“Josephine Butler” by Alexander Munro

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Josephine Butler

Alexander Munro (1825-1871)

Probably after 1852, and before 1868 (see below)

The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Alexander Munro was a long-time friend of the Butlers. The bust would have been executed at some point after the couple's marriage in 1852 and before a letter of June 1868, in which Josephine mentions that she has several times tried and failed to get a good photograph taken of herself: "I have at last got one done of Munro's bust of me, which is nice I think," she tells her correspondent ("Josephine Butler in Liverpool").

Munro shows his subject with downcast eyes, looking modest, serious and refined. If the bust was modelled closer to the time of the letter, as seems likely, he might well have been making a special point” by presenting her in this pose. Josephine had reform in her veins: born in Northumberland in 1828, she was the daughter of John Grey, a social reformer and anti-slavery campaigner who was a cousin to Earl Grey. After the tragic death in 1864 of the couple's only daughter Eva, whose bust Munro also modelled, she became an ardent reformer herself.

Photograph and text 2008 by Jacqueline Banerjee. With thanks to the gallery.

Making full use of her political connections and acumen (see Hartley 76), she spearheaded a successful campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts, the first of which was passed in 1864, that allowed policemen to consider any women in ports and army towns prostitutes "and bring them in to have compulsory checks for venereal disease. If the women were suffering from sexually transmitted diseases they were placed in a locked hospital until cured" (schoolnet.co.uk). She was also one of those responsible for getting the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. Described by Jenny Uglow as the "bravest of all opponents of the double standard" (341), she would already have been exposed to some of the abuse and ridicule which greeted her on her later speaking engagements. She was highly intelligent too, and an outspoken supporter of women's rights to higher education: in 1867 she became President of the North of England Council for the Promotion of Higher Education for Girls. Eventually she would play her part for women's suffrage as well. As she emerged further into "a glaring and much more dangerous limelight" (Forster 183), Munro would have been particularly keen to present her as the very embodiment of womanly virtue.

Related Material

Portrait of Josephine Butler by George Richmond

Bibliography

Forster, Margaret. Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism. London: Secker & Warburg, 1984.

Hartley, Cathy, ed. A Historical Dictionary of British Women. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003.

"Josephine Butler in Liverpool" (a Liverpool University Library site). Viewed 10 January 2009.

Uglow, Jenny. Elizabeth Gakell: A Habit of Stories. London: Faber, 1993.

(Uglow is discussing the public response to Gaskell's Ruth, and reports that Josephine Butler, then recently married and living in Oxford, "bitterly remembered the dons' pious insistence that no pure woman should know of such things," 341, emphasis added).

Last modified 10 January 2009