Any woman who dares to speak up for other women, or for children, will always be traduced by people whose motives are less than benevolent. The extraordinary feminist campaigner Josephine Butler (1828 - 1906) campaigned for women's suffrage, the right of women to better education, the end of coverture (where a woman’s independent legal existence vanishes when she marries) in British law, the abolition of child prostitution, and an end to human trafficking of young women and children into European prostitution.
I had read of the Contagious Diseases Acts & it is interesting to learn more about Josephine Butler's work in connection to them.