Josephine Butler - Social Reformer
Josephine Grey was born in 1828. She was the daughter of an old Northumberland Family. In 1852 she married the Revd George Butler an educationalist and Canon at Winchester. After the birth of five children the family moved to Liverpool in 1866 when George became the head of Liverpool college. In this city Josephine encountered the problem of prostitution. She refused to ignore it and opened her home as a refuge for prostitutes and began to campaign on their behalf. In the society of the time it was regarded as unseemly for a woman to be aware of issues like prostitution and to express views about the matter in public. She thus encountered a lot of opposition to her work. Her faith underpinned her work, she even found time to write a biography of Catherine of Siena. One particular issue was the Contagious Diseases Act passed by Parliament in the 1860s to protect military and naval personnel from sexually transmitted diseases. This Act was characterised by its inclination...