Josephine Butler (1828–1906) was an English feminist and social
reformer in the Victorian era. She campaigned for women's suffrage and
better education for women. She was instrumental in the 1886 repeal of
the Contagious Diseases Acts, which had subjected prostitutes to
invasive medical examinations, and she founded an organisation to combat
similar practices across Europe. After she became aware that English
women and children were being sold into prostitution on the continent,
her allegations led to the sacking of a Belgian police commissionaire
and the imprisonment of his deputy and 12 brothel owners. Josephine
fought child prostitution with help from the campaigning editor of The
Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, leading to the Criminal Law
Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 years
of age. Her final campaign came in the late 1890s, against medical
mistreatment of prostitutes in the British Raj. She wrote more than 90
books and pamphlets, including three biographies. Her Christian feminism
is celebrated by the Church of England with a Lesser Festival, and
Durham University named one of their colleges after her.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Butler>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1777:
El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first civil settlement
in the Spanish colony of Alta California, was founded as a farming
community.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California>
1807:
Maria I of Portugal, the Braganza royal family and its court of
nearly 15,000 people departed Lisbon for the colony of Brazil just days
before Napoleonic forces invaded.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_the_Portuguese_Court_to_Brazil>
1947:
The United Nations General Assembly voted to approve the
Partition Plan for Palestine, a plan to resolve the Arab–Israeli
conflict in the British Mandate of Palestine by separating the territory
into Jewish and Arab states.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine>
1987:
Korean Air Flight 858 exploded over the Andaman Sea after two
North Korean agents left a time bomb in an overhead compartment, killing
all 115 people on board.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858>
2007:
Philippine soldiers led by Senator Antonio Trillanes, on trial
for the 2003 Oakwood mutiny, staged a mutiny and temporarily seized a
conference room in The Peninsula Manila hotel.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_Peninsula_siege>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
anecdata:
(usually humorous or pejorative) Anecdotal evidence.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anecdata>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very
same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large
for some of us to see.
--C. S. Lewis
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis>