ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the strategies of three feminists who spent most of their lives working on the issues: Josephine Butler, who worked primarily on prostitution; Frances Power Cobbe, who is best known for her work on domestic violence, though she was also a prominent anti-vivisectionist; and Ellice Hopkins, a 'social purist' who called for the protection of young girls and a concomitant male chastity. In her article, Cobbe constructed domestic violence as an exclusively working-class problem. Modern feminists, and even some later nineteenth-century feminists, knew that this was an untrue portrayal of the problem. The pro-women legislative changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are but one indication of this. 'Feminist protest' was not in itself a 'politics of repression', as Walkowitz implies. Ellice Hopkins addressed a meeting in Leeds in 1884 which was attended by a number of respectable women: the wives of clergy, industrialists, businessmen and landowners.