Marie Stopes
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Marie Stopes (October 15 1880 - October 2 1958) was a Scottish author, campaigner for women's rights and pioneer in the field of family planning. Stopes edited the journal Birth Control News which gave anatomically explicit advice, and in addition to her enthusiasm for protests at places of worship this provoked protest from both the Church of England and the Catholic Church. Her sex manual Married Love was controversial and influential.
In 1911 she married Reginald Ruggles Gates; this marriage was annulled in 1914. In 1918 she married Humphrey Roe.
Dr Marie Stopes opened the UK's first family planning clinic, the Mothers' Clinic at 61, Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London on 17 March 1921. In 1925 the London clinic moved to its present site at 108 Whitfield Street, Central London. The clinic offered a free service to married women and also gathered scientific data about contraception. The opening of the clinic created one of the greatest social impacts of the 20th century and marked the start of a new era in which couples, for the first time, could reliably take control over their fertility.
In 1925, the clinic moved to Whitfield Street in Central London, where it remains today. Dr Marie Stopes and her fellow family planning pioneers around the globe played a major role in breaking down taboos about sex and increasing knowledge, pleasure and improved reproductive health. In 1930 the National Birth Control Council was formed.
From the 1920s onwards, Marie Stopes gradually built up a small network of clinics that were initially very successful but by the early 1970s they were in financial difficulties. In 1975 the clinics went into voluntary receivership. The modern organisation that bears Marie Stopes' name was established a year later, taking over responsibility for the main clinic, and in 1978 it began its work overseas in New Delhi. Since the late 1970s the organisation has grown steadily and today the Marie Stopes International Global Partnership works in 38 countries and has offices in London, Brussels, Melbourne, Tokyo and Washington DC.
Marie Stopes was also a prominent campaigner for the implementation of policies inspired by eugenics. In her Radiant Motherhood (1920) she called for the "sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood (to) be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory." Even more controversially, her The Control of Parenthood (1920) declared that "utopia could be reached in my life time had I the power to issue inviolable edicts... (I would legislate compulsory sterilization of the insane, feebleminded)... revolutionaries... half-castes." Defenders of Marie Stopes point out that such remarks should be read in their historical context. Following Stopes' death in 1958, a large part of her personal fortune went to the Eugenics Society.
Marie Stopes’ early career (1909-20) was as a palaeobotanist. She obtained a first class honors degree in botany and was a gold medalist at University College London. She went to Japan on a Scientific Mission in 1907, spent a year and a half at the Imperial University, Tokyo, and explored the country for fossil plants. She was also Fellow and sometime Lecturer in Palaeobotany at University College London and Lecturer in Palaeobotany at the University of Manchester.
In 1999 Marie Stopes was voted 'Woman of the Millennium' by Guardian newspaper readers in the UK.