A lesser-known side of Marie Stopes

The Library has recently added to the catalogue a copy of Marie Stopes' little-known first (and only) novel, Love's Creation, published in 1928 under the rather transparent pseudonym of 'Marie Carmichael' (Stopes' mother's maiden name was Carmichael and her own full name was Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes). The copy was Stopes' own and is inscribed with her address inside the front cover.

Stopes is, of course, well-known for her best-selling works on marriage and birth control and related topics in sexual enlightenment. A few people have heard of her poetry (which was turned down for publication by Faber, politely but firmly, by T. S. Eliot) or of her plays, several of which achieved production, or of the film, Maisie's Marriage, which she scripted in order to convey the birth control message to a wider audience.

Love's Creation, however, remains a unique venture, at least in terms of having actually achieved publication. The copy in the Wellcome Library is a first edition, although it is probably truer to say the only edition as there were no reprints and no demands by publisher or literary agent to produce a successor, since it sold poorly. Neither did it gain critical recognition, being largely dismissed, when reviewed at all, with a brief notice rather than extensive critical discussion. One notice indeed described it as 'old-fashioned', and this seems not unjust when we consider that other works appearing on the literary scene in 1928 included Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint. Mary Abbott, a friend of Stopes, suggested in a letter to her that the furore around Hall's novel of lesbian advocacy might have had a knock-on impact on libraries and booksellers, making them cautious of anything that might turn out to be scandalous, but this seems rather improbable as an explanation for the popular and critical apathy which greeted Love's Creation.

Since Stopes was working on versions of the novel that eventually appeared in 1928 for a period of some twelve years, it presumably had some particular personal significance for her, given the many other demands on her time and energies. Although she at one time had considered embodying the ideas about marriage that eventually became her best-selling manual Married Love in fictional form, Love's Creation does not appear to be the fictional version of her message to 'young husbands and all who are betrothed in love'.

The novel begins with the arrival of a female scientist in a laboratory previously all male. While one might hope that this might become the largely untold tale of a woman in science, it soon turns into the romance between Lilian and her colleague Kenneth. Shortly after their marriage, Lilian dies in a road accident. A second strand of the plot is the story of her younger sister, Rose Amber, and her disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, the widowed Kenneth throws up his university position in favour of travel for scientific purposes (his experiences very closely mirror Stopes' as recounted in her Journal from Japan, 1910). Its depiction of the characters and roles of women and men seems strangely conventional given Stopes' own pioneering career and achievements. It depicts one marriage abruptly terminated by accidental death and one made hellish by the husband's pathological jealousy (this may well draw on Stopes' experiences in her first marriage). While the ending promises a future union along the lines set out in Married Love, such an ideal is nowhere presented fictionally within the novel. The story is also, for a realist work, curiously unanchored in history: it is never clear whether the action is taking place before or after the Great War, which is never mentioned. There is also an entire chapter putting forward a 'large cosmic theory' through the mouth of Kenneth. Stopes, who was capable of producing non-fictional works which were and are extremely readable and which early readers found compelling, had less success when it came to telling a story.

It seems probable that very few people have ever read this novel: I only did so when I was invited to contribute a chapter on Stopes - 'Uniting Science and Sensibility: Marie Stopes and the Narratives of Marriage in the 1920s' - to the essay collection Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939 edited by Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (University of North Carolina Press, 1993). It remains, however, a historical curiosity and a sidelight on the complex character of Marie Stopes.

'Birth of the Birth Control Clinic'

The Institute of Historical Research (IHR) was founded 90 years ago and as part of a series of events to mark other notable milestones of 1921, the IHR is holding a one-day conference on the 11th March to explore the work and legacy of birth control pioneer Marie Stopes (Stopes's first clinic opened in 1921).

Speakers on the day include Dr Lesley Hall (Wellcome Library) and more details on the Conference and registration are available from the IHR's website.

The Wellcome Library holds a wealth of material on the history of birth control and these records - including material relating to Stopes' career - have been the subject of a number of posts on this Blog.

Image: Birth control clinic in caravan, with nurse (PP/MCS)

Stella Browne in the archives at the Wellcome Library

This week my biography of Stella Browne, early twentieth century British feminist sex radical and socialist, was published by I B Tauris: The Life and Times of Stella Browne: Feminist and Free Spirit. While it contains the fruit of extensive research in archives and libraries over three continents, a solid core of essential material for any study of Stella Browne is to be found in the archives at the Wellcome Library.

She was one of the founders of the Abortion Law Reform Association (1936). Her own activism on the subject during the previous two decades had been an inspiration to other campaigners – in her chronology of the movement, Janet Chance placed one entry, STELLA CAMPAIGNS ALONE, between the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act on which the criminal status of abortion rested, and the informal discussions in 1935 leading to the inauguration of ALRA. Stella Browne’s activities in pursuit of ALRA’s aims are particularly well-documented for the latter part of the 1930s. A file of correspondence (SA/ALR/B.5) with her colleagues during the 1940s and 50s, following her move to Liverpool for family reasons during the War, reveals how committed she remained even when she was physically distant, poor, ageing and in deteriorating health, communicating with them on matters of mutual interest until very shortly before her death.

This is however by no means her only appearance in the collections in the Wellcome Library. Her rather tense relationship with Marie Stopes, whom she had known prior to the latter’s emergence into notoriety with the publication of Married Love in 1918, is discernable in a small group of letters preserved among the latter’s ‘ML [Married Love] – GEN’ correspondence (PP/MCS/A.42). Although there is a letter of warm congratulation about Married Love and commiserations with the difficulties the US edition was experiencing under the Comstock Laws, the tone soured rapidly. In 1922 Stella Browne was appalled by Stopes’s rewriting of the history of her involvement with birth control to conceal Margaret Sanger’s priority. This escalated into high levels of antagonism on both sides, and Stopes’s correspondence in the British Library indicates that she even considered suing Stella Browne for libel (a rather pointless exercise, given Stella’s continual state of penury).

Her relations with Dr C P Blacker, General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, were also somewhat fraught. Although she attended meetings at the Eugenics Society, and was briefly a member, her antipathy to the class-biased and anti-feminist nature of hereditarian ideology is extremely well-documented, as is her opposition to authoritarian solutions to social problems. However, as part of Blacker’s reform eugenics initiative of the 1930s, the Society was increasingly forming strategic alliances with campaigners in related areas such as birth control and family allowances. Although when Stella Browne first mooted the topic of abortion in a Society meeting, it was met, according to Alice Jenkins of ALRA, by a silence ‘that could be felt’, the question of legalisation was at least up for discussion by the later 1930s, and the Eugenics Society constituted a forum where ALRA might find potential allies and sympathisers.

Blacker’s own views on Stella Browne, expressed to various correspondents in his capacity as General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, and among his personal papers, were not sympathetic (‘moderately mad’). She contacted him about a delegation to the Ministry of Health being organised by the National Birth Control Association in 1933 – her letter survives among his personal papers (PP/CPB/C.3/3) – with which he was very reluctant that she should be involved.

She enjoyed better relations with other bodies active in the campaign for birth control, including the Malthusian, later New Generation, League, and the Workers’ Birth Control Group. However, although she was clearly very active in promoting the latter’s endeavours to obtain official permission for birth control advice to be given in local authority maternity welfare clinics, her name is striking absent from their literature, a little of which survives among the archives of the Family Planning Association. The clue to this mystery is provided by Dora Russell’s files relating to the WBCG in the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, which indicate a policy decision that the names associated with the group should all be of married people who were parents (except for Dorothy Jewson, MP, their main Parliamentary ally). Stella’s strong ties with the WBCG are confirmed by the very significant overlap in membership between the by then defunct WBCG and the founding group of ALRA.

Her enduring connections with the wider world of sexual reform movements even in later life are testified to by her listing as one of the Vice-Presidents of the Society for Sex Education and Guidance, active during the 1940s and 50s, literature of which has been preserved among the archives of the Family Planning Association.

Happy birth [control] day, Marie!

One of the first collections acquired by the former Contemporary Medical Archives Centre (now subsumed into Archives and Manuscripts) was a mass of papers of Marie Stopes (1882-1958) which had been rejected by the British Museum Reading Room to which she had left her personal archive, and returned by them to her son, Harry Stopes-Roe, who eventually presented it to us. Over the years this has been one of the most popular and heavily-used collection in the archives.

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The bulk of these papers consisted of thousands of letters to Stopes from members of the general public. Many of them wrote in passionate gratitude for the advice given in her pioneering marriage manual, Married Love, published in the last months of the Great War and becoming an immediate best-seller, even though the publisher had been so dubious of its success that they had asked Stopes for a contribution towards publication costs. Others were written by those who had come across Stopes’s name through the press or word of mouth as someone who could help them with the prevention of pregnancy or their anxieties about sexual matters. In numerous instances a carbon copy of Stopes’s response or at least of a personalised PS to a form letter also survives.

This forms a unique source for attitudes to and beliefs about sexuality and reproduction and other matters to do with health during a period when social attitudes more generally were in flux but ignorance remained widespread, and has been drawn on by many historians.

Although Stopes herself was not a medical doctor – she was entitled to style herself ‘Dr’ because she held a PhD in palaeobotany, the study of fossil plants – she had made herself more knowledgeable about sexual functioning and about the practicalities of contraception than the vast majority of the medical profession. Up until very recently such matters were not routinely incorporated into the medical curriculum and doctors who wished to inform themselves were obliged to seek training at Stopes’s clinics or those established by the other organisations which eventually amalgamated to become the National Birth Control Association, later the Family Planning Association.

Stopes remains a fascinating and controversial figure of many contradictions. Like so many of her contemporaries, she had a considerable sympathy with the eugenics movement, although in her case, she believed that much of the problem of the ‘C3’ [unfit for active military service] population could readily be dealt with by enabling women to space their pregnancies and limit their families. This would lead both to healthier offspring and women themselves with more energy for active motherhood.

A second generation feminist (her mother Charlotte Carmichael Stopes had been an earlier campaigner for female higher education, wrote several important feminist texts, and was a militant suffragette), Marie Stopes’s work was profoundly inflected by these beliefs and her desire to empower women. However, in spite of this ideological commitment, she does not come over as entirely ‘sisterly’ in her relations with other women: she clearly found it impossible to work with other birth control campaigners as her equals rather than as her disciples, leading to her schism with the NBCA in the early 1930s.

Besides the copious correspondence from the public, the Stopes papers here at the Wellcome include a little general correspondence pertaining to birth control, a certain amount of material about the Mothers’ Clinics she set up and the Society for Constructive Birth Control that she founded, meetings she held and lectures she gave, her relations with the press and media, and some legal papers, including transcripts of the proceedings in her high profile libel case against the Roman Catholic medic Dr Halliday Sutherland. There is also a little Stopes material among the archives of the Eugenics Society, to which she bequeathed her clinics.

Some of the extensive secondary literature on Stopes and her career is listed in this Birth Control and Eugenics bibliography (pdf). Other collections in the Wellcome Library on birth control include material reflecting her often fraught relationship with other individuals and organisations in the movement.

Stopes's first clinic was located in Upper Holloway (near Archway), but it soon moved to a more central location in Whitfield Street, a short walk from the Wellcome Library. This building is now the headquarters of the reproductive health charity, Marie Stopes International.

Blue Plaque for Marie Stopes

Today an English Heritage Blue Plaque was unveiled in Cintra Park, Upper Norwood, on the house in which the eminent palaeobotanist, sex educator and campaigner for birth control, Marie Stopes (1880-1958), spent her childhood years. (Some of us might feel that her mother Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Shakespearean scholar, suffragette, and writer on women's issues, also deserves some commemoration. She made a significant contribution to enlivening the cultural atmosphere of Upper Norwood by running discussion groups, Shakespeare readings, a logic class, and meetings on female suffrage.)

Present at the unveiling were Stopes's daughter-in-law, Mary Stopes-Roe (Stopes's son, Harry Stopes-Roe, being unfortunately able to be present for health reasons) and her grandson Jonathan Stopes-Roe. Also present were representatives of the British Library, of Marie Stopes International which carries on her work on a global scale and is based in Whitfield Street, Fitzrovia, in the premises formerly occupied by Stopes's own Mothers' Clinic from 1926, and Lesley Hall, representing the Wellcome Library and the Galton Institute Council, which continues to administer one of Stopes' legacies, a Birth Control Trust for 'the alleviation of poverty by providing practical birth control advice'.

While the bulk of Marie Stopes' substantial archives are held in the British Library Department of Manuscripts, the Wellcome Library holds a significant collection of Stopes papers, consisting mainly of thousands of letters received from grateful readers and other enquirers following the publication of her pioneering marriage manual, Married Love, in 1918, but including some material on her birth control clinics and other activities. There Library also holds a substantial number of other archival collections relating to birth control in the UK and elsewhere.

A Weekend with Wells

The weekend 9th to 11th July saw a fascinating conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the H. G. Wells Society, ‘H. G. Wells: From Kent to Cosmopolis’, held in the appropriate setting of the Darwin College Conference Suite at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

While the conference dealt predominantly with Wells as writer and social visionary, there were a number of papers and elements of interest to the medical historian. The planned opening speaker, the distinguished author Brian Aldiss, was unable to attend, but sent a brief note to be read to the conference referencing a group of novels written by Wells in the 1920s dealing with the topic of mental disturbance, and raising the question of how far these were rooted in personal experience.


A paper by Marc Arnold on ‘H. G. Wells: Tuberculosis, Class and the Fear of Racial Degeneration’ revealed contrasting attitudes - strongly based on social class - to sufferers from TB in the nineteenth century, either ethereally delicate and frail or brutish and animalistic. Although Wells had himself been diagnosed as tubercular as a young man (but had recovered), he lent his weight to the campaign in Sandgate mounted by respectable residents objecting to the presence of numerous pauper consumptives in the town brought there by a local sanatorium entrepreneur. Arnold also made the intriguing suggestion that the depiction of the Eloi and the Morlocks in The Time Machine (1895) owes something to these contrasting images of consumption.



Themes of notions of racial degeneration and Wells’ interest in eugenics cropped up in a number of other papers. John Partington, for example, explored Wells’ relationship to the developing birth control movement, indicating that his interests lay in the wider issues of racial improvement that he saw birth control as enabling. Although most of Wells’ correspondence with Marie Stopes is in the British Library Department of Manuscripts, there is one furious note to her among the Stopes correspondence here in the Wellcome, concerning his resignation from the Society for Constructive Birth Control in 1922, and carbon copies of her letters to him some years later trying to woo him back as a supporter (PP/MCS/A.242). Her endeavours failed, although he later became a Vice President of the rival National Birth Control Association, renamed the Family Planning Association in 1938, from its inception in 1930 until shortly before his death in 1945 (SA/FPA/A14/173)

There was a fascinating plenary lecture by the science fiction novelist and children’s author Gwyneth Jones (Ann Halam) about The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and writing her own novel Dr Franklin’s Island (2001) influenced by it, deploying modern techniques of stem cells and genetic engineering rather than surgery as the means by which the sinister scientist creates human-animal hybrids. The discussion raised issues of the context for Wells’ depiction of vivisection. The Brown Dog furore about animal experimentation at University College took place from 1903 to 1910 (on which there is some documentation in Archives and Manuscripts) and had vivisection much in the news took place after the publication of the novel, but the topic had been a cause for concern and agitation throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century. The archives of the Lister Institute, formerly British Institute for Preventive Medicine, include material on the protests by local residents against its establishment on the Chelsea Embankment on the grounds of resistance to experimentation on animals.

This was an excellent conference, and I may also add that my own paper, ‘An Ambiguous Idol: H. G. Wells inspiring and infuriating women’, based on research in the Wells papers in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was well-received.

Channel 4 abortion ad: part of a long history

When Marie Stopes (1882-1958) first began her crusade for birth control and better sexual knowledge, she was horrified to discover that a significant proportion of the correspondence she received following the publication of her books Married Love and Wise Parenthood in 1918 consisted of requests for the termination of a pregnancy already begun, rather than the prevention of potential pregnancies. A similar phenomenon greeted the opening of her Mothers’ Clinic in Upper Holloway, London, in 1921. Desperate women (and some men) sought her advice on how to intervene in suspected or confirmed conception.

In her public statements, Stopes was adamant that birth control was nothing to do with abortion and that wider knowledge of sound methods of contraception would obviate the large number of abortions. As abortion, even by medical professionals was illegal at that date, and often conducted in dangerous and unhygienic circumstances, this was the strategic line to take. She also endeavoured to pursue with legal force the manufacturers of supposedly abortifacient pills who used her name in their advertisements.

However, in private correspondence with specific individuals, Stopes was sometimes more sympathetic. In cases where a delayed period was causing anxiety, she occasionally advocated the use of Widow Welch’s Female Pills, as an emmenagogue. In a few cases which seemed to her particularly deserving, she was prepared to go further and recommend ‘evacuation of the uterus’ and even to pass on the name of doctors who were known to be prepared to perform abortions (usually for a price).

This prudent line was continued by the National Birth Control Association (subsequently the Family Planning Association) when it was established to coordinate the activities of the various groups running clinics or lobbying the government for legislation to permit birth control advice in local authority welfare centres. There is some evidence from oral history that in at least some clinics, the workers were prepared to assist in procuring abortions by qualified medical personnel. But since abortion was still illegal (even if performed by a registered medical practitioner) this would not be recorded at the time.

During the 1930s awareness was growing of the high level of ‘backstreet’ abortion either self-induced by women or performed by some local person known to ‘help out’, with their significant death and morbidity rate. There was also a widespread belief that wealthy women were catered to by profiteering Harley Street doctors prepared to risk the law for a good price. There were increasing calls for a reform in the law and in 1936 an Abortion Law Reform Association was established.

In spite of the severe constraints upon advertising its presence and the difficulties it faced in setting up clinics, the birth control movement continued to expand quietly throughout the 1940s and 1950s, although contraceptive services were not included in the National Health Service when it was set up in 1948. The Family Planning Association remained the main provider of these, though it also trained general practitioners who wanted to develop these skills.

During the 1960s birth control gradually became a more respectable cause. The Pill was introduced in the early 60s, and in 1967 the Labour Government finally passed legislation permitting, but not requiring, local health authorities to provide free contraception. In the same year Liberal MP David Steel’s Private Members Bill for abortion law reform was finally passed, with significant support from the Abortion Law Reform Association. This had been given a new lease of life when the thalidomide scandal revealed that it had been legal to prescribe this drug but that it remained illegal for a pregnancy affected by it to be terminated.

For many decades London Underground had refused to carry even the most discreet advertisements for FPA clinics, but by the 1970s posters advertising the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, a non-profit abortion provider, began to be seen along the sides of the escalators.

Television commercials for contraception lagged significantly behind. It was only with the advent of the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the 1980s that advertising for condoms, previously very discreet, became more high profile.

It is therefore remarkable that at last, nearly ninety years since Stopes opened the first birth control clinic in the UK, eighty years since the Ministry of Health first permitted the giving of contraceptive advice in maternal welfare clinics to women whose lives were threatened by another pregnancy, that there is at least a strong possibility that an advertisement for abortion advisory services by the sexual health charity Marie Stopes International - based in the Whitfield St London WC1 premises to which Stopes moved her own clinic in 1926 – may finally appear on television.
This story of the long slow road to visibility and acceptability of the right to control reproduction is reflected in numerous collections in Archives and Manuscripts in the Wellcome Library. We hold a large collection of Marie Stopes’ own papers (including thousands of letters from her readers); the archives of the Family Planning Association and of the Abortion Law Reform Association; and even a small group of surviving papers of the Widow Welch’s Pills company. An overview of our copious holdings relating to birth control can be found here. The Library also holds numerous relevant published works and ephemera.

25,000 new words to search

The Library blog generally focuses on items in the Wellcome Library’s holdings, mentioning their catalogue descriptions in passing: it rarely features the unglamorous process of how those catalogue descriptions are created. Two new additions to the catalogue of archives and manuscripts, however, highlight this process and between them present over 25,000 more words to act as targets for readers searching the database.

When the Wellcome Library switched to describing its archives and manuscripts on a database, there were many printed and typed hard-copy catalogues to convert: descriptions of 424 collections of twentieth century papers and over 8000 manuscripts. A dedicated project converted manuscript descriptions and the majority of the modern papers (c.80%), and since then Library staff have been working quietly behind the scenes to deal with the remaining catalogues. We have recently passed 400 converted catalogues and currently stand near the 95% mark.

A recently-converted catalogue, the papers of the British Medical Association (SA/BMA), demonstrates the process and the gain to the reader. The basic text of the old catalogue is transferred to a spreadsheet, with one line per database entry and each column corresponding to a database field. This transfer can be done by retyping or by cut and paste, depending on the nature of the old catalogue. Once in the spreadsheet, it is manipulated: new fields are added such as reproduction conditions and language, and HTML tags are added to the old text so that it will display correctly when viewed on the internet (paragraph breaks and italicised text are the commonest additions). Since the references by which readers have known the material previously will not always enable the database to build the records into the hierarchical “tree” used in the archive catalogue, they have to be examined and a new, slightly different version created that will sit in the database invisible to the reader but generating the “tree”. Finally, all this data is loaded to the database.

Some of our old catalogues contained not merely lists of the items held but also detailed indexing – most notably of correspondents, where collections contained a large number of letters. These indexes, too, can be converted to database form and made available to the researcher. A recent example is the correspondence of Carlos Paton Blacker (1895-1975) (PP/CPB), psychiatrist and secretary to the Eugenics Society. In the course of his long and varied life Blacker generated enough correspondence for the index to come to 39 pages. By moving this to a spreadsheet and carrying out some manipulation there to sift the entries into groups, this bulk has been broken up into nine more manageable accumulations of data, one for each of the major sections of the collection.

For researchers, the net result is 25,000 more words in the archives database: words of all varieties, expected and unexpected, whose common factor is that all can act as targets for searches. As an example, the BMA papers' previous basic entry on the database said that they included subject files on medical issues arising in particular places or with reference to particular diseases, but the database now allows one to locate, should one wish, the files relating to Llwynipia in the Glamorgan coalfield and the health problems there; Major Stevens’s controversial “Umckaloabo”, an alleged cancer cure; or the intriguingly-named Overbeck Rejuvenator. Blacker’s correspondents, similarly, can now be located, from (taking the letter B as a sample) the poet Edmund Blunden to Boxing magazine and Lieutenant A.D.A. “Fido” Balfour.

These, of course, are just samples from the long-running process behind the scenes that populates the archive database. Other recently converted collections include the papers of the sex education pioneer Marie Stopes (PP/MCS), the medical historian and tuberculosis specialist Walter Pagel (PP/PAG), and the Research Defence Society (SA/RDS). Each is now fully searchable online in a way that is sure to bring to light new ideas for research, new and strange product names, and individuals that you never knew were in correspondence with each other.

The illustration shows work in progress on the British Medical Association catalogue.