Marie Stopes, Social Revolutionary and Feminist, or an Intolerant Eugenicist: A Brief Summary

“I will be canonised in 200 years time”, scribbled Marie Stopes in a margin of a Catholic pamphlet. Marie Stopes, undoubtedly, was her own biggest fan, but the public hype she built around herself and her work, although exaggerated at times, was essentially well-earned. She had transformed society, but to what scale? Her publicising and popularising of sexual equality in marriage, birth-control and voluntary motherhood combined with her class prejudiced, eugenicist jargon that infiltrated all her ideology made her both a much loved and hated figure. One cannot deny that her books, articles and clinics caused a stir, which opened up the separate spheres of men and women so they could communicate to find an effective solution for fertility limitation and a better marriage. Sexual knowledge and birth-control had been things strictly limited to males and ‘lewd’ women, whilst female sexuality was something that had never been contemplated separately, or indeed seriously, from women’s ability to procreate. Stopes produced a remarkable ideology that, if not practiced, surely opened social and cultural barriers in society to allow the free dissemination and discussion of such ideas.

Stopes’ ideology was rather contradictory. In some ways it was revolutionary in that it promoted female liberty and sexual pleasure in marriage, but it was still conservative advocating only heterosexuality and marriage. Her notion of sexual equality did not extend to include the idea that women could dominate sexual relations. However, Stopes idea of equality within marriage no longer allowed women to be sidelined as the weaker sex. Stopes was particularly revolutionary in comparison to many of her feminist contemporaries. Although Stopes agreed with feminists that marriage should not give the husband ‘conjugal rights’, she rejected the idea that women were passionless. Stopes depicted women as sexual beings and introduced her theory of the ‘Law of Periodicity’, which gave them the right to refuse or accept their husband’s sexual advances without been seen as “frigid” or “depraved”. Husbands wrote to Stopes to ask for advice on how to control their erection, for example, so they could satisfy their wives. These men were actively trying to implement Stopes’ idea of equality and mutuality within marriage, which transformed the marital relationship. However, Stopes’ marriage manuals were aimed mainly at the middle-classes. While some of the ideas may have diffused into the working-classes, the absence of such female rights in cheaper pamphlets like A Letter to Working Mothers indicates that such ideas were meant only for the ‘respectable’ classes. Stopes was not as revolutionary as she could have been, but her policies were radical for the time, which had a definite impact on middle-class women.

Stopes succeeded somewhat in dispelling the ignorance of those women who had come into contact with her through her newspaper articles, her books or her clinics. She disseminated sex and birth-control information in a time when doctors were unable or unwilling to provide their patients with such information. Accessibility and availability was one of the problems Stopes tried to overcome. Setting up a mail-order service from her London Mothers’ Clinic and ensuring her name was constantly in the press, she guaranteed that the majority of society at least knew who she was and what she was fighting for. When knowledge on some topics were limited and highlighted by individuals in their correspondence, Stopes reacted, sometimes publishing another edition of her books to include the missing information. The accessibility of such information reduced sexual ignorance as well as empowering women with the knowledge of how to control their fertility. Although Stopes’ message reached the working-classes, few of her recommended methods were adopted. Middle class women were able to adopt her methods because they had the money to spend on her Racial Cap. They were more receptive to change, unlike working-class women.

Stopes had to overcome the social and cultural barriers of the working-classes, but her middle-class status combined with her own ignorance meant that she did not understand their needs and problems the working class people faced. Although she did recognise on some level that she had not succeeded to have an impact on working-class women, she failed to alter her strategies to overcome the social and cultural barriers, which would have enabled more women (especially the working-class women) to use her recommended artificial and reliable contraceptive methods rather than abstinence and withdrawal. Despite the class differentiation on the practical application of contraceptives, the knowledge of birth-control was made open and available to all classes.

Her aims: a superior race and happy, healthy mothers and children, were intertwined and inseparable. Although it is impossible to distinguish her motives behind her promotion of birth-control, we know that Stopes gave women of all classes some amount of knowledge to help end numerous childbirths that resulted in needless waste of life of the child and mother. Whether eugenicist principles or feminist principles were behind it is secondary to the effect Stopes had on infant mortality and society’s awareness of it. All women were helped and no woman was spared from Stopes’ eugenicist ideal. According to her working-class women were degenerating the race and middle-class women, the good stock, were expected to have more children that were fit and strong to create a good, healthy race. To some degree, Stopes was successful in creating a better ‘race’ through her propagation of happy and healthy families. The combination of equality in marriages, voluntary motherhood through birth-control and sexual knowledge gave rise to the understanding of female sexuality and the knowledge of how to use birth-control effectively.

Stopes had constructed a complex ideology, which based each notion on the following... To have a successful marriage, Stopes argued that the mutual orgasm was the solution. To ensure women could enjoy sex without the fear of pregnancy, birth-control would have to be used. Birth-control was the double-edged sword, as it was central to Stopes’ ‘constructive’ eugenicist ideology as well as protecting women from numerous pregnancies. Culmination of which is a successful marriage. All of Stopes’ ideas were combined and indistinguishable from each other. It was an exceptional and very progressive ideology, but it was inherently flawed.

The reason Stopes was unsuccessful in revolutionising society was because she did not propagate her idea of equality in marriage and female sexuality to the working-classes, which meant that they could not follow Stopes’ ideology as she had envisioned. No doubt the indistinguishable nature of her feminist and her eugenicist motives made many working-class women wary of adopting her ideology in case they were allowing themselves to be manipulated to her eugenicist interests. Alas the working-classes needed revolutionising the most. The middle-classes had already limited their fertility and women had gained the vote. The feminist movement was mainly a middle-class phenomenon and women were expanding their sphere of influence of which Marie Stopes herself was a living example. Essentially, the working-classes were excluded from this ‘social revolution’.

The overall conclusion is that Stopes was a social reformer, not a revolutionary. She helped women, but not uniformly. Class differentiation meant that Stopes led a piecemeal revolution that generally excluded working-class women. She remained rather conservative in some of her aims, but she provoked controversy with her policies. Her ideology set middle-class women on the long road to a sexual revolution, which working-class women would join later.