The Birth of the Birth Control Clinic

As part of IHR@90, a celebration of the ninetieth anniversary of the foundation of the Institute of Historical Research, a conference was held last Friday at Senate House on ‘The Birth of the Birth Control Clinic’ (jointly organised with the University of Exeter), since it is also 90 years since Marie Stopes established the first birth control clinic in the UK, in Holloway – it subsequently moved to Whitfield Street in Fitzrovia, illustrated here.

This conference could hardly have taken place without the wealth of archival resources on birth control and allied matters held in the Wellcome Library providing a solid basis for research in this area.

It was a full day of fascinating papers and vigorous discussion, kicking off with Lesley Hall’s paper ‘Situating Stopes, or putting Marie in her proper place’. While suggesting that ideologically Stopes’s views were less pernicious than they have sometimes been depicted and that her involvement with contemporary ideas about eugenics was complex, it was also suggested that her difficult personality created many problems in her relationship with the birth control movement as a whole. This was perhaps prefigured by her secession from the Malthusian League to form her own Society for Constructive Birth Control in 1921.

Unfortunately one of the speakers for the first panel session on ‘Contexts’, Sarah Hodges, was unable to attend and we were thus deprived of an insight into the impact of birth control ideas in India, ‘Married Love among Madras's Neo-Malthusians’. However, Stephen Brooke demonstrated the significant impact more generally on gender issues in Labour politics of the introduction of birth control into the political sphere through the activities of Dora Russell and others in the Workers’ Birth Control Group. Another facet to issues around birth was revealed in Anne Bergin’s paper on the professionalisation of midwifery in nineteenth century Ireland, ‘From the Wop to the Bed: the modernisation of midwifery from handy woman to the professional midwife in Ireland, c.1800-1900’ (the ‘wop’ or ‘sop’ was the bed of straw upon which Irish women traditionally gave birth).

After lunch we had an insight into continuing work on reproductive health and contraception on a global scale from Victoria Elliott of Marie Stopes International. While this organisation is not a direct descendant of Stopes’s original Mothers’ Clinics, its headquarters are in the Whitfield Street building to which her London clinic moved in 1925, and its logo is its doorway.

Stopes’ own global, or rather, Imperial, concerns and ambitions were illuminated in Susanne Klausen’s discussion of Stopes’s interaction with the birth control movement in South Africa, ‘I ought to have a clinic in every country in the world’: Marie Stopes, imperial feminism and the South African birth-control movement, 1930-1945’.

In a further panel session ‘After Stopes’, Lara Marks gave a nuanced account of the multiple elements leading to the development of the contraceptive pill and the diverse nature of its impact, in ‘Panacea or Poisoned Chalice? A History of the Contraceptive Pill’ (and it is gratifying to hear that her major work Sexual Chemistry on this subject is now out in a new edition). Tania McIntosh paid attention to significant local differences in family size based on the nature of local economies in ‘Methods and beliefs: family planning in Sheffield and Nottingham, 1925-35’, as well as demonstrating the extent to which traditional cultures of abortion flourished. Amanda Raphael in ‘Birth by the book: Grantly Dick Read and the beginnings of the “natural childbirth” movement in England’, suggested that in spite of Dick Read’s appeal to ideals of the natural, his views only really gained purchase in a context inflected by the idea of family planning in which childbirth was no longer an inevitable ordeal over which the woman had no control. (Dick Read’s papers are also held in the Wellcome Library.)

Finally, Christina Hauck addressed a perhaps less well-known facet of Stopes’s diverse career, her ambitions as a dramatist, in ‘A baby of her own: maternal desire and English polity in the plays of Marie Stopes’. Hauck suggested that, even when not directly based on Stopes’s personal experience, as with Vectia, which rested very heavily on the debacle of her first marriage, the plays are autobiographically revealing of Stopes’s ideas about herself and the tensions between her public and private personae. Although the work of birth control propaganda Our Ostriches was produced at the Royal Court Theatre, and Stopes did have other plays staged, works such as Vectia and the unpublished The Vortex Dammed (based on Noel Coward’s first major success, The Vortex) sounded pretty much unproduceable, quite apart from the difficulties Stopes experienced with the theatrical censorship system.

This was a very full day and there was enthusiastic commentary and questioning on all papers.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing: February 2011

February was a month of sustained activity in the archives and manuscripts department, with a lot of cataloguing projects but most of these still ongoing. Some 243 new records went into the database, but of these only a tenth became visible to the public before the month's end. Only one major collection was released to the public this month, but it was an important one: the papers of the Population Investigation Committee. The PIC was founded in 1936 as a research body to gather data about issues relevant to the population of the United Kingdom and its then colonies, the major issue at the time being a falling birth-rate. In the years since that the PIC has investigated a wide variety of issues: vital statistics, foreign population policies, birth control, marriage, fertility, maternity services, social mobility, and the health and development of children. A more detailed description of the collection by its cataloguer can be found in a recent blog post. A wide variety of research topics are therefore opened up by this significant addition to our collections; the full catalogue can be browsed in the catalogue at SA/PIC.

Last month we trailed the forthcoming release of the final tranche of the papers of Francis Crick (PP/CRI). Physical processing of these papers – rearrangement, rehousing in acid-free packaging, and so forth - is now complete, and the vast majority of the work on fine-tuning 900 database records is done. Since the Crick papers will be at the heart of the Library’s project to digitise material significant to the history of genetics, it is intended to digitise the papers immediately and release them for use in the reading rooms once this is done; the expanded catalogue will probably be available some time before this.

As noted at the head of this post, a lot more has gone into the database this month than is visible immediately: next month will see some of this other ongoing work completed and the database records released to public view on the net.

The image at the head of this post is from Wellcome Images and is a copyrighted image made available under Creative Commons License.

Woman's Hour

Yesterday's edition of Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, featured an interview with Dr Lesley Hall talking about her new book - recently highlighted here - The Life and Times of Stella Browne: Feminist and Free Spirit.

The interview discusses Browne's career and relationship with other birth control campaigners, and begins with Dr Hall giving as the starting point for her research, her cataloguing of the papers of the Abortion Law Reform Association, held in the Wellcome Library.

Listeners in the UK can listen again to the interview through the Woman's Hour website.

'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.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing - August 2010

August saw the completion of several long-running projects, with newly catalogued collections and retroconverted catalogues both entering the online database for the first time. Several thousand new records were made available for searching, chiefly relating to twentieth-century collections.

Our first highlight this month (already described more fully in an earlier blog posting) is an indication of how up-to-the-minute archives can be and a valuable addition to our holdings on genetics, complementing the hard science with information on its human impact. Genetic Alliance UK is an umbrella organisation bringing together various groups representing persons affected by genetic conditions (the initial impulse came from a member of the Huntington's Disease Association, whilst in its first years it was run on a voluntary basis by a member of the Tuberous Sclerosis Association): it was founded in 1989 as the Genetic Interest Group and adopted its new name in June this year. It deals, then, with very current issues and the archives include material created only a few months ago. The papers total four boxes (50 database records) and include minutes and agendas of the society's AGMs, Trustee Board and Operational Group, annual reports, and newsletters and publications produced by the society, either alone or in conjunction with other groups. The papers are available under the reference SA/GIG.

In the 1980s the Library received a small collection of papers relating to the work of the biochemist Norman Heatley (1911-2004) and his work as part of the team that developed penicillin; these were made available under the reference GC/48. At the end of Heatley’s life a much larger amount of material was given to the Library, transforming the original single box into a collection filling thirty: this new material has now been catalogued and the original GC/48 merged with it, to form a large new collection with the reference PP/NHE. A fuller description of the papers is to be found in a blog posting by their cataloguer.

A letter by the great cricketer (and general practitioner) W.G. Grace (1848-1915), previously held in the Library’s old Autograph Letters Collection, was added to the online catalogue. It includes information on one of his younger brothers, who is about to take an exam at the Royal College of Surgeons: Grace discusses with the College how to minimise the effects of his exam nerves. The letter can be consulted using the reference MS.8746.

As noted last month, work continued behind the scenes on the papers of the psychiatrist Henry Dicks (PP/HVD) and on a project to expand the amount of material catalogued and available that relates to Wellcome Witness seminars on various topics in medical science (GC/253). Work also continues on a radical expansion of the catalogue of the papers of the geneticist Professor Hans Grüneberg (PP/GRU) which will make available much more detailed information about his individual correspondents. For the moment, the original catalogue of the Grüneberg papers has been taken off-line to avoid creating confusion: contact the archives and manuscripts department to access this material.

Last month's cataloguing highlights mentioned that the retroconversion project, which aims to convert all the Library's old hard-copy archive catalogues to database form, is coming very close to completion. We mentioned then the catalogue of the Abortion Law Reform Association, which completed retroconversion in the final hours of July and went live very early in August, adding 758 new records to the database. The archive includes records of the Association, its officers, and individuals connected with the attempt to reform the abortion laws, plus various associated materials such as papers of Chairman Janet Chance, and, following the passing of 1967 Act making abortion legal, papers of the 'Lane' Committee on Working of the Aberdeen Act and Abortion Amendment Bills. Its reference is SA/ALR.

In an allied area, the catalogue of the Birth Control Campaign was also converted. The 257 new records for searching document the work of the Campaign and its parent body the Birth Control Trust, focusing in particular on Parliamentary action: topics addressed include wider availability of vasectomies, free provision of contraception under the NHS, and general improved NHS facilities for contraception, abortion and sterilisation. There is also a large section of press cuttings, and files relating to attempts to promote and publicise its aims and to relations with other bodies in connected fields. The papers can be found by searching for the reference SA/BCC.

Earlier we mentioned new cataloguing that relates to genetics: retroconversion also contributed to this theme, making available the catalogue of papers relating to the
Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit. Another 498 records were added to the database, the many scientific symbols used in the data leading to a considerable extension in the archivists' HTML abilities. The MRC Blood Group Unit succeeded the Galton Laboratory Serum Unit set up in 1935 under the direction of Professor (later Sir) Ronald Fisher and financed through the Medical Research Council by the Rockefeller Foundation (the need for safe transfusion therapy intensified blood group research in the run-up to the Second World War). The Unit was reconstituted in 1946 at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine as the Blood Group Research Unit, under the directorship of Dr Robert Race, and acquired an international reputation in the highly specialised field of haematology, extending its work in 1965 into the genetics of blood groups. Upon the retirement of Dr Race in 1973, Dr Ruth Sanger became director of the Unit. Under Dr Sanger's direction, the Unit continued to make a unique contribution to the identification of blood groups, and to the applications of the blood group systems to the problems of human genetics. The Unit was disbanded in September 1995, although its work continues in other research centres. This collection will be one of those to be digitised early as part of the Library’s focus on material relevant to the history of genetics; the data can be browsed under the reference SA/BGU.

Finally, the catalogue of the papers of Sir Edward Mellanby FRS (1884-1955) and Lady May Mellanby née Tweedy (1882-1978) was converted. The Mellanbys worked together in the field of nutrition, with particular emphasis on vitamins and deficiencies; in addition, Sir Edward was Secretary to the Medical Research Council from 1933-1949. The papers include personal material, correspondence, research notes, lectures and drafts, and add another 876 records to the database which can be found under the reference PP/MEL.

Images:
1/ screenshot of the website of Genetic Alliance UK.
2/ Lady Mary Mellanby and Sir Edward Mellanby in Kew Gardens, c.1950, from PP/MEL.

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Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing - July 2010

Our archive cataloguing during July was chiefly dominated by on-going projects rather than the release of new records to the database: although several of those projects will appear very shortly, some as early as August’s round-up. One very small collection was catalogued swiftly and released on the same day: various items of correspondence, mostly undated, by the author and medical man Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) (MS.8744).

The papers of the biochemist Norman Heatley (PP/NHE) will be released in the very near future: cataloguing is completed and what remains is the final editing of the catalogue and the necessary physical processing (boxing up, labelling and so forth). As mentioned in a recent blog post, this will tell another side of the penicillin story to that given in the recently-retroconverted papers of Sir Ernest Chain (PP/EBC).

Behind the scenes, work continued on the papers of the psychiatrist Henry Dicks. In addition, under the heading of new cataloguing, we can include a radical expansion of the catalogue of the papers of the geneticist Professor Hans Grüneberg (PP/GRU) which will make available much more detailed information about his individual correspondents.

A project is also under way to expand the amount of material catalogued and available that relates to Wellcome Witness seminars on various topics in medical science – the fruits of this will appear in the near future as GC/253.

The retroconversion project to convert all our old hard-copy archive catalogues to database form moves ever closer to completion. This month saw the release of the catalogue relating to Sir Graham Selby Wilson (1895-1987), bacteriologist (PP/GSW). Wilson’s particular research areas were the Salmonella group of bacteria, brucellosis and tuberculosis, milk hygiene and the control of diphtheria. His papers include biographical information, research materials, lectures and material on his academic career in Manchester and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and papers on the setting up and operation of the wartime Emergency Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS), of which Wilson became Director in 1941, continuing as Director of the peacetime service until retirement in 1963.

Also of particular note is the collection of papers from the Abortion Law Reform Association (SA/ALR), whose catalogue completed retroconversion and checking during the final hours of July and went live on Monday August 2nd – these will be mentioned in more detail in next month’s round-up.

In addition, behind the scenes retroconversion work also continued on various collections such as the Medical Research Council’s Blood Group Unit (SA/BGU) and the Birth Control Campaign (SA/BCC).

Image: Sir Graham Selby Wilson, the catalogue of whose papers was released to the database this month. Photograph from Wellcome Images.

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.

Professor R A Soloway

We in Archives and Manuscripts were saddened to learn this week of the death of Professor Richard Allen Soloway, Eugen Merzbacher Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a longstanding reader in our holdings. Professor Soloway was a distinguished historian of the British eugenics movement, birth control, and demography, after having had earlier careers in journalism and aviation. He produced two outstanding works: Birth control and the population question in England, 1877-1930 (1982) and Demography and degeneration: eugenics and the declining birthrate in twentieth-century Britain (1990), which remain definitive studies on these topics, as well as several important articles on particular facets. His knowledge in these areas was extensive and based in solid archival research. He visited the Wellcome many times following his first visit to what was then the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre in 1983, mainly to consult the archives of the Eugenics Society and the Family Planning Association and the papers of C. P. Blacker, General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, and was an exemplar of good archival research practice. He was latterly working on a history of contraceptive research in Britain in the early twentieth century, although his responsibilities as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences somewhat curtailed his opportunities for pursuing this project. His works also included the influential Prelates and people: ecclesiastical social thought in England, 1783-1852 (1969). He was a fine scholar and always ready to advise and support other scholars and students. He will be much missed.