Sex, Gender, and Religion

Sex, Gender, and Religion: Josephine Butler Revisited will appeal to readers interested in women’s subjectivity and agency. Josephine Butler (1828-1906) spearheaded campaigns against state regulation of prostitution. A gifted platform speaker, she enthused a variety of British and European audiences, and wrote abundantly about her cause. Contributors revisit Butler after the end of the twentieth century, where she has been feted, forgotten, and then rediscovered as reformer, mystic, and feminist. Firmly locating Butler within her context, this book breaks new ground by focusing on the role of religion in her life and work, as well as on Butler as (auto)biographer, writing her own self as she writes her campaign.

Author Biography

The Editors: Jenny Daggers is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University, United Kingdom. She received her Ph.D. and her M.A. in theology from the University of Manchester and her B.Soc.Sc. in political science from the University of Birmingham. Daggers has published widely in journals and is the author of The British Christian Women’s Movement: a Rehabilitation of Eve (2002). Diana Neal served as head of Theology and Religious Studies and of Identity Studies, as well as being a founding member of the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Liverpool Hope University. She received her Ph.D. and her M.A. in theology from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, and her B.A. in theology and history from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Neal has published largely in the field of medieval women’s mysticism, and is presently engaged in a study of the fifteenth-century pre-Tridentine reformer, Angela Merici.