Transformative Research Legacies: Josephine Butler - Forgotten Feminist?

Wednesday 27^th May 2015, 1-2pm

Venue: Seminar Room 8, South Campus Teaching Hub

Speaker: Dr. Jane Jordan (Kingston University)

As part of engage@liverpool's Transformative Research Legacies series, Dr. Jane Jordan (Kingston University) discusses the legacy of Victorian social campaigner, writer and commentator, Josephine Butler.

When in 1869 the British Government extended the scope of two recent Contagious Diseases Acts which sought to prevent the spread of syphilis in the Army and Navy by forcibly examining women ‘suspected of being common prostitutes’, Josephine E. Butler became the respectable figure-head for the national repeal campaign. The wife of the headmaster of Liverpool College, Butler had gained a reputation for her non-judgemental rescue work. Butler’s practical efforts, ministering to dying prostitutes from the city slums or from the Brownlow Hill Workhouse Infirmary, informed her feminism.

Throughout the political campaigns to abolish the CD Acts in Britain and its colonies, to raise the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, and to stamp out trafficking for the purposes of prostitution, Butler’s position was uncompromising: the state regulation of prostitution enslaved disenfranchised women for the benefit of men, the lawmakers. Yet Butler’s critical reputation has been mixed. Jane Jordan will discuss Butler’s legacy in relation to narratives of Victorian feminism and, too, recent political attempts to regulate the practices of sex workers.

Dr Jane Jordan wrote the critically acclaimed biography, Josephine Butler (John Murray, 2001; Continuum, 2007) and co-edited the five-volume anthology of Butler’s writings, Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns (Routledge, 2003) with Ingrid Sharp. Dr Jordan is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Kingston University where she teaches Victorian Literature; she co-founded the Victorian Popular Fiction Association in 2009, and has published widely on the Victorian popular novelist Ouida.

Her most recent study, Ouida and Victorian Popular Culture, co-edited with Andrew King, was published by Ashgate in 2013. Dr Jordan’s current research project re-examines Josephine Butler’s collaboration with W.T. Stead whose notorious exposure of the organised trade in child prostitution in the metropolis was published in the Pall Mall Gazette, July 1885.