Marie Stopes

Marie Stopes (born October 15, 1880, Edinburgh, Scotland—died October 2, 1958, near Dorking, Surrey, England) was an advocate of birth control who, in 1921, founded the United Kingdom’s first instructional clinic for contraception. Although her clinical work, writings, and speeches evoked violent opposition, especially from Roman Catholics, she greatly influenced the Church of England’s gradual relaxation (from 1930) of its stand against birth control.

Stopes grew up in a wealthy, educated family; her father was an architect, her mother a scholar of Shakespeare and an advocate for the education of women. Stopes obtained a science degree (1902) from University College, London, which she completed in only two years. She went on to do postgraduate studies in paleobotany (fossil plants), earning a doctorate from the University of Munich in 1904. That same year she became an assistant lecturer of botany at the University of Manchester. She specialized in fossil plants and the problems of coal mining. She married her first husband, a botanist named Reginald Ruggles Gates, in 1911. Stopes would later assert that her marriage was unconsummated and that she knew little about sex when she first married. Her failed marriage and its eventual annulment in 1916 played a large role in determining her future career, causing her to turn her attention to the issues of sex, marriage, and childbirth and their meaning in society. She initially saw birth control as an aid to marriage fulfillment and as a means to save women from the physical strain of excessive childbearing. However, Stopes also was a staunch supporter of eugenics, and she advocated for eugenic birth control, wherein inferior women of the lower classes would be prevented from having children.

In 1918 Stopes married Humphrey Verdon Roe, cofounder of the A.V. Roe aircraft firm, who also had strong interests in the birth-control movement. He helped her in the crusade that she then began. Their original birth-control clinic—designed to educate women about the few methods of birth control available to them—was founded three years later, in the working-class Holloway district of London. That same year she became founder and president of the Society for Constructive Birth Control, a platform from which she spoke widely about the benefits of married women having healthy, desired babies—essentially promoting the idea of eugenic birth control. In the meantime she wrote Married Love and Wise Parenthood (both 1918), which were widely translated. Her Contraception: Its Theory, History and Practice (1923) was, when it first appeared, the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. After World War II she promoted birth control in East Asian countries.