Behind the bedroom curtains

This plaque has recently gone up in Well Walk Hampstead. It marks the home of Marie Stopes 'Social reformer and pioneer of the family planning movement' who lived here from 1909 to 1916, during the period of her first marriage.

Stopes was a scientist who trained as a paleobotanist at University College London. On a geological expedition to Canada in 1910 she met Reginald Ruggles Gates who she married the following year. They returned to live here but the marriage was in trouble from the outset. Gates proved to be impotent and in 1913 Stopes sought annulment on the grounds of non-consummation. As a result of her personal experiences and the legal research she did to obtain the divorce (which her husband did not contest) Stopes started to write upon the subject of marital relations; in 1918 her book Married Love was published after being rejected by several publishers. Using frank language she pushed the bounds of convention in addressing for the first time for the ordinary reader the subjects of mutual sexual pleasure for both partners, contraception and the shared responsibility for considerate conduct in the bedroom - all this despite the fact that she was still technically a virgin.*

Stopes' book was condemned by the churches, the medical establishment and the press, and banned in America but it was a massive best-seller. The pioneering birth control clinics she started made contraception available to all, freeing multitudes of women from an endless sequence of pregnancies and unwanted babies. By 1923, her East London clinic was overwhelmed: women were walking miles, waiting hours and crying in the streets when they were turned away because there wasn't time for them to be seen. The organisation Stopes founded remains one of the largest in the world. She herself married her publisher and had her only child at the age of 43.

Unfortunately it has to be acknowledged that Marie Stopes' enthusiasm for birth control was connected with her strongly racist and eugenicist views. She was an admirer of Hitler, she hoped to reduce the breeding of the lower orders and she attempted to prevent her own son from marrying a woman who Stopes deemed imperfect because she wore glasses. She cut him out of her will when he went ahead. (He became a philosopher and president of the British Humanist Society.)

A tarnished legacy. When we peer through these net curtains we discover unsettling things.



*Compare another 'sex radical' recently blipped by Guinea Pig Zero.