Marie Stopes
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Marie Stopes (October 15, 1880 - October 2, 1958) was a Scottish author, campaigner for women's rights and pioneer in the field of family planning. Stopes edited the journal Birth Control News which gave anatomically explicit advice, and in addition to her enthusiasm for protests at places of worship this provoked protest from both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. Her sex manual Married Love, which was written while she was still a virgin, was controversial and influential.
The modern organisation that bears her name, Marie Stopes International Global Partnership, works in 38 countries across the world and currently in the UK is the largest provider of family planning and abortion services outside the National Health Service.
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[edit] Early work
Marie Stopes’ early career (1909-20) was as a palaeobotanist. She obtained a first class honors degree in botany and was a gold medalist at University College London. She went to Japan on a Scientific Mission in 1907, spending a year and a half at the Imperial University, Tokyo, and explored the country for fossil plants. She was also Fellow and sometime Lecturer in Palaeobotany at University College London and Lecturer in Palaeobotany at the University of Manchester.
[edit] Work in family planning
Stopes opened the UK's first family planning clinic, the Mothers' Clinic at 61, Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London on March 17, 1921. The clinic offered a free service to married women and also gathered scientific data about contraception. The opening of the clinic created one of the greatest social impacts of the 20th century and marked the start of a new era in which couples, for the first time, could reliably take control over their fertility.
In 1925 the Mothers' Clinic moved to 108 Whitfield Street, Central London, where it remains to this day.
Dr Marie Stopes and her fellow family planning pioneers around the globe played a major role in breaking down taboos about sex and increasing knowledge, pleasure and improved reproductive health. In 1930 the National Birth Control Council was formed.
[edit] Other interests
Stopes was also a prominent campaigner for the implementation of policies inspired by eugenics. In her Radiant Motherhood (1920) she called for the "sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood (to) be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory." Even more controversially, her The Control of Parenthood (1920) declared that "utopia could be reached in my life time had I the power to issue inviolable edicts... (I would legislate compulsory sterilization of the insane, feebleminded)... revolutionaries... half-castes."
Stopes even cut her son Harry out of her will for marrying a near-sighted woman named Mary Barnes Wallis, later Mary Stopes-Roe. It was not as though he was marrying someone from an indistinguished family: Mary was the daughter of the noted engineer Barnes Wallis. Stopes wrote: "She has an inherited disease of the eyes which not only makes her wear hideous glasses so that it is horrid to look at her, but the awful curse will carry on and I have the horror of our line being so contaminated and little children with the misery of glasses ... Mary and Harry are quite callous about both the wrong to their children, the wrong to my family and the eugenic crime."
Defenders point out that such remarks should be read in their historical context. Following Stopes' death in 1958, a large part of her personal fortune went to the Eugenics Society.
[edit] Personal life
In 1911 she married Reginald Ruggles Gates; Stopes claimed that this marriage was unconsummated and was annulled in 1914. In 1918 she married Humphrey Verdon Roe, brother of Alliot Verdon Roe.
Stopes died due to breast cancer at her home in Dorking, Surrey, UK. [1]
[edit] The modern Marie Stopes International organisation
From the 1920s onwards, Stopes gradually built up a small network of clinics that were initially very successful, but by the early 1970s were in financial difficulties. In 1975 the clinics went into voluntary receivership. The modern organisation that bears Marie Stopes' name was established a year later, taking over responsibility for the main clinic, and in 1978 it began its work overseas in New Delhi. However, this followed the infamous family planning (compulsory sterilisation) initiative of the India Emergency Government of 1975 to 1977, and there was a strong backlash against any initiative associated with family planning in India, that exists up to the 21st Century. This curtailed the activities of Marie Stopes International in India. Since the late 1970s the organisation has grown steadily and today the Marie Stopes International Global Partnership works in 38 countries and has offices in London, Brussels, Melbourne, Tokyo and Washington DC. However, the organisation`s work was impeded by the Bush Administration decision to stop funding it on 21 January 2001, which led to it having to close some operations in Kenya.
The organisation has been involved in the Abortion debate.
[edit] Writings
- Marie Stopes (1918). Married Love. London: Putnam.
- Marie Stopes (1918). Wise Parenthood. London: Rendell & Co..
[edit] Biographies
- Ruth Hall (1978). Marie Stopes: A biography. Virago, Ltd.. ISBN 0-86068-092-4.
- June Rose (1992). Marie Stopes and the sexual revolution. Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-16970-8.
