SARAH C. WILLIAMS is an Oxford-trained freelance historian, best known for her study on religious belief and popular culture. In When Courage Calls (Feature, 22 November), she seeks an audience for the story of Josephine Butler beyond the confines of the academic world.
Sexual categories and religious identities are “once again fraught with tension”, she argues, and “problematic popular perceptions of the historic relationship between Christianity and gender have been reinforced rather than unsettled by recent readings of the past.” We once again find ourselves “siloed into sharply divided camps”. Yet Butler’s unique perspective remains “profoundly relevant”.
Those of us involved in a conference on trafficking a couple of decades ago certainly found this to be true. The papers were published as Beating the Traffic, edited by Alison Milbank (2007). Milbank’s endorsement of this new book refers to our living “at a time when women’s value and safety is again at risk”.
Whereas Jane Jordan’s Josephine Butler (2001) is a wide-ranging life of the great reformer, Williams has written a more focused spiritual life, in which we frequently hear the voice of Butler herself. The emphasis falls less upon documenting externals and more upon the inner life of a totally committed Christian whose campaigns were grounded in private and public prayer.
Butler made it clear in her Recollections of George Butler that her husband played a crucial part in her life and mission. In the early days of their marriage, they read the Bible and prayed together in Oxford, after their many guests had left. “We read together the words of Life”, she wrote, “and were able to bring many earthly notions and theories to the test of what the Holy One and the Just said and did.”
She felt that Bishop Wilberforce ordained her, too, when he laid hands upon George. When she witnessed the most appalling scenes in brothels, and listened to the testimony of prostitutes who underwent humiliating and painful examinations, she told George that she must throw herself fully into the battle to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts.
For a woman to speak out on taboo subjects, in a society vitiated by concealment and double standards, was to incur a heavy cost for both of them, socially and professionally. “Go!” George said, “and God be with you.” George later became a Canon of Winchester Cathedral, where Josephine is commemorated.
Historians now recognise that it was the networks of prayer, developed at the heart of the Repeal campaign in the 1870s, which made it possible to reimagine “outcast” women. “Praying together for women on the margins of the culture”, Williams writes, “changed the way women, in every walk of life, saw themselves, and it changed the way they understood political agency within the nation as a whole.” These are bold claims, and they are backed up by well-documented evidence in the central passages of the book.
A lifelong pattern of intense private prayer empowered Butler, who was so inspired by Catherine of Siena that she somehow managed to publish a 300-page study on the saint in the midst of her Repeal campaign. “It is in the solitude of the soul alone with God that His thoughts are revealed,” she wrote in Prophets and Prophetesses (1897).
In pressing her point about the centrality of prayer, Williams can become a little repetitive, and a rather more nuanced analysis of Butler’s response to movements in the Church of England would have been helpful. But then the success of Butler’s campaign was itself the result of hammering home a message in countless speeches made in draughty halls across the country and on the Continent, with bricks sometimes flying through windows and rotten eggs aimed at this upstart woman, a prophet in her own generation and in ours.
Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton.
When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the radical pursuit of justice for women
Sarah C. Williams
Hodder & Stoughton £25
(978-1-3998-0373-1)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50