AS GLOBAL rates of violence against women stand at unprecedented levels, the work of Josephine Butler, the 19th-century social activist, has never been more relevant. From 1869 to 1885, she led the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts. Designed to protect the armed forces from the threat of what was then known as venereal disease, the Acts provided for the detention of women on the mere suspicion that they were prostitutes, and for their compulsory medical examination.
For Butler, these Acts were a concrete example of an invidious sexual double standard that ran like a fault-line through every layer of Victorian society. If these laws went unrepealed, she argued, any attempt to increase women’s rights would ultimately prove ineffectual. Gathering the necessary political momentum for long-term change, Butler’s campaign exposed the violent mistreatment of women.
It revealed the sexual exploitation among the Establishment, and the complex relationship of injustice to the prevailing economic structures of the day. It uncovered international criminal networks that were engaged in sex trafficking across Europe, and galvanised the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent to 16.
Throughout a life spent championing the rights of women, Butler focused on the essential link between fighting for justice and Christ-centred contemplation. Indeed, it was her firm conviction that justice was impossible without prayer.
When Butler stood up to address a group of young men at the University of Cambridge in 1879, at the height of her campaign, she issued a shocking invitation to contemplation.
“What think ye of Christ?” she asked in the language of the Gospels. “Let us go with him into the temple; let us look on him on the occasion when men rudely thrust into his presence a woman, who with loud-tongued accusation they condemned as an impure and hateful thing. ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ At the close of that interview, He asked ‘Woman, where are thine accusers?’” (published as The Social Purity Address, Morgan & Scott, 1894)
This is not what the young Cambridge men expected to hear in an overtly political address on the sexual exploitation of women. And yet, Butler’s singular focus on Christ stands right alongside her clear diagnosis of the problem. “The root of the evil is the unequal standard in morality; the false idea that there is one code of morality for men and another for women.”
For a moment, she turns her audience into the accusers in the biblical scene. She implores them to enter into the experience of the “outcast” woman as she encounters Christ; to hear for themselves her anguished cry. She asks the young men to consider how Jesus not only welcomed the outcast, but also became the outcast, submitting to violence and exclusion in order to overthrow every human definition of power.
AlamyNotice of a meeting led by Josephine Butler in Pontefract
It is only in contemplation of Christ, she argues, that we come to know what justice is. True justice is not simply an idea that can be abstracted from a set of doctrines or principles. Justice is revealed through a relational encounter with Christ — who is perfect Justice. Butler was unambiguous on this point: “In order to arrive at the truth of these great subjects and to attain clear insight and immovable conviction in these great matters of principle [justice towards women and the equality of all human beings], there is one thing that I am convinced is indispensable. You must learn courageously to isolate your own soul, and to retire from the presence of your fellow men. . .”.
Butler knew her audience well. They were the future leaders of the nation; soon-to-be generals and prime ministers, bishops and archbishops. And she focused on the greatest threat to the well-being of society: the separation of action from contemplation — prayerless living that fails to behold Christ.
BUTLER’s approach demands our attention as we consider the sexual violence that has taken root in our society. Without the stillness of regular prayer, we become blind to our own sin, to our disregard for the needs of others, to our propensity towards violence and our culpability in systemic injustice. When activity drives out time and space for Christ-focused reflection, we become impervious to the deepest truths of the inner life.
Our hearts harden to meet the tyranny of our schedules, and it becomes easy to ignore the summons to genuine and difficult goodness. We are sucked into apathy and robbed of the strength to lead against the grain of culture. As Butler put it in her address: “Evil results when the habit of conferring with man takes the place of communion with God.”
When Butler spoke to the Cambridge men, she knew that she was treading a fine line. To issue a call to contemplation to those who were already sincere Christians was to run the risk of misunderstanding, especially in the face of an urgent social problem. Such a call could easily be misinterpreted as an excuse to withdraw into inactivity. But this could not have been be further from Butler’s main point.
Prayer must be more than personal edification. The humility cultivated in private contemplation must be the starting point for just action in the world. Crucially, it is in the presence of Jesus that we learn how to rename reality; to distinguish good from evil, justice from injustice. It is here that our eyes are opened to see the deep causes of injustice, not just the symptoms.
For Butler, this meant renaming women caught in the underworld of Victorian prostitution. The working out of her contemplation of Christ was a refusal to use the language of the culture to describe women who had been sexually compromised as “fallen women”, “common prostitutes”, or “chattels”. Such language alienated them, stripping them of dignity and excluding them from equal status before the law.
It allowed communities to treat individuals as objects, and to do so without conscience. Most of all, such language contradicted the welcome that women received from Jesus. Instead, Butler renamed women “outcasts”. This was a prophetic act to up-end cultural categories and turn the spotlight on those who ignored men’s so-called “natural proclivities”.
But renaming was not just linguistic. The primary focus of Butler’s work was to gather women together to pray for those on the margins of society. She formed communities who prayed and acted. They heard testimonies, collected statistics, visited families, offered employment opportunities, introduced educational reforms, gave legal aid, and encouraged women to resist the legal requirements of the Contagious Diseases Acts. These groups worked from the margins to change the social and political imagination, and their work flowed from persistent prayer.
Restless effort on its own is not powerful enough to meet the profound challenges that we face today. As Butler put it, “Action combined with contemplation and contemplation combined with action is the one indispensable thing for the prophetic illumination of justice in the world.”
Sarah C. Williams is the author of When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the radical pursuit of justice for women: A biography, published by Hodder and Stoughton at £25 (Church Times Bookshop £20); 978-1-3998-0373-1.