Marie Stopes

It is customary nowadays to describe Marie Stopes as "a pioneer of women's rights", but the facts do not necessarily support this assertion.

Stopes's advocacy of birth control had far more to do with eugenics than with women's rights. June Rose (Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, 1992) described Stopes as "an elitist, an idealist, interested in creating a society in which only the best and the beautiful should survive."

Stopes was a founder member of the Eugenics Society, in 1912, and became a fellow in 1921. Also in 1921, she founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress to "promote eugenic birth control", partly because "the [Eugenics] Society refused to place birth control prominently on its platform."

Stopes was strongly against abortion, believing that birth control was the only means that married couples should use to limit the size of their families. Nurses at her clinic had to sign a declaration not to "impart any information or lend any assistance whatsoever to any person calculated to lead to the destruction in utero of the products of conception". When Stopes learned that a friend of one of her literary friends had had an abortion, she accused him of murdering the unborn child.

In 1996, historian Richard Soloway told the Galton Institute ("a learned society concerned with the scientific study of all aspects of human heredity") that "If Stopes' general interest in birth control was a logical consequence of her romantic preoccupation with compatible sexuality within blissful marriage, her particular efforts to provide birth control for the poor had far more to do with her eugenic concerns about the impending "racial darkness" that the adoption of contraception promised to illuminate."

In 1918, Stopes married Humphrey Verdon Roe, the financial backer of her most famous work, Married Love. Their son, Harry Stopes–Roe, was born in 1924. Stopes disliked Harry's companion, Mary Eyre Wallis, who was the daughter of the noted engineer Barnes Wallis. When Harry announced their engagement in October 1947, his mother set about "to try to sabotage the union". She found fault with Mary and wrote to Mary's father to complain. She tried to get Humphrey's support against the marriage, arguing that any grandchildren might inherit Mary's myopia. Humphrey was not persuaded.

In 1923, Stopes sued the Scottish physician and author Halliday Sutherland for libel, after he criticised her birth control methods and implied that she should be prosecuted. The jury decided that although Sutherland's words were defamatory and not fair comment, they were true in substance and fact; consequently the judge found in Sutherland's favour. It was seen in the press as a moral victory for Stopes, and the decision was reversed in the Appeal Court. But Sutherland took the case to the House of Lords, with the support of the Catholic Church, and the Lords' irrevocable decision was in Sutherland's favour. Wikipedia notes however that "the trial had made birth control a public topic and the number of clients visiting the clinic doubled."

Stopes died in 1958, aged 77. She left her clinic to the Eugenics Society, and most of her estate to the Royal Society of Literature. Her son Harry received her copy of the Greater Oxford Dictionary, and other small items.