Marie Stopes
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958) was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes publicly opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed,[1] though her actions in private were at odds with her public pronouncements.[2]
For the modern organisation that was named after her, see MSI Reproductive Choices.
Marie Stopes
2 October 1958 (aged 77)
- University of London (BSc, DSc)
- University of Munich (PhD)
In reaction to her controversial beliefs, Marie Stopes International in 2020 changed its name to "MSI Reproductive Choices" with no other changes.[3]
Early life and education[edit]
Stopes was born in Edinburgh. Her father, Henry Stopes, was a brewer, engineer, architect and palaeontologist from Colchester. Her mother was Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, a Shakespearean scholar and women's rights campaigner from Edinburgh. At six weeks old, her parents took Stopes from Scotland;[4] the family stayed briefly in Colchester then moved to London, where in 1880 her father bought 28 Cintra Park in Upper Norwood.[5] Both of her parents were members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where they had met.[6] At an early age, she was exposed to science[7] and was taken to meetings where she met the famous scholars of the day. At first, she was home-schooled, but from 1892 to 1894 she attended St George's School for Girls in Edinburgh.[8] Stopes was later sent to the North London Collegiate School, where she was a close friend of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn.[1]
Stopes primarily focused on her science career in her 20s and 30s. Stopes attended the University of London in 1900,[7] at University College London as a scholarship student, where she studied botany and geology; she graduated with a first class B.Sc. in 1902 after only two years by attending both day and night schools at Birkbeck, University of London.[9]
Stopes' father died in 1902[7] leaving her family in financial ruin. Her paleobotany professor, Francis Oliver, took her under his wing and hired her as his research assistant in early 1903.[7] This is what sparked her interest in paleobotany, building a platform to begin her career.
Oliver was on the verge of debatably one of the greatest finds in paleobotany when he took Stopes on as a research assistant. Initially, it was thought that most of the fossil plants found in Carboniferous Coal Measures were ferns,[7] Stopes was tasked to find the specimens that showed better connection with the seeds of fern fronds. It was discovered that some of the "ferns" bore seeds.[7] "Seed ferns" became known and recognized as the missing link between ferns and conifers.[7] They later became known as the pteridosperm.[7] She was provided the opportunity to work with the world's leading experts in paleobotany at the time. Within the same year she won the Gilchrist scholarship from University College London,[7] with the help of Oliver and her geology professor, Edmund Garwood who provided incredible references.
Following this, Stopes earned a D.Sc. degree from University College London, becoming the youngest person in Britain to have done so. In 1903 she published a study of the botany of the recently dried-up Ebbsfleet River. After carrying out research on Carboniferous plants at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and at University College, London, she put the money she received from the Gilchrist Scholarship towards a year's worth of funding her study on the reproduction of living cycads[7] at the University of Munich. There, she worked with Karl Goebel, who was a leading paleobotanist on cycads. Stopes used this study as her doctoral dissertation, she presented her dissertation in German and received a PhD in botany in 1904.[7] She was, in 1904, one of the first women to be elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London,[10][11] and was appointed a demonstrator in order to teach students.[12] She was also a fellow and occasional lecturer in paleobotany at University College, London until 1920.
Marie Stopes: Her Work and Play[edit]
Aylmer Maude, acclaimed writer and Tolstoy expert, was brought into the home of Stopes and Gates in an effort to support their financial needs. While already having a troublesome marriage, Maude's interjection in the household only added more tension to the marriage as Stopes' flirtatious nature caused Gates more jealousy and frustration. Maude and Stopes remained friends long after her separation from Gates in 1914, and the intensity of their relationship was reflected in a letter he wrote immediately prior to her second marriage to Humphrey Roe: "My dearest Una [Maude's pet name for Stopes], I have been bothering you with letters recently… Still I cannot let the eve of your third marriage pass without sending you my most cordial good wishes and fondest greetings."[30]
Maude's biography, "The Authorized Life of Marie C Stopes", was published in 1924. The book was not well received (The Spectator described it as "a panegyric and not a biography") and it may even have been written by Stopes herself. When Stopes blamed Maude for the book's poor sales, he replied: "you so impressed on me the importance of getting the Life out quickly, and I evidently rushed it to the point of scamping it and failed to correct some of the errors in your rough draft."[31]
The book was republished in 1933 as "Marie Stopes Her Work and Her Play". While the later book included an account of the Stopes v Sutherland libel trial of 1923, questions have been raised about its credibility. For instance, significant aspects of the story of Stopes' visit to Professor McIlroy in disguise and being fitted with a cervical cap (the same device about which McIlroy had been so critical during the High Court trial) have been shown to have been fabricated,[32][33] and McIlroy's treatment of Stopes has been shown to have been consistent with her testimony in the High Court.[34]
A New Gospel to All Peoples[edit]
When Stopes had sufficiently recovered, she returned to work in 1920; she engaged in public speaking and responding to letters seeking advice on marriage, sex and birth control.[35] She sent Mrs. E. B. Mayne to disseminate the Letter to Working Mothers to the slums of East London. Mayne approached twenty families a day, but after several months she concluded the working class was mistrustful of well-intentioned meddlers.[36]
This lack of success made Stopes contemplate a different approach to taking her message to the poor. A conference of Anglican bishops was due to be held in June; not long before the conference, Stopes had a vision. She called in her secretary and dictated a message addressed to the bishops which began: "My Lords, I speak to you in the name of God. You are his priests. I am his prophet. I speak to you of the mysteries of man and woman."[37]
In 1922, Stopes wrote A New Gospel to All Peoples.[38] The bishops were not receptive; among the resolutions carried during the conference was one aimed against "the deliberate cultivation of sexual union" and another against "indecent literature, suggestive plays and films [and] the open or secret sale of contraceptives".[39] The Catholic Church's reaction was more strident,[40] marking the start of a conflict that lasted the rest of Stopes's life.
Views on abortion[edit]
Publicly, Stopes professed to oppose abortion; during her lifetime, her clinics did not offer that service. She single-mindedly pursued abortion providers and used the police and the courts to prosecute them.[81] Stopes thought that the use of contraceptives was the preferred means by which families should voluntarily limit their number of offspring. Nurses at Stopes' clinic had to sign a declaration not to "impart any information or lend any assistance whatsoever to any person calculated to lead to the destruction in utero of the products of conception".[82] When Stopes learned that one of Avro Manhattan's friends had had an abortion, she accused him of murdering the unborn child.[83]
Her public actions were at odds with her private pronouncements. In a 1919 letter, she had outlined a method of abortion to an unidentified correspondent,[81] and she "was even prepared in some cases to advocate abortion, or, as she preferred to put it, the evacuation of the uterus".[84] In Wise Parenthood, she had promoted the "Gold Pin" or "Spring", which was a "method [that] could be described as an abortifacient".[85]
