Marie Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist, academic, campaigner for women’s rights and pioneer in the field of birth control.
Stopes was born in Edinburgh to an archaeologist father and scholarly, suffragist mother. Her parents had met through the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Stopes attended University College London (UCL) where she studied Botany and Geology. She graduated with a first class BSc. She then went on to earn a D.Sc. degree from UCL, becoming the youngest person in Britain to have done so. She went onto complete her Ph.D in Palaeobotany at the University of Munich while occasionally lecturing in Palaeobotany at University College London and the University of Manchester. She was the first female academic in the science faculty at the University of Manchester.
In 1911 Stopes married Reginald Ruggles Gates, he was impotent and unable to consummate the marriage and after three years their marriage was annulled. He had traditional views of how women should behave and had strongly opposed her support for women’s suffrage. Stopes was a member of the Women’s Freedom League, her mother was a member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. Stopes strongly believed that a non-violent approach was best.
Stopes published her first book on the subject of impotence, entitled ‘Married Love’ in 1918. The book was widely condemned by churches, the medical establishment and the press, despite this it was popular, selling 2,000 copies within a fortnight. Stopes became famous overnight and thousands of women wrote to her for advice. She then wrote a second book, ‘Wise Parenthood’ which was a manual on birth control.
Stopes married Humphrey Verdon Roe who shared in her views, before meeting Stopes, Roe had offered to finance a birth control clinic attached to St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester but his offer was declined. After their marriage, Stopes and Roe opened a family planning clinic in Holloway, North London for poor mothers. It was the first in the country and offered a free service to married women. The clinic taught women about birth control methods including the cervical cap, the pull-out method, spermicides and olive oil-soaked sponges which had been popular in Greek/Roman times. Stopes was opposed to abortion and hoped that by educating women about birth control abortions would not be necessary. Stopes tested many of her contraceptives on the patients at her clinics and collected data from her research.
Stopes took a risk opening the clinic as others, like Annie Besant had been sent to prison for advocating birth-control. In 1925 the clinic moved to central London and others opened across the country, by 1930 other family planning organisations had joined forces with Stopes to form the National Birth Control Council (later the Family Planning Association).
The Catholic Church opposed Stope’s clinics, in 1923 Stopes sued Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland for libel after he wrote an article in the Daily Express calling for her to be sent to prison. He also accused her of writing obscene books. The case generated huge publicity for her views.
Stopes continued to campaign for women to have better access to birth control until her death on 2 October 1958. The clinics continued to operate after her death but went into voluntary receivership in 1975. A year later Marie Stopes International was established as an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) working on sexual and reproductive health. It now works in over forty countries, has 452 clinics and has offices in London, Brussels, Melbourne and in the U.S.