Marie Stopes (October 15, 1880 ? October 2, 1958) was a Scottish author, eugenicist, 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, works in 38 countries across the world - ranging from the UK, Bolivia, and the Philippines through to Pakistan, Kenya and Papua New Guinea.

Early work

Blue plaque commemorating Marie Stopes at the University of Manchester

Work in family planning

Stopes opened the UK's first family planning clinic, the Mothers' Clinic at 61, Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London on 17 March 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 attempt to take control over their fertility.

In 1925 the Mothers' Clinic moved to Central London, where it remains to this day.

Stopes and her fellow family planning pioneers around the globe, like Dora Russell, 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.

Advocacy of Eugenics

Stopes was a prominent campaigner for the implementation of policies inspired by eugenics. In her Radiant Motherhood (1920) she called for the "sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood (to) be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory." She also seemed to bemoan the abolition of child labour for the lower classes:

?Not many years ago the labourer's child could be set to work early and could very shortly earn his keep; while at the same time the young gentleman was an expense and care to his father and mother until he had passed through the University of Oxford or Cambridge, and among some even until he had made his "finishing" world tour. The trend of legislation has continuously extended the age of irresponsible youth in the lower and lower middle classes, until it now approaches that of the middle and upper class youth. A stride in this direction was taken by the last Education Act, which has made education compulsory throughout the whole country to an age which is nearly university age.
I need not labour the resulting effect of the ever increasing prolongation of youth. It is not only apparent but has received sufficient treatment from the hands of various authors and thinkers.
Its corollary, however, has still not received that clear and direct thought which its significance demands.
Parenthood under the present regime, is not only an increasing responsibility and expense, it has become so great a strain upon the resources of those who have for themselves and their children a high standard of living that it is tending to become a rare privilege for some who would otherwise gladly propagate large families.
As Dean Inge reminded us (Outspoken Essays, 1919), there was a stage in the high civilisation of Greece when slaves were only allowed to rear a child as a reward for their good behaviour. I find a curious parallel to this in the treatment of a section of our society by our present community.
Crushed by the burden of taxation which they have not the resources to meet and to provide for children also: crushed by the national cost of the too numerous children of those who do not contribute to the public funds by taxation, yet who recklessly bring forth from an inferior stock individuals who are not self-supporting, the middle and superior artisan classes have, without perceiving it, come almost to take the position of that ancient slave population.?

In 1935 Stopes attended the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the Nazi regime. ^[1]

Stopes even cut her son Harry out of her will after he married a near-sighted woman - Mary Eyre Wallis, later Mary Stopes-Roe, 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."

She also had Harry wearing a skirt when he was a boy as she did not believe in the "ugly and heating-in-the-wrong-places garments which most men are condemned to wear" and for the same reason forbade Harry to ride a bicycle. Harry wearing a skirt was noted by Barnes Wallis in 1935 when Harry was eleven. On the same occasion Marie disapproved of Wallis' wife Molly breast-feeding her younger son Christopher^[2].

Supporters of Stopes generally concede that she made such remarks, but argue that they should be read in their historical context. For example the author Virginia Woolf once wrote in her diary "On the tow path we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles...They should certainly be killed."^[3] Following Stopes' death in 1958, a large part of her personal fortune went to the Eugenics Society.

Personal life

In 1911 she married Reginald Ruggles Gates; Stopes claimed that this marriage was unconsummated and it was annulled in 1914. In 1918 she married Humphrey Verdon Roe, brother of Alliott Verdon Roe.

Stopes died from breast cancer at her home in Dorking, Surrey, UK.

The modern Marie Stopes International organisation

From the 1920s onward, Marie 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. Since then the organisation has grown steadily and today the Marie Stopes International (MSI) global partnership works in 38 countries, has 452 clinics worldwide and has offices in London, Brussels, Melbourne and USA.

In 2006 alone, the organisation provided services to 4.6 million clients and by 2010 aims to protect 20 million couples from unplanned pregnancies and unsafe abortion (citation?)

Writings

Biographies

See also

• Suffragette
• Social hygiene
• List of non-governmental organizations in the People's Republic of China
• Abortion debate

References

External links

• Marie Stopes International
• Marie Stopes International UK
• Marie Stopes International Australia
• Pictures of Marie Stopes and Thomas Hardy at her Portland, Dorset home
• 'The Colonisation of a Dried River Bed' - PDF file of Marie Stopes' 1903 article

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