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Thursday, December 15, 2005
What and who is Marie Stopes?
INTERNET research reveals, the group was founded by Marie Carmichael Stopes.
She was born in Edinburgh to an archaeologist father and scholarly mother who was also a suffragist. Her studies as a paleobotanist took her to London and Munich, then to Manchester where she became the first female member of the science faculty of the university.
But it was her married life that inspired her devotion to sexual education.
Stopes' first marriage was unconsummated and then annulled in 1916 and so she found herself researching the subject. This fascination led to her first book Married Love (1918) - published in the year she married Humphrey Verdon Roe. A second book called Wise Parenthood closely followed Married Love and then she became an overnight success, swamped with requests for birth control advice.
Marie Stopes always intended that sexual ecstasy should be restricted to marital union, but despite her good intentions she invited controversy because of her explicit approach to the anatomy of sexual relations and her frank advocacy of the practice of birth control.
With her career established, she wrote more books and edited the journal Birth Control News.
To continue her good work, she opened a clinic in Holloway, North London, offering free contraceptive advice to poor mothers. She had the full support of her second husband. Their success led to the foundation of the National Birth Control Association which became the Family Planning Association in 1931.
Always strong in the face of dissension she brought a successful libel action against a Catholic doctor who opposed her progressive ideas.
The Marie Stopes organization has branches in almost all parts of the world.
(December 15, 2005 issue)
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