Introduction to Marie Stopes- My dissertation 'marvel'!!!

As a famous paleobotanist, notorious author, birth-control pioneer, eugenicist and feminist, Marie Stopes was certainly a controversial character. Sex education and birth-control is something many of us take for granted today. Where would society be today if women could not restrict the number of children they had? Many would pinpoint the 1960s as the watershed in contraceptive technology and promotion, but it was from the late nineteenth-century that birth-control began to be considered as a serious social movement in the British Isles. Marie Stopes personalised the movement and promoted birth-control by constantly publicising herself, her works and her clinics. She not only achieved more than any other birth controller, but revolutionised marital relations and motherhood, which changed women’s lives.

Marie Stopes lived in a time of great social change for women in England. The feminists’ pre-war political efforts and women’s war effort resulted in women being emancipated in 1918. The following year a Sex Disqualification Removal Act was introduced, opening higher levels of civil service, legal professions and jury duty to women.

N.B. However, the political emancipation was restricted to women who were above the age of thirty, owned property or were the wives of householders or occupied property with the annual rate of £5 and had a graduate degree. It was by no means universal suffrage, as it is clearly restricting voting rights to middle class women, unlike men who, no matter their class, could vote.

These gains combined to raise the question of a possible increase in female opportunities and Married Love (1918) was published amongst this expansion of political and economic opportunities for women. With Stopes promoting sexual pleasure, it seemed a revolutionary time for middle-class women.

The first half of the twentieth-century was also a time for heightened eugenics fear. The emancipation of some women paralleled the increased anxiety on the ‘Condition of England’ question. Reconciling women’s demands for greater political and economic equality with the needs of the race was one of the most troublesome eugenicist issues. Independent women were eschewing the typical domestic role as wife and mother. The Great War was a eugenics nightmare. It supposedly destroyed the finest physical and mental stock of the nation and disrupted family life and selective reproduction. In Britain there was a particular emphasis on the idea that certain areas of the working-class were degenerating the nation. There were variants of eugenic principles. The worst was ‘negative’ eugenics, which was more authoritarian and used coercive measures to decrease the propagation of ‘bad stock’ and was based on racism, and classism to produce a strong ‘race’. Stopes combined the ‘negative’ principles with ‘positive’ principles, which promoted those who she considered ‘good stock’ to have more children. She had strong eugenic principles and was a member of the Eugenics Society, but she participated in the middle-class feminist movement. Stopes combined these two strains of influence to form an agenda that she thought would benefit all women. This dissertation will argue whether her eugenics or latent feminist principles steered the course of her work and whether she revolutionised society through her ideology on marital relations, publicity of sexual knowledge and promotion of birth control.

Marie Stopes has not suffered from historical neglect. There have been four biographies on her, two of which were from very close friends and their objectivity has been questioned. The first biography was written by her ‘would-be lover’, Aylmer Maude in 1924 and he clearly admires her, which no doubt contributing to Stopes’ publicity campaign. The second biography was written by Keith Briant in 1962. He was another of her ‘would-be’ lovers and writes from a sentimental point of view four years after Stopes’ death. Neither of these biographies historically analyses Stopes and talk of her objectively. The third was written by Ruth Hall (Passionate Crusader, 1977). She is a journalist and she focuses on Stopes’ sexual and emotional experience that provoked her varied career. She just assumes that Stopes helped women with their sexual, marital and contraceptive needs and focused very little on Stopes’ role in the birth-control movement. June Rose, a professional biographer, wrote Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (first ed. 1992), which focuses on Stopes interweaving public and private life.

My dissertation is an analysis of how revolutionary Stopes’ work was on changing marital relations, sexual knowledge, and promoting birth-control. I will not discuss why there was a fertility decline or why limiting births happened uniformly in Great Britain. I intend to explore women as one gender and discuss to what extent Stopes revolutionised social ideals of marriage, sex and birth-control. Women have never been looked at as a whole by previous historical analysis. Contrasting the class variations of Stopes’ influence will give a more balanced overview of her work revolutionising women’s role within marriage and society. I have contrasted Stopes’ works and her correspondence to see how influential her ideology was on women and if it changed society, which has not been explored before. I will also study the conflict between Stopes’ eugenicist principles and her concern for women’s health and happiness. Eugenics hugely influenced Stopes’ aims and affected the way Stopes’ helped women. Many historians have argued her to be either a feminist or a eugenicist. I believe that for Stopes they were indistinguishable, I will argue that Stopes combined her feminist and eugenicist principles. She may have had different aims, race regeneration and happy domestic life with sexual pleasure and voluntary motherhood, but there was one means: birth-control.

I study whether marriage became an equal partnership as Stopes’ promoted and whether women actually achieved sexual fulfilment. I use Stopes’ marriage manuals and correspondence to see how far her ideas of sexual fulfilment and equality in marriage were adopted across the classes. I discuss how Stopes combated sexual ignorance, which was causing unhappy marriages, high birth rates and weak, exhausted mothers. I examined what Stopes wrote in a wide variety of books and then contrasted them to my sample of correspondence to see how many were grateful for the knowledge and asked for more information. Whether the plea for more information was an indication that the information in the books was not sufficient is discussed and how publicity, her clinics and newspaper articles contributed to the dissemination of sex and birth-control information. There is also an in-depth discussion on what steered Stopes’ promotion of birth-control; was it for the race or women’s health and happiness? I look at Cohen’s argument that the clinic was the instrument through which Stopes helped women regain control of their fertility. I have also looked at what Stopes wrote, particularly her eugenicist tract Radiant Motherhood, and how this affected her influence on reforming society for women.

Using Stopes’ own published works, there are many pitfalls. What Stopes may have publicly advocated in her books did not necessarily correlate to her actions in the clinics or in her correspondence. Stopes was a self-aggrandising publicist but her sympathetic tone in correspondence and her policies in the clinics did not show her ardent eugenicist drive as many of her books did. It is hard to know whether the sample of correspondence used in this dissertation is representative of society at the time. The respondents were predisposed to be in favour of birth-control and voluntary motherhood. The majority of respondents were middle-class therefore the other classes are disproportionately represented making it difficult to achieve a balanced overview. Despite this, it is possible to achieve an overall sense of how far Stopes revolutionised society for women. Stopes may not have helped every single woman in society, but those she did help have an experience worth studying.

The overall conclusions to be drawn from this dissertation are that Stopes was a social reformer, not a revolutionary. She tried to break social barriers that maintained sexual ignorance and publicised such topics allowing the free dissemination of information as well as changing marital relations. Stopes did help both middle and working-class women by her publicising information through different media. Those who came into direct contact with Stopes, through her work, letters and clinics were helped to gain control of their fertility. Stopes helped women but not uniformly. In hindsight it seems she stayed rather conservative, as she did not promote issues too deviant from the social norms, but in the 1920s and 1930s she was seen as controversial. Stopes was a social reformer, who through birth-control achieved her feminist and eugenicist objectives of happy marriage, voluntary motherhood, universal sexual knowledge and race regeneration. For Stopes, there was no distinguishing between her eugenicist and feminist principles, which were so intertwined.

More to follow.... mwhahahahahaha....