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