Reaping the Fruits of Resistance: Josephine Butler and Sarah Grand

Abstract

Christina Rossetti’s poetics of reclamation finally turns away from work within the public sphere; indeed, the poet explicitly distanced herself from the growing women’s movement as the nineteenth century drew to a close, most famously signing Mrs Humphrey Ward’s “Protest against Female Suffrage” published in the Nineteenth Century in 1889.1 Yet, the political potential of a philanthropic discourse that linked the fate of the “fallen” and “pure” would continue to be harnessed for explicitly radical ends by fin-de-siecle proto-feminist activists and New Woman authors. Indeed, it is a resisting discourse that comes to dominate public opinion as well as governmental policy during Josephine Butler’s successful “crusade” against the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts of 1864, 1867, and 1869, a battle waged by the reformer in the press as a writer and on the platform as an orator. In addition to her effective contestation of the governmental regulation of prostitution and its requisite institutions of Lock hospitals and medical police, Butler’s prominence as a public speaker facilitated greater frankness on the subjects of female sexuality and venereal disease, as well as the importance of “feminine” influence in public policy-making. I argue that Butler’s opposition to a “conspiracy” of male silence on the subjects of prostitution and sexual transgression, as well as her cultivation of a high profile public persona, set the stage for the emergence of a very particular “feminist” heroine at the end of the century: a figure partly based upon Butler herself.