BUTLER, Josephine.

£2,650 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Autograph letter signed to Robert F. Horton, discussing his Women of the Old Testament, together with a copy of the book. An impassioned autograph letter signed by Josephine Butler to Robert Horton, responding to his work, Women of the Old Testament, together with a first edition of the book. Butler offers a lengthy discussion of her feminist and religious beliefs, her disdain for predatory "spiritualists", and remarks on the biblical women she holds in high esteem.Butler (1828-1906) was a hugely influential campaigner for women's suffrage, education, the end of coverture in British law, and the end of child prostitution and human trafficking. Her legacy as a staunch feminist, social reformer, and Christian are all evident in this excellent letter. Both she and Horton were involved in similar social campaigns, and Horton's biographer notes that "Butler's campaign made a great appeal to him, and he had invited her to address Oxford men in his rooms" around 1880 (Peel, p. 129). Interestingly, Horton's mother had heard Butler speak in Birmingham a few years earlier, writing to him that "Mrs. G. Josephine Butler much pleased me, and I felt the power of Woman [emphasis in original], but Oh, dear, it is not the thing to speak in public" (quoted in ibid., p. 26).Butler opens her letter in praise of Horton's work and thanks him for his chapter on the Sorceress of Endor, "a woman who I have always felt an admiration of". The Sorceress (or Witch) of Endor was a woman who, in the Hebrew

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