Marie Stopes (1880 - 1958)
Marie Stopes, the eugenicist and birth control pioneer, famously exhorted women to "Never put anything in your vagina that you would not put in your mouth!" It came as no surprise, therefore, that she was in 1999 voted ‘Woman of the Millennium’ by Guardian readers (this was in the days before Mars bars were vetoed by the Atkins diet).
Born in Edinburgh in 1880, Marie later became a pupil at the North London Collegiate School. She was a high achiever, and her distinguished academic career bore fruit in a double first from University College London and a doctorate from Munich, for her work on fossilised plants.
Her thesis was incredibly prescient. In 1911 she married fellow scientist Reginald Ruggles Gates, only to find that his own sap was long past rising. After consulting some foreign books in the British Library, she was shocked to discover that she was a virgin and her husband impotent. The marriage was annulled.
Shamed by her earlier ignorance, Stopes wrote a sex manual, Married Love, which was funded by her new husband, Humphrey Roe, a northern manufacturing magnate whom she married in 1918. Such was the British public’s thirst for advice about bedroom gymnastics that the book sold over 2,000 copies in a fortnight; and like many runaway publishing successes, it was quickly branded “immoral” and “obscene” by the Church.
Married Love abstained from discussing contraception in much detail, but the sequel – Wise Parenthood – was a compendium of family planning methods, despite its semi-oxymoronic title. It went down so well that, by the early 1920s, Stopes had opened a birth control centre in Holloway, North London. Unusually, it employed only female doctors and nurses.
The clinic later moved to central London and was bombed twice during the blitz of 1940. There’s no evidence that the Nazi’s targeted it, but they must have admired Stopes’ insistence that her staff ignore air-raids and continue to fit contraceptives. As a notice on the wall decreed:
"..only when the sound of actual gunfire or bombs [is] very near is danger point considered to have been reached."
A fanatical believer in eugenics, she campaigned to prevent to poor and disabled from breeding. She even went so far as to accuse her son of committing a crime against his “country, his family and children” by proposing to marry a short sighted woman. He ignored her, so Marie retaliated by boycotting the wedding.
However, extramarital affairs were fine. With her husband’s approval, she spent the latter part of her marriage sporting with a succession of younger men. She also believed that trousers damaged the genitals and forced her son, Harry Stopes-Roe, to wear skirts when he was a child. Whether her lovers ever wore skirts is unknown.
Apart from having affairs with younger men, Marie Stopes devoted her last year to writing poetry. A tragic end to a fascinating career.
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