Born Josephine Elizabeth Grey in Northumberland, Josephine Butler was the fourth daughter in a family that was steeped in the Liberal tradition and that enjoyed influential political and social connections. She was educated, although not unusually well, by a governess and her mother and later spent two years at a school in Newcastle. The greatest influence on her during her early life was her father, whom she idolized. John Grey was involved in the great public movements of his day, including the First Reform Bill, Free Trade, and the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade.

Antislavery agitation first introduced the young woman to the sexual and social inequality of women. At the age of seventeen she learned of the sexual oppression of women enslaved by their masters, and she later wrote that what she learned "combined to break my young heart, and ... awakened my feelings concerning...