'A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change'

March 4, 2021

#ChoosetoChallenge is this year's theme for International Women's Day. With this mind, we are sharing an extract from Josephine Butler: A Very Brief History. Josephine challenged social attitudes to women and campaigned for women's rights. In this extract, author Jane Robinson tells us about Josephine's far-reaching influence, and how one of her 'greatest assets was her ability to discuss shocking subjects in a calm, persuasive way'.

---

Josephine Butler’s influence on her world was far-reaching. As one of the most famous women of her age, and a pioneer in multiple fields – spiritual, social, educational and political – it would not be an exaggeration to say she made an impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. It is difficult to think of any woman before her with such authority.

Take spirituality first. Most middle-class parlours in the second half of the nineteenth century were adorned with elaborately decorated mottoes like ‘Prepare to Meet Thy God’, ‘The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth’, ‘Watch and Pray’. While Josephine spent her whole life preparing to meet her God, she was not particularly interested in inheriting the earth or in watching and praying without doing. Nor did she subscribe to the idiom of a spiritual hierarchy that imagined women demurely hesitant on the lower rungs of a ladder to heaven, while men, by divine right, shinned ahead. ‘The Church has always allowed herself to be bound, held back, dragged down, more or less, by the overpowering weight of unregenerate male feeling.’ This was a dangerously provocative thing to say. That is why she said it. After all, the best way to change public opinion is to challenge it.

Josephine refused to be labelled an Anglican, or anything else. Her idiosyncratic brand of Christianity was inclusive, socialist in its egalitarianism and forbearance (though she appeared far more ready to excuse wayward women than misguided men). We are humans first, she said, men and women next, and our souls have identical value in the sight of the Lord, whether or not we are outwardly virtuous. There is no place for a pecking order in a modern, enlightened religion. Pre-empting Mary Baker Eddy, who popularized the concept in Christian Science, Josephine even went so far as to speak of ‘the Great Father-Mother God,’2 implying that there was no place for gender discrimination, either.

One of Josephine’s greatest assets was her ability to discuss shocking subjects in a calm, persuasive way. That is how she was able to sustain such progressive arguments about personal morality without being dismissed (entirely) as subversive, a madwoman or some kind of witch. She had her enemies, as we have seen, who considered her blasphemous and possibly dangerous too, and who subscribed to the traditional adage that for nice ladies, ignorance was bliss. But the majority of her readers and listeners credited her at the very least with sincerity. She was so patently well-meaning. To a great extent, that overrode her unorthodoxy and perhaps eased the way for other nonconformists (in a general rather than a sectarian sense) to be given a fair hearing. She was tolerant, so evinced tolerance in others.

This is an extract from Josephine Butler: A Very Brief History by Jane Robinson

---