Marie Stopes (1880–1958) was a British campaigner for women’s rights and a pioneer in the field of family planning.
Born in Edinburgh, Stopes grew up in an affluent, educated family and trained as a palaeobotanist. When her marriage to Reginald Ruggles Gates broke down because of his impotence, Stopes’s reading on the subject motivated her to write Married Love (1918) and Wise Parenthood (1918.) Churches, the medical establishment, and the media denounced the books. Nevertheless, they became very popular, selling thousands of copies quickly.
In 1921, Stopes started the United Kingdom’s first instructional clinic for contraception in London and offered a free family planning service to married women, and collected data about contraception. By 1930, she expanded her establishment with branches all over the United Kingdom and joined forces with other family planning organizations to create the National Birth Control Council (now the Family Planning Association.)
Stopes’s clinical work, writings, and speeches evoked fierce opposition, especially from Roman Catholics. However, she seriously influenced the Church of England’s measured moderation (1930) of its viewpoint against birth control.
For the rest of her life, Stopes continued to campaign for women to have better access to birth control and wrote unexceptional poetry and plays.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Marie Stopes
You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing.
—Marie Stopes
Topics: Beauty
Each coming together of man and wife, even if they have been mated for many years, should be a fresh adventure; each winning should necessitate a fresh wooing.
—Marie Stopes
Topics: Fresh, Marriage
An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloating.
—Marie Stopes
Topics: Mankind, Man, Body
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