothers, 1879.
Boucherett, Jessie. “How to Provide for Superfluous Women”. Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, edited by Josephine Butler, Macmillan, 1869, pp. 27-48.
Butler, Josephine. In Memoriam: Harriet Meuricoffre. Marshall and Son, 1901.
Butler, Josephine, and James Stuart. Josephine E. Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir. Editors Johnson, George W. and Lucy A. Johnson, J. W. Arrowsmith, 1909.
Butler, Josephine, and James Stuart. Josephine E. Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir. Editors Johnson, George W. and Lucy A. Johnson, J. W. Arrowsmith, 1928.
Butler, Josephine. Legislative Restrictions on the Industry of Women. Matthews and Sons, 1874.
Jex-Blake, Sophia. “Medicine as a Profession for Women”. Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, edited by Josephine Butler, Macmillan, 1869, pp. 78-120.
Butler, Josephine. Memoir of John Grey of Dilston. Edmonston and Douglas, 1869.
Butler, Josephine. Mrs. Butler’s Appeal to the Women of America. The Philanthropist, 1888.
Butler, Josephine. Native Races and the War. Gay and Bird, 1900.
Butler, Josephine. “Native Races and the War, 1900”. Indiana University: Victorian Women Writers Project.
Butler, Josephine, editor. Now-a-Days.
Butler, Josephine. Our Christianity Tested by the Irish Question. T. Fisher Unwin, 1887.
Butler, Josephine. Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade. H. Marshall and Son, 1896.
Butler, Josephine. Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade. Hyperion Press, 1989.
Butler, Josephine. Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade. Cambridge University Press, 2010, http://www.cambridge.org/series/sSeries.asp?code=CLOR.
Stuart, James et al. “Preface and Editorial Materials”. Josephine E. Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir, edited by George W. Johnson and Lucy A. Johnson, J. W. Arrowsmith, 1928, p. v - vii; various pages.
Butler, Josephine. “Prefatory Biographical Note”. Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, Hyperion Press, 1989, p. xi - xvi.
Butler, Josephine. Rebecca Jarrett. Morgan and Scott, 1885.