1880–1958
○ Died of breast cancer
Palaeobotanist who popularised birth control with Married Love and Britain’s first birth-control clinic
Her 1918 sex manual Married Love brought birth control into public discourse, and in 1921 she opened Britain’s first birth-control clinic in London; she also advocated compulsory sterilisation of the “unfit”.
A British palaeobotanist, author and campaigner, born in Edinburgh. Known for her work on plant fossils and coal classification, she was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) brought birth control into public discourse, and in 1921 she and her husband Humphrey Verdon Roe opened Britain’s first birth-control clinic in London. An ardent eugenicist, she advocated compulsory sterilisation of the “unfit” and publicly opposed abortion. She fought a long conflict with the Catholic Church and died of breast cancer in 1958.
Also known as: Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes
Activities and affiliations
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1903–1920
Science and technology
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1918–1958
Social movements and organizing
Related historical events
- 1885–1941.11.06Sexual Reform Movements in Europe and the Reaction of the 1930s (1885–1941)Birth-control campaignerWrote Married Love and opened Britain’s first birth-control clinic in 1921.
- 1885.08.07–1938.07.19Sexual Reform in Britain: From the Wilde Trials to The Well of Loneliness (1885–1938)Birth-control campaignerWrote Married Love and opened Britain’s first birth-control clinic in 1921.
Married Love, the clinic and eugenics
She studied botany and geology at the University of London, graduating in two years, and became the youngest person in Britain to earn a DSc. In 1911 she married the geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates, and in 1913 she filed for divorce on the ground that the marriage had never been consummated. Around then she began a book on how marriage should work, and in July 1913 sought advice on its contraception chapter from Margaret Sanger, who had just spoken on birth control at a Fabian Society meeting. Refused by publishers, the manuscript appeared as Married Love on 26 March 1918, paid for by Humphrey Verdon Roe, to whom the Malthusian League’s secretary had introduced her; it needed five editions in its first year, and she soon married Roe. Her birth-control manual Wise Parenthood that followed ran to ten editions.
At the end of 1920 she resigned her lectureship to found the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, and on 17 March 1921 she opened the Mothers’ Clinic in Holloway, London. Run by midwives, the free clinic taught all married women methods of contraception and dispensed her own “Pro-Race” cervical caps; it moved to central London in 1925 as she built a network of clinics across Britain. She feuded with Norman Haire in The Lancet, and her libel action against the Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland ended in defeat in the House of Lords in 1924.
She described the society’s aim as countering the falling birth rate of the “thrifty, wise, well-contented” while “the C.3 end” and “the semi-feebleminded” bred recklessly. She joined the Eugenics Education Society in 1912 and in 1918 and 1920 advocated the compulsory sterilisation of those she considered unfit for parenthood. Publicly she opposed abortion and used the police and the courts against abortion providers, though her private actions were at odds with her public statements. In August 1939 she sent Hitler her love poems, hoping they would be distributed through German birth-control clinics. She died of breast cancer in Dorking in 1958, leaving her clinic to the Eugenics Society.