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.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Cultural formation | Charlotte Stopes | 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 |
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 |
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. |
Family and Intimate relationships | Kate Clanchy | While the family was in Edinburgh, KC
's mother, Joan Clanchy
, was the Headmistress of St George's School for Girls
(which numbers Ménie Muriel Dowie
among its distinguished former students). Scott, Jane. “By Virtue Of An Explosive Arts Debut”. The Herald. |
Friends, Associates | Naomi Mitchison | 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 | |
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 |
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, Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Constable, 1992. 169 |
Occupation | Charlotte Stopes | 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.