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from Part II - Counter-Figures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2017
A girl who was committed to prison by the Bench at ———, said, “It did seem hard, ma'am, that the Magistrate on the bench who gave the casting vote for my imprisonment had paid me several shillings, a day to two before, in the street, to go with him.” If the said Magistrate should chance to read The Shield, and would wish to hear a little more about this, I shall be happy to communicate with him.
(Josephine Butler, quoted in Jordan and Sharp 2003b: 90)On May 9, 1870, Josephine Butler was preoccupied with the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts, which regulated prostitution in Victorian England. The CD Acts consisted of three laws passed by the British Parliament between 1864 and 1869, which affected the lives of many women and were opposed by many women's rights activists. Among feminists such as Florence Nightingale, James Stansfeld, James Stuart, Elisabeth Wolstenholme, and John Stuart Mill, Butler was the law's fiercest opponent. Because Butler argued that women needed to be protected from a piece of “vicious” and “evil” legislation, she became the most vocal defender of the prostitutes.
In a letter to the editor of The Shield, the magazine of the Anti- Contagious Diseases Acts Association, Butler made the case that the laws regulating prostitution had “demoralizing, brutalizing and oppressive” effects (Jordan and Sharp 2003b: 86). By channeling the voice of the prostitutes, she deployed shame rhetorically to show that upper class men were participating in the spread of prostitution. She strategically appealed to the threat of public humiliation. Butler used the confession of a woman to underscore the sexual involvement of an unnamed magistrate in prostitution. While Butler did not disclose the name of the magistrate, she gestured at the possibility that she might use such information to expose him as a hypocrite. Her implied threat was that all the magistrates in Kent might be in the same situation, and that they themselves could subsequently be exposed for their misdeeds, to the extent that they would have to endure public shame of their own.
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