Married Love

Married Love opens: “More than ever to-day are happy homes needed”; its object, the preface says, was to serve the State by increasing the joys of marriage and showing how much sorrow could be avoided. Its central question was how the “desire for freedom” and exploration could be balanced with monogamy and raising a family, and its answer was not freedom to wander but “a full and perfected love”. Stopes argued that marriage should be an equal partnership, and the book was the first to note that women’s sexual desire coincides with ovulation and the days before menstruation.

Turned down by academic and mainstream publishers alike, Married Love was published by the small firm Fifield & Co. in March 1918 with £200 from Humphrey Roe, a Manchester businessman and birth-control campaigner whom Stopes later married. It sold out at once and was in its sixth printing within a fortnight; officially scorned in Britain, it went through 19 editions and almost 750,000 copies by 1931. The US Customs Service banned it as obscene until 1931.

Readers’ requests prompted by Married Love led Stopes into practical birth-control work. She founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress to support a clinic, and on 17 March 1921 she and Roe opened the Mothers’ Clinic in Holloway, north London. Run by midwives with visiting doctors, the free clinic gave married women birth-control advice and cervical caps. Her campaign had a strong eugenic motive: she explained that the Society aimed to counter a falling birth rate among the “thrifty” and “sound” and the “reckless breeding” at the other end of the social scale. Stopes publicly opposed abortion.