Stella Browne

When she was three her father, a superintendent of lighthouses, drowned, and she grew up watching her mother run a boarding house for single women. Schooled in Germany through an aunt, she became fluent in French and German, and after St Felix School in Suffolk took an Honours degree in Modern History at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1902. She combined the sexology of Ellis and Carpenter with her own feminism. In 1912 she wrote to The Freewoman rebutting the claim that abstinence was the key to health for single women, and in her best-known paper, “Sexual Variety and Variability Among Women” (1915), argued that women had the right, equally with men, to sexual experience and variety outside conventional marriage. The “cult of motherhood”, she held, diminished women as individuals and bound them to marriage.

By 1911 she called herself “a Socialist and ‘extreme’ Left-Wing feminist”. She joined the WSPU in 1907 but left in 1913, rejecting Christabel Pankhurst’s “ignorant and presumptuous dogmatism” and the leadership’s class attitudes, and thereafter lectured and wrote for the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. She wrote for The Malthusian, The Freewoman and other papers and translated works on sexual reform. On a national speaking tour in the late 1920s women asked her for abortions, which, not being medically qualified, she had to refuse. In 1926 she became secretary of the Chelsea Labour Party to bring birth control and abortion onto the political platform, and in 1929 she lectured on “The Right to Abortion” at the World Sexual Reform Congress in London.

On 17 February 1936 she founded the Abortion Law Reform Association with Janet Chance and Alice Jenkins; it grew from 35 members in its first year to nearly 400 by 1939, mostly working-class women from labour groups and the women’s branches of the co-operative movement. She died of a heart attack in May 1955, the night before her seventy-fifth birthday; her death certificate gave her occupation as “Spinster: No occupation”. The association later gained a flood of members amid the thalidomide scandal, and historians judge that without its long work abortion reform would not have come as early or as radically as it did.