Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marie Stopes
-
Standard Name: Stopes, Marie
Birth Name: Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes
Pseudonym: Mark Arundel
Pseudonym: Erica Fay
Pseudonym: Marie Carmichael
Pseudonym: G. N. Mortlake
MS
was best known for her early-twentieth-century writing on motherhood and birth control, and for her strong commitment to educating women in the practice of contraception. In order to communicate detailed instructions on topics that were taboo, she often employed a literary style that may now seem over-mystical or lyrical. She published widely, writing in various disciplines such as science, sexology, philosophy and theology, in a number of literary genres such as drama, autobiography, poetry, and the novel, and on a wide range of topics, including censorship, love, and marriage.
"Marie Stopes" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie_Stopes_at_the_time_of_the_marriage_with_Mr._H.V._Roe._Wellcome_M0017375_(cropped).jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Though little is known about her early religious experiences, she brought up her daughters as members of the Free Church of Scotland
.
Commire, Anne, and Deborah Klezmer, editors. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Yorkin Publications, 2002.
850
According to her daughter Marie
, CS
raised them in the...
Education
Diana Athill
DA
was taught at home by governesses (seven successively before she was sent to school), who followed a correspondence course designed for home schooling which was known as Parents Educational National Union
. A French...
Education
Fay Weldon
FW
learned to read at three: I remember . . . the way the letters suddenly made sense.
Weldon, Fay. Auto da Fay. Flamingo, 2002.
24
After her grandmother joined the family in 1942 she was able to borrow adult books from...
Family and Intimate relationships
Margaret Forster
From about the time she entered her teens, MF
was haunted by the determination that her life should not be like what she saw as the empty, monotonous lives of her mother and her aunts...
Family and Intimate relationships
Naomi Mitchison
The marriage endured, though NM
had several years of unenjoyable sex before she discovered Marie Stopes
's Married Love. When the couple were apart they normally wrote to each other every day (or every...
Family and Intimate relationships
Charlotte Stopes
CS
bore her daughter, Marie Stopes
, the future scientist and sex reformer.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.
Naomi's close childhood friends included Julian
and Aldous Huxley
. Close family friends included Florence Buchanan
, distinguished physiologist, and Marie Stopes
, paleobotanist and birth control educator (the latter role emerged only later).
Squier, Susan M., and Naomi Mitchison. “Naomi Mitchison: The Feminist Art of Making Things Difficult”. Solution Three, Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1995, pp. 161 -83.
164
Benton, Jill. Naomi Mitchison: A Biography. Pandora, 1992.
22
Friends, Associates
Phyllis Bentley
Vera Brittain
introduced PB
, during her stay in Chelsea, to birth-control crusader Marie Stopes
.
Brittain, Vera. Chronicle of Friendship. Bishop, AlanEditor , Gollancz, 1986.
41
Friends, Associates
Muriel Spark
For the next few years she lived the stimulating, bohemian, often harsh life of a modern poet in London, though she despised those literary circles which she felt to be self-serving and amateurish. Although she...
Friends, Associates
Angela Brazil
Visiting Polperro in Cornwall, AB
introduced herself by letter to Marie Stopes
, on the excuse that they shared the same publisher, Blackie
.
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane, 1976.
128
Intertextuality and Influence
Maude Royden
She had originally given the first seven of the eleven chapters as addresses at Kensington Town Hall on a series of consecutive Sunday nights.
Royden, Maude. Sex and Common-Sense. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922.
xv
This was the same year in which Marie Stopes
formed...
Leisure and Society
Angela Brazil
AC often entertained school-children and orphans at her home. She suggests a different slant on the eugenics movement when describing this activity to Marie Stopes
: A spinster lady can't do much in your line...
Occupation
Muriel Spark
She later recounted the ructions that cost her her Poetry Society
job. She set out to raise the quality of the Poetry Review, to cease railing against the moderns,
After completing her education, she taught privately. CS
was also her daughter Marie
's primary educator until Marie reached the age of twelve.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Commire, Anne, and Deborah Klezmer, editors. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Yorkin Publications, 2002.
850
Timeline
April 1900
Shafts, a paper for women and the working classes, then a magazine of progressive thought, ceased publication.
By September 1915
US birth-control activist Margaret Sanger
probably showed Marie Stopes
(as a French pessary) an example of the original contraceptive cap of the kind dating from 1838.
16 October 1916
Margaret Sanger
opened a birth-control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in New York (Brooklyn), four and a half years ahead of the first such British clinic, which was the brainchild of Marie Stopes
.
American National Biography.
1929
The Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress
(founded by Marie Stopes
in August 1921) began to advocate sterilization in certain cases where women were congenitally diseased, physically or mentally handicapped, or had previous...
1930
A number of rival birth-control clinics joined forces as the National Birth Control Association
(later the Family Planning Association).
31 July 1930
Memorandum 153/MCW, a clause introduced by the Ministry of Health, first allowed dispensation of contraceptive advice.
2 June 1942
The criminal trial by jury of Dr Eustace Chesser
for his educational book Love without Fear began; he was charged with publishing an obscene libel.
1991
RU 486, the morning after pill, was approved for use in the UK.
