A Victorian Christian Feminist: Josephine Butler, the Prostitutes and God

A Victorian Christian Feminist: Josephine Butler, the Prostitutes and God by Lisa Nolland was published by Paternoster Press in December 2005 and is our 19230th best seller. The ISBN for A Victorian Christian Feminist: Josephine Butler, the Prostitutes and God is 9781842272251.

Josephine Butler was the leading light of a highly controversial Victorian feminist pressure group which championed prostitutes' rights and contested the sexual double standard as sanctioned by the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s

This work tells her story and asks the questions: What made her take up this cause? and What kept her going through the many years of discouragement and vicious hostility?

Victorian prostitution is explored in terms of the dominant Victiorian view and the attitude of Evangelicalism, and possible effects on attitudes to the prostitute of political conviction, and perspectives created by Romanticism and Feminism are sought.

None of these take us to the heart of her motivation. We find this only at the point where the pain of her daughter's death, her concrete experience of marginalized women and her set of ideological convictions are related to her mystical Christian faith.

Josephine's issues were ones of gender and sexuality and these are areas which are still being hotly contested in our own day. Perhaps it is possible to find inspiration and perspective from her story for a Christian engagement in the public realm, in these areas and others