Josephine Butler: the forgotten feminist who fought the UK police – and their genital inspections

in 1869 as she decided to throw herself into a stormy national debate? When she agreed to lead efforts to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts – CD Acts for short – she was in her early 40s, had lost her only beloved daughter in a tragic accident and was already involved in what was known as “rescue work”; she had employed a woman freed from Newgate prison after serving a sentence for infanticide.

The point was to prevent venereal infections among soldiers and sailors, and initially the laws applied only in garrison and port towns. But reformers objected to measures they saw as illiberal, immoral and more likely to spread disease than inhibit it, since they did nothing to limit infected men’s sexual activity.

Convinced that MPs had deliberately avoided publicity when the laws were passed, Butler and her supporters organised prayer meetings and gave out thousands of leaflets. This provoked a furious response and repealers were repeatedly attacked. Butler was forced to hide from an angry crowd in a grocer’s cellar, and to leave a hotel in which she had booked under a false name in the middle of the night. But when the votes were counted, it was clear that the bold tactics had succeeded. Storks lost.

This was not the end of the CD Acts agitation. Butler began campaigning against a similar regime operated by colonial authorities in India, while in London the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette,, stage-managed a stunt. Scandalised by lurid tales of girls being trafficked into what was then called the “white slave trade”, Stead set out to buy a teenager himself. Having paid an intermediary to find a couple who were prepared to part with their daughter for a fee, he spirited her off to Paris.

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