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Title: The authorized life of Marie C. Stopes
Author: Aylmer Maude
Release date: March 23, 2026 [eBook #78278]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Williams & Norgate, Ltd, 1924
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78278
Credits: deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTHORIZED LIFE OF MARIE C. STOPES ***
[Illustration: DR. MARIE STOPES as thousands have seen her on the
lecture platform.]
THE
AUTHORIZED LIFE
OF
MARIE C. STOPES
BY
AYLMER MAUDE
AUTHOR OF
_Life of Tolstoy_.
_Editor of the “Maude Tolstoy” in the World’s
Classics Series._
LONDON:
WILLIAMS & NORGATE, LTD.
14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.2
1924
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
The author expresses his grateful thanks to the following firms who
have kindly given permission for the use of some of the photographs
illustrating this book:--Messrs. Swaine, Elliott & Fry and Neame.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. The Theme.
II. Glimpses of Childhood.
III. The Student.
IV. Academic Life.
V. World Travel.
VI. Marriage.
VII. “Married Love” and its Developments.
VIII. Opponents.
IX. Inner Life.
APP. A. List of Books and Pamphlets by Dr. Marie Stopes.
APP. B. List of Dr. Stopes’s Scientific Memoirs, etc., Embodying
her New Discoveries.
APP. C. The tenets of the C.B.C.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Dr. Marie Stopes as thousands have seen her on the lecture
platform.
2. The author at Givons Grove with Mrs. Zangwill on his left, Dr.
Marie Stopes kneeling, and her mother on his right.
3. Marie Stopes as a student, with a group of professors, in the
mountains. Prof. Goebel on her left.
4. The first portrait in her robes as Doctor of Science of London.
5. Humphrey Verdon Roe.
6. Dr. Marie Stopes at the time of her marriage to Mr. H. V. Roe.
1918.
7. An Industrial Conference at Givons Grove.
8. Dr. Stopes, seated, with her husband’s father and mother.
9. Mr. H. V. Roe and “Wuffles” as a puppy.
10. Members of the Birth Rate Commission. The Bishop of Birmingham
in the centre. Dr. Stopes on his left.
11. Dr. Marie Stopes and her Baby, Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe, aged 3
months.
12. Dr. Marie Stopes.
13. Dr. Marie Stopes.
14. Inner home life: Dr. Stopes as gardener, and her husband with
the car.
CHAPTER I.
THE THEME.
To write the life of a friend who is still very much alive presents
difficulties, but they are compensated for in the present case by
the fact that I am able to consult the subject of my work and her
family, and draw much of my material direct from the fountain head.
I had a similar experience when I wrote _The Life of Tolstoy_, but
there my subject was eighty years of age and had nearly completed
his life’s span, whereas my present subject is still young, and her
work in full progress without any sign of exhaustion. In the former
case I wrote of the ablest man I had met, and now I am writing of the
ablest woman I have met. In both instances their personality and the
influence exercised by their works, as well as misunderstanding and
misrepresentation to which they have been exposed, invite attention.
Dr. Stopes’s world-wide reputation as a scientist, especially as a
leading authority on palæobotany and coal-research, is not the sort
of reputation that quickly reaches the general public. What has made
her name rapidly familiar the world over has been the revolution she
has effected in the general attitude towards sex. When, under the
influence of painful personal experience, she began to touch that
question, six years ago, no intelligible principles were recognisable
among us to guide people in their matrimonial arrangements. There was,
on the one hand, an obscure impression that virginity, celibacy, and
the suppression of the sex-instinct, were ideals for normal men and
women to aim at, while on the other hand there was an equally cloudy
belief that married couples ought either to avoid marital relations or
produce as many offspring as chance might send--regardless of whether
such offspring were likely to be healthy or unhealthy and whether
the parents could support them or not; regardless also of the effect
continuous child-bearing would have on the health, or even on the
life, of the mother. Guidance was sometimes offered on the basis of
a misapplication of the 38th chapter of Genesis--which relates to a
pre-Mosaic state of morality and has to be violently twisted before
it can even be made to appear to apply to the problems of to-day. All
this was merely a darkening of counsel with words, unsatisfying alike
to those who read the Bible for themselves, and to those who sought
reasonable guidance elsewhere for their sex-relationships.
Many felt the need of a sensible principle on which sex morality could
rest, and in the chapter on “The Sex Question” in my book _Leo Tolstoy_
I ventured to say: “It may be necessary to overhaul the accepted ideals
on this subject and to consider it afresh,” and had suggested the
principle that “those things are good in sexual relations which make
for the health, happiness, and efficiency of the present and future
generations”; but this was a cold philosophic conclusion, and it was
Dr. Stopes who supplied what was really needed, namely, an application
to the detailed treatment of the sex problem of a keenly trained
scientific brain in combination with artistic ability to convey her
feelings, and an appreciation of the immense importance of the subject
for the welfare of mankind.
Love and hunger are the two great driving forces of humanity, and we
cannot afford to allow a taboo to inhibit the application of thought
to the problems relating to either of these, nor can any system of
morality be effective the reason for which cannot be so stated as to
commend it to the acceptance of rational people frankly facing the
facts life sets before us.
In relation to ordinary normal humanity Dr. Stopes agrees with what
is said in the Bible: that it is not good that “man should be alone,”
and with the implication of the text which says that “male and female
created he them.” She also agrees with St. Paul’s injunction to
husbands and wives: “Defraud ye not one the other, except it be by
consent for a season”; and she is sure that it is nothing less than a
crime for people recklessly, or deliberately, to bring into the world
children who cannot be healthy or be decently provided for, and that
it is also a crime to sacrifice the health and lives of women by
demanding that they shall bear children beyond their capacity to do so
healthily and willingly.
To indicate on the one hand scientific reasons why normal marital
relations are favourable to the development of one’s mental and
physical powers and one’s capacity to serve God and man, and why on
the other hand the ascetic type of celibate is often cantankerous,
embittered, and troublesome, required up-to-date knowledge of the
action of secretions in the human body. To discover and point out the
hidden rocks on which many marriages are wrecked owing to ignorance
of a normal sex-rhythm in healthy women, was work specially suitable
for a woman scientist. Considerable courage was needed to present
these matters to the general public (whom they so greatly concern)
in defiance of the social taboo that then still prevailed, and of a
medical prejudice against the lay public being permitted to understand
things that pertain to their peace. Besides these qualities, literary
skill was needed, and much tact had to be employed, to present the case
so that it should reach a wide circle of readers and convince them,
without creating any avoidable friction.
The effect of Dr. Stopes’s efforts, in so short a time as six years,
has amounted to nothing less than a revolution in the general attitude
towards sex. She has created a new atmosphere and a new terminology.
Even her opponents now use her language; the difference noticeable
before and after the publication of _Married Love_ is most marked.
Heaps of imitators and heaps of converts have appeared.
On the special question of birth control (which by the way is only
briefly alluded to in a couple of pages of _Married Love_) a great
deal had been written before Dr. Stopes dealt with the matter, and as
long ago as 1868 there had even been a voluminous correspondence about
it in a leading London newspaper, but, in spite of much discussion
concerning this and some other special aspects of the sex problem,
it somehow happened that up to the time when Dr. Stopes began her
work ignorance on the general subject was so prevalent, and so
widespread was the superstition that peculiar moral virtue pertained to
ignorance, that it was still possible for an intelligent, alert, and
scientifically-minded woman to experience great difficulty in obtaining
information that to-day is readily accessible to every intelligent
inquirer.
The battle is now set between a reasonable and an unreasonable moral
code; and though the force of inertia and a long tradition of ignorance
are on the side of the obscurantists, the ultimate triumph of light
against darkness is already assured.
In this introductory chapter I will merely quote the opinions expressed
by two writers well qualified to judge of the value of Dr. Stopes’s
work. Owing to the extreme urgency of the need, the public has
over-emphasized her birth control work and under-estimated her general
work on sex. Concerning this latter Dr. Havelock Ellis, the leading
world authority on sexology, writing in the _Medical Review of Reviews_
(Vol. 25, No. 2, Feb., 1919), says of some of the new observations in
_Married Love_:--
“This seems to represent the most notable advance made during recent
years in the knowledge of women’s psycho-physiological life.”
And Mr. Luther Munday wrote:--
“There always have been situations experienced that neither the Bible
nor Science have hitherto explained.... But through your thought has
come, once for all, a message clean and pure, linking the mystery
of sex with the majesty of the Eternal and giving happiness to all
during life’s little part of immortality here on Earth.”
The following chapters furnish some account of the preparation Dr.
Stopes had for her work, of the fields in which she has made her mark,
of what she herself is like, of the personal experiences that directed
her attention to the problems of sex, and of the opposition she has
encountered.
It is greatly to be hoped that, both on the problems of sex and on
other subjects, Dr. Stopes will add much in the future to what she has
already given us.
CHAPTER II.
GLIMPSES OF CHILDHOOD.
Marie Carmichael Stopes, the first child of Henry Stopes and Charlotte
Carmichael, his wife, was born in Edinburgh, the town of her mother’s
birth and upbringing, but her father was pure English, and at the age
of six weeks the baby girl became a Londoner, which, in essence, she
has remained ever since.
Henry Stopes was by profession an architect, but since early childhood
had a passion for fossils and the stone tools left by prehistoric
man. Indeed, at the age of eight years he was whipped soundly for
insisting on taking his stones to bed with him, and through life his
passion for archæological research furnished him with a second career,
which undoubtedly greatly influenced the home surroundings of his
children and, in the case of his elder daughter, largely directed
the line of her development. Long before his death Henry Stopes had
accumulated the largest private collection in the world of prehistoric
stone implements, and their constant care and classification, as
well as collection, was a great feature in his elder daughter’s life
from her earliest childhood. Henry Stopes’s interests were profound
in many directions and very human; in addition to these two main
interests he was a noted agricultural expert, writing regularly under
a _nom-de-plume_ for agricultural papers, and being Chairman of the
British Judges of Barley; being indeed a pioneer in the critical
judging of grain. He accumulated statistics on the effects of different
rotations of crops in connection with prize-winning strains and so
on, which meant a great deal of statistical work from the records of
numerous entrants for the annual barley competitions, in which his
little girl, before she was twelve years old, used to help him, or
was led to believe that she was helping him, while undoubtedly he was
training her in arithmetic and in a scientific attitude of mind towards
life in general.
Marie Stopes sometimes calls herself a “British Association Baby,” for
Henry Stopes and Miss Carmichael were first introduced at a meeting
of the British Association; and Marie was taken, from childhood, to
almost every meeting of the Association during her school days, only
missing those meetings which were held overseas.
Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, her mother, was one of the pioneers of
women’s University education, having been the first woman to take the
University Certificate in Literature, Philosophy, and a number of other
subjects at Edinburgh University when they were given by the Professors
privately for the ladies, who were afterwards examined with the same
examination papers as the men, but from whom degrees were withheld.
Charlotte Carmichael headed many a list in the early days when Miss
Jex Blake was studying medicine. After marriage Miss Carmichael
came to live in London, and took up the study of Shakespearean
contemporary history, becoming an expert in reading early records
and ferreting out many of the facts time had rendered obscure about
Shakespeare’s life history. She is the author, among other works, of
“The Bacon-Shakespeare Question Answered,” “Shakespeare’s Warwickshire
Contemporaries,” “The Life of the Earl of Southampton,” and a large
number of serious original contributions published by the learned and
periodical press.
Thus on both sides the baby Marie inherited a variety of intellectual
interests. One of her maternal great grandfathers was Brown, the Royal
Architect, in Edinburgh, who not only repaired Holyrood Palace but
designed and built many of the finest streets and squares in the West
End of Edinburgh which still delight the town-planners of to-day.
Another maternal great grandfather was William Carmichael, Writer to
the Signet, assistant and then successor to Sir Walter Scott. The Scott
family were intimate with the Carmichaels, and Lady Scott personally
embroidered a beautiful Christening robe for one member of the family,
which descended to Marie, was used for her own Christening, and is now
handed on to her son.
On her father’s side, behind an immediate Quaker connection, there was
a long line of Anglican clergy.
Inherited also was a great liking, indeed almost a passion, for
travel. After the journey at six weeks from Edinburgh to London, the
nine-months-old baby was taken to the seaside and plunged into the sea,
and thereafter never less than twice a year, and often more frequently,
she made a journey to some part of England or Scotland, becoming later
on a world-wide traveller.
After a few years little Marie had a sister, called Winifred, and these
two were the only children of their parents, no boys being wished for.
This fact, and the attitude of generous appreciation towards women
that was characteristic of her father, undoubtedly had a favourable
influence on her character and achievements through life, for she was
brought up from her earliest consciousness not only to feel that her
birth had been desired, but that she, as a girl, had been wished for
and that no boy would have satisfied her parents as she did. For an
eldest child who has the misfortune to be a girl when a boy is desired,
a very different home and outlook must develop. Whilst still a tiny
child, when asked by enquirers if, besides her sister there was no
brother, she would gravely announce that pussy was her brother, and
she thinks she was probably 8 or 9 years old before she realised
that pussy was not a brother. Her father being particularly fond of
cats, and having an almost magical power of training them, the family
pussy had its own dinner-service and used to sit up at table with the
children, eating off its own plate on the table from a high chair just
like Marie’s little sister.
From her uneventful childhood, a few points stand out in her memory
as being of great importance in the development of her character. One
of these was a nurse who was for many years their devoted attendant,
and after whom the favourite doll was called “Little Annie.” Nurse
Annie, one day, looking at the doll’s dress which the child was sewing,
remarked that it was very good “for a lady,” and Marie, at that time
not more than six or seven years of age, blazed with indignation that
it should not be very good in itself. In some queer childish way she
resented the fact that a lady should be considered incapable of doing
things as well as other people, and determined that she would sew, at
any rate, as well as a servant. This she did, but unfortunately the
nurse said nothing about knitting like a lady; so that when she was
twelve years old and went first to school, she immediately took first
place in the sewing class and bottom place in the knitting class.
A rather absurd introduction to her later well-known birth control
ideas also may be traced to the nursery. Her mother one day, when the
nurse told her that new boots were needed, laughingly remarked, “Oh,
what should I do if I had a dozen children?” Little Marie gravely
remarked: “You would drown all the others, and keep Winnie and me.”
In London the Stopes family lived beside the Crystal Palace in a house
in Cintra Park, overlooking private grounds on one side and with
ground behind the three central gardens of the neighbouring circle of
houses, which went uphill and downhill, so that the children had much
space in which to play. Mr. Stopes built a wing on to the house that
they took and, having very enlightened architectural ideas for those
days, had an open verandah connecting the back parts of the house,
for the convenience of the maids and to make an open-air playground
for the children in wet weather. In the garden an old quince tree
was a favourite resort of the children, because they could lie on
its branches and overlook the stableyard, and watch the horses being
groomed. It was under this quince tree, too, that Marie Stopes says
she first got the idea, as a very small child, which finds expression
in her pamphlet “Mother, how was I born?”--for it was just by that
quince tree that, as a prattling child of four or five, she was talking
about babies and where her little sister had come from, and she felt,
rather than saw, that people were laughing while telling her the
gooseberry-bush fiction, and she then felt, with a flush of insight
and indignation, that they were lying to her. The matter however did
not actually interest her, but the vivid impression of that moment
has painted on her memory every leaf, and the exact arrangement of
the grass and of the border walks, so that it is the most vividly
remembered scene of the whole of that home.
The children were taken regularly once or twice a year to some seaside
place, and for many years they went to different seaside resorts in the
South of Scotland. At about the age of nine, North Berwick was the
choice, and Marie’s inherited passion for fossils had full vent in the
collection of crinoids which were washed up thickly on the seashore.
There too Marie Stopes tells me that she has a very vivid memory of
lying on her back in the garden at North Berwick and really, for the
first time in her life, noticing the clouds; noticing them, that is to
say, in such a way that to this day she can remember their shapes and
patterns and the thrilling sense of portentous glory their mounting
and swiftly riding god-like forms created in her mind. She thinks
this was connected in some way with the reading of a book, “Tales of
Ancient Greece,” which had been given to her not long before; but she
says it felt as though she had suddenly looked through a glass-door
into the whole Universe, peopled with mysterious beings she had never
seen before and never ceased to see thereafter. A little later, indeed
she thinks that very summer, a sense of personal shame and inferiority
developed in her, which she did not get over for many years, and
at that time almost her only consolation was the story of the Ugly
Duckling in Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. The first sense of personal
shame resulted from her mothers’ advanced, and as we moderns would
think very sensible, ideas. Little Marie had been given a knitted
dress to wear, when no one else, at any rate in that seaside place,
was advanced enough to be wearing knitted dresses; and instead of
feeling happy and distinctive in it she felt utterly ashamed to appear
different from other children; a feeling that was accentuated by the
fact that a young cousin laughed at her. About this same time, owing
to the curious inaccuracy and incompleteness of a child’s ideas, this
feeling was emphasised and increased by the following incident. The
Stopes family and three or four other families in the district combined
to employ the services of a private dance-mistress, who came in turn
to each of the four houses, where the class was held in rotation.
Mrs. Stopes, when her turn came, gave the children a nice tea of
wholesome cakes without currants, and to make them attractive used to
send to town for cakes with coloured icings and various fancy things
she thought the children would like. One of the other households,
however, gave only rock buns and milk. Poor little Marie thought that
rock buns, as they contained currants, which she was never allowed to
have at home, were something much grander and more expensive, and was
always ashamed of the fact that they were not rich enough to have rock
buns for tea. As usual with her however no external sign of this deep
shame was ever shown, but for years she felt crushed and humiliated by
the fact that to her a halfpenny rock bun was far grander than an iced
gateau. At this time and all through her earlier childhood her father
was very well-to-do--but he had great financial losses when she was
about eleven, which left them permanently impoverished in comparison
with the earlier expectations.
Marie’s education was exceptional in many ways. Her mother having been
brought up in the good old Scottish school, started the little girl of
about five on Greek and Latin roots, so as to give her a fundamental
knowledge of the structure of the English language. But Marie proved
so stupid that this was dropped and, beyond being taught to read and
write, she had indeed almost no education until, a few days before
she was twelve, she was sent to school. This statement should however
be qualified by mention of something that, again, greatly influenced
her mental attitude towards the Universe. A large atlas was solemnly
brought out every morning, and on its title-page this atlas had a
circle in which part of the world was drawn with clouds around it. Her
first memory of any lesson at all was pointing with a stubby little
baby finger at this circle, representing a sphere, and repeating “The
world is round and rolls in space.” This formula, which was repeated
daily for years, so impressed itself on her that she was always trying
to feel the world rolling in space and even, as a very small child,
used to wonder which way up she was standing at any given moment.
Marie and her sister Winifred were sent to St. George’s School in
Edinburgh for their first schooling, and then the unusual nature of her
preliminary training, pitted against the ordinary school curriculum,
left her woefully behind her age in attainments, so that she was
put with a class of girls much younger than herself. In half a term
however she began to find her feet, but not before her backwardness had
emphasised the feeling of shame and humiliation at her inferiority,
which indeed throughout her schooldays was strongly characteristic of
her, and which she tried to hide by making the most of any attainments
that she thought she had; and she undoubtedly had some that were
unusual in a child of her age. For instance, she had been entrusted
by her father with a small collection of flint implements he was
presenting to the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries in Edinburgh,
and when she was taken down with them to Dr. Anderson, the learned
Director of the Museum, without any hesitation or embarrassment she
gave him what amounted to a lecture on their nature and uses, and told
him what to write on the labels for the exhibition cases. So amused
were her elders by her expert knowledge of these implements, that her
head mistress asked her to lecture to the assembled school on the
subject. This she did, her audience consisting of the entire school
including the teachers. Having never been brought up to an acute
personal consciousness or any personal conceit, she did not realise
then that there was anything unusual or surprising in facing such an
audience. A diary which Dr. Stopes kept as a child for some weeks still
exists, and begins with an entry concerning her first day at school:
“Oct. Tuesday 4. I went to school at 10 o’clock and did not like it
at all. I went to bed very cross.” Three days later comes an entry
relating to what subsequently became one of her chief studies. “Friday,
7th. Went to school. It was so nice we had an object lesson on coal
mines and coal.”
While in Edinburgh she had the immense advantage of the kindly personal
friendship of Miss S. E. S. Mair, her mother’s friend, one of the
originators of the St. George’s Girls’ School, the best school in
Edinburgh, and a leader of social life and advanced thought in that
city. Miss Mair used to give famous parties for little girls, at which,
after a sumptuous tea, each child was asked to make a clever remark to
entertain the whole company. Marie’s remarks, though presumably not
clever, were extremely embarrassing to her and kept her petrified with
fear throughout the whole tea, so that she used to feel that it was a
great pity the remarks were not asked for before tea, because then her
appetite would have been so much better for the tea itself--a feeling
that no doubt many after-dinner speakers have shared. In Edinburgh also
the horizon of the two little girls was enlarged by the kindly care and
interest of Miss Menzies, who had a great interest in Iceland and read
many Icelandic and Northern sagas aloud to them. Miss Menzies too had
a comfortable elderly cook who took Marie’s domestic education in hand
and on Saturdays taught her home cooking and the making of real Scotch
scones and shortbreads, interesting her in cooking, and sowing the
seeds of an accomplishment which later in life proved of great value
when she was out camping, or living under unusual conditions, as she
often did.
After two years in Edinburgh the children were brought back to
London and were sent to the North London Collegiate School, whose
head mistress was Dr. Sophie Bryant, the successor of Miss Buss, the
original founder of the School. Although two years of Edinburgh
schooling had made Marie rather better able to meet girls of her own
age on an equality, she was still far behind her years in many of
the routine school subjects; and when she finally passed the London
matriculation, second-class, her Latin mistress said to her: “I do
not know how you did it, you had no business to get through,” and she
replied: “I did it by writing very clearly everything I knew and saying
nothing about the things I did not know; for I thought it would save
the Examiners’ time”--a remark which showed much penetration, for in
later years, when Dr. Marie Stopes herself became an examiner, she
learnt how examiners are worried by illegible handwriting and screeds
of mazy reading which do not make it clear to them what the candidates
know and what they do not know. At the North London Collegiate School
the two girls were still educated in a rather unusual way. They were
not permitted to go to afternoon school, and only lived in London from
Monday mornings till Friday middays, going home to a country house
in the then beautiful village of Swanscombe. The house there was
an old Elizabethan oak-panelled house which Marie was old enough to
appreciate, and the charm of which, and the mysterious beauty of some
of its rooms, fascinated her in her early adolescence. At the age of
about fourteen she often got up at four or five in the morning in order
to be alone in the old rooms, one or two of which she sketched very
industriously though with little talent. These pictures however are
still precious to her as recalling the house she has ever loved. It had
a very high stone wall along the tiny village street on one side, and
opened into cherry orchards leading to woodlands on the other, and it
was in these woods and flowery lanes that Marie first really saw the
beauty of flowers. She says:
“At the age of fifteen I remember observing the faces of flowers as
passionately as I had at the age of about nine observed the sky. I
escaped by myself one day into the woods and spent several hours
lying motionless, gazing into the faces of the violets. That too was
the opening of a door into another universe. Of course, I suppose I
must have seen flowers before, but till then I had never felt the
sight of them.”
This home in Swanscombe had been taken because of Henry Stopes’s
great interest in the brick-earths and gravels of the surrounding
neighbourhood, which teemed with relics of prehistoric man in the shape
of both palæoliths and neoliths, and there Marie, and to a less extent
her sister Winifred, spent nearly all their holiday time and almost the
whole of every Saturday and Sunday, collecting specimens with their
father in the quarries and on the fields, washing them, labelling them,
and cataloguing them, with him. To this house also came many visitors
of interest to the growing children.
“One of my schoolgirl memories of Swanscombe is the famous editor,
Mr. Norman Maccoll, the editor of the then thunderer, the _Athenæum_.
He was always very charming to us children, but disapproved of
our going into the woodlands without gloves, as he said we were
to be young ladies in the future and should have white hands. So
on the days that he came to lunch we used to put on gloves to go
round the woodlands with him, but never on other occasions. He was
a very stout, elderly gentleman with long beard and a benign,
fatherly face, though his literary criticisms were the terror of
many a serious author. We did not look upon him with such awe as we
undoubtedly should have done, and I remember once luring him to sit
on a very firm bush, through which he promptly went, leaving only his
head and his feet sticking up, and from which the united strength of
my little sister and myself were insufficient to extricate him, red
and indignant, and very much less pompously impressive than usual.
I remember another occasion when, to avoid climbing a high fence,
we children stepped through, and he, miscalculating the width of
the bar, followed us but stuck midway. No pushing or pulling could
get him either in or out. He became purple in the face, and we were
all frantic. My mother, as one of his reviewers and an author whose
reputation could be made or marred by his paper, was almost in
tears, and my father at last was so genuinely concerned that he ran
home for a saw. I also remember Seton Karr, the famous lion hunter,
lunching with us and being escorted across the cherry orchard by my
sister and myself, wherein we encountered two or three cows from
whom Seton Karr fled with teeth chattering, while my sister and I
remained a protective bodyguard between him and the cows. We were
firmly convinced at the time that he was in real fear of them, and I
remember preaching to myself a moral lesson on the vanity of courage.
Now, however, I begin to wonder whether he was not an adept in the
art of pleasing children. A man who also made a great impression
on my early childhood was the very lovable late Dr. Furnivall, the
famous Shakespearean, who often came to lunch with us in his pink
shirt and with his pink bald head, and went with us through the woods
in a state of childlike glee. He first among all my acquaintances
showed me the delight of lying flat on one’s back in the baking
sunshine, and I well remember his refusal to proceed round the
woodland with my mother and the rest of the party, and insisting on
lying where he was on the violet-decked slope in the sun for an hour
at a time, while the rest took the decorous walk round the crest
and picked him up on their return. I remember also there Professor
Sayce, the famous Assyriologist, whose life has just been published,
and who was much interested in my father’s implements; and also Mr.
Mabson, the owner and editor of the _Statist_, a journal for which my
father sometimes wrote.
“As a young girl I met so many of my parents’ friends, mostly
people who were doing something in the world of thought, that it is
difficult to say who influenced me and who did not; but I clearly
remember an outstanding influence from one talk with Sir Francis
Galton and also from Mrs. Alec Tweedie, whose house I was sometimes
taken to visit. Once at a party at Robert Mond’s country house she
introduced me to him as ‘a girl who is going to do great things.’
I felt it was incumbent upon me to try to live up to such an
introduction!”
With the exception of one annual day for their chief school friends,
the children had almost no young companionship, but listened to the
talk of scientific or literary experts at their parents’ table, and
found their chief amusement in the constant companionship of their
father. When the elder girl was about fifteen however the parents
thought it wise to come nearer to their school, and the family moved
to Hampstead, by chance to the house next door to Professor Bonney,
the geologist. Professor Bonney had not grasped who his new neighbour
was, and when hundreds of butter boxes were piled in the garden, he
gave out a groan round the neighbourhood, that his new neighbour was
a wretched grocer. Professor Bonney, who was more a geologist than an
archæologist, showed only a polite interest in the boxes when he found
out that the contents were museum specimens of stone implements and not
the remains of a grocery business.
The continuous unconscious education which companionship with her
father gave Marie was supplemented, whilst settling into this house, by
really expert lessons in carpentry. Her father, always anxious that she
should not do things in a “ladylike” way, taught the girl when and how
to use screws instead of nails, and how to mitre a corner, in making
cabinets or shelves, and both girls helped their father to put up many
shelves and make arrangements for his specimens. This resulted in a
passion to do things for herself, and a small room was allotted as a
study for the girls, which Marie distempered with a stencilled design
of her own make, and for which she constructed a good deal of the
furniture. In this room she pursued her school studies in an erratic
way, hurrying through the official homework and, as she grew older,
reading many books it would probably have surprised her elders to
know that she read. “Between the ages of sixteen and seventeen I read
most of Kant and Swedenborg, a great deal of comparative theology, as
well as a large number of out-of-the-way novels, and, of course, many
scientific books, such as ‘The Origin of Species’ and others then new
to me, which it would have shocked my mother very much to know that I
was taking seriously.”
In her later school years Marie had more or less caught up to the
standard for her age, but until she reached the Sixth Form and was a
Prefect, she never felt really sure among her school contemporaries.
Even though in many classes she headed the list, she always came down
in some other subject. She was seldom indisputably top of the class,
but when she was nearly seventeen the chemistry mistress, Miss Aitken,
developed scarlet fever, and for the next morning’s work there was
no teacher. Marie, without hesitation, went to the headmistress and
said that as she had been spending some hours in the laboratory she
knew just what Miss Aitken had intended to give to those classes, and
that she could show where the apparatus was ready prepared. Dr. Sophie
Bryant, the headmistress, in view of the crisis, and also possibly
to test the quality of a girl in whom she felt some interest, asked
Marie if she could take the classes, which she did; and then for six
weeks, directed only by correspondence from Miss Aitken, Marie took the
chemistry for the whole school, including the class of which she was
herself a member. She was very proud when she received a present of £5
for having done this, and much humiliated when having sent a receipt
without a stamp on it, this was returned for her to rectify the error.
Nevertheless she went through the school leaving a general impression
on most, if not all, the mistresses, except Miss Aitken and Dr. Sophie
Bryant herself, that she was a stupid girl whose plodding perseverance
alone saved her from disgracing herself in the examinations. Among
her school-mates she made a few lasting friendships. Her great school
friend, and the only one whose life has remained in close contact
with her own, is Olga Kapteyn, a girl of Dutch descent, niece of
Professor Kapteyn, the famous astronomer. These two girls, who both
had a passion for colour, including a love of gold and orange tone for
silk (which was then almost unattainable), came together over their
intense appreciation of their teacher, Miss Aitken. Of Miss Aitken,
Marie Stopes says: “She was, undoubtedly, the greatest influence in my
school career. She opened to me the door that led to all the exquisite
beauty of Italian art and of the school of artists represented by
Watts, Rossetti, and their contemporaries. She taught me chemistry
so well that I was doing work of honours degree standard in physical
chemistry before I left school, and she strengthened and hardened my
character by her mingled austerity and beauty. I had undoubtedly the
usual schoolgirl’s ‘Schwärmerei’ for other teachers whom I thought I
loved more at the time. But Miss Aitken and Dr. Sophie Bryant are the
two mistresses who understood me and influenced me, and to whom I owe
a lasting debt of gratitude.”
On leaving school Marie Stopes was given a leaving Scholarship in
Science, and under the influence of Miss Aitken she went to University
College, London, rather than to a Woman’s College which had been
suggested for her. Miss Aitken wisely said: “If you are going to do
science at all, do it under the biggest men of the day.”
CHAPTER III.
THE STUDENT.
Whether Marie Stopes should go to a Women’s College or to University
College, London, was being discussed by her parents, the headmistress
and teachers. The girl however settled it for herself by going down
to University College and entering herself there as a student in the
faculty of science. That was in the days of Miss Rosa Morrison as the
women’s tutor, and after due formalities and recommendations had been
put through the question came up of the classes she would take. As her
last two years at school had included considerably more training in
zoology and chemistry than is usual for a schoolgirl, the chemistry
indeed being far beyond the intermediate standard, and up to the
degree standard, Marie wanted to enter for honours in the intermediate
examination at the University. Professor Sir William Ramsay was
always very sympathetic towards any student with ambitions, but did
not himself conduct the practical classes for the juniors, though he
gave them their lectures. The Professor naturally would not hear of
her doing honours degree work until the intermediate examination had
been passed, so that chemistry, from being the young student’s chief
interest and most advanced study, dropped into second place. Receiving
considerable encouragement from the Professor of Botany, Professor
Oliver, who was willing to give the necessary attention even to one
honours student, the girl took up honours in that subject, in which
at school she had taken very little interest; and she made botany her
main work for the first year at the University. At the close of the
first year, naturally, there were the College class examinations,
and owing to the curious lack of personal supervision--which, though
it is in many respects one of the best features of University life,
has its inconveniences--no one, not even the dons under whom she was
working or the Dean of the University, ever told her that by taking the
class examinations she would enable the Professors to place her for
some of the various scholarships which were available. When the young
student asked Professor Oliver at the end of the Session whether it
was compulsory, or wise, for her to take the class examination, his
reply was “It is a free country.” The Professor of Zoology, the famous
protozoologist, Minchin, on the other hand, most kindly came to her in
the laboratory one day shortly before the examinations, and urged her
to take sufficient trouble with the nomenclature of the bones, saying
that if only she would work up the bones with their foramina she would
be nearly certain to get the medal for the class. But the obstinate
young student replied that no medal would be worth her wasting the
small amount of brains she felt she possessed on learning the names of
the bones, and that she could not see the advantage of learning them,
when they were always available in a book; what she wanted to do was to
learn things she could not find in books. The Professor laughed, and
had another friendly, but rather reproachful, smile when she took the
second place in the class instead of the first.
How much this unguided young student lacked orientation was also
shown by the fact that on the annual Prize Day of the College she was
spending the morning fishing for algæ in the Botanic Gardens with a
fellow-student, who urged her to come to the College in the afternoon.
Her dress was wet and covered with the slimy green of the algæ, and
she did not feel inclined to go at all, but her fellow-student pressed
her to do so, and she slipped into the back of the Hall when prize
distribution was in progress, entirely unaware even of the possibility
of any prizes coming her way, and was incredulous when the fact that
she was the recipient of a gold medal was announced and her name was
called. Instead of being pleased, she was much distressed at receiving
this gold medal, for she felt that if work such as hers secured a gold
medal, it must indeed be a disappointing thing to be a Professor with
such poor students. She told me she stayed awake the whole night crying
about it, and vowed to herself to be worthy of it in the future.
Ridiculously unoriented also was she about the little feminine things
generally of interest to girls. For some time after going to the
University, for instance, she wore a ring on her engagement finger, and
when asked by her fellow-students when she was going to be married,
was amazed to learn that this was the engagement finger, as she had
not known that there was any such thing. The ring had been given her
by her mother, and the girl had no knowledge that any significance
was involved in wearing it. Similarly, when in the first year of her
college course she received her first proposal of marriage, the man was
surprised at her reply: “But I am not nearly old enough to think about
such things; surely I do not look twenty-five.” And he had to learn
that, of course, she would not consider anything of the sort until she
was twenty-five, “because nice girls do not.” Her father had brought
her up in this belief, with the very proper intention of delaying her
sex-consciousness as long as possible, and so strictly and implicitly
had she accepted the idea, that nothing the man could say could
persuade her that it was not most improper of him even to have thought
it possible that marriage could be discussed with a nice girl under
twenty-five. Naturally such a girl was not always understood by her
fellow-students, but she was popular enough to be made the President of
the Women’s Union Debating Society and one of the hockey eleven.
Shortly after the College examinations the open University examinations
took place. Marie Stopes took the first place in first-class honours
and gained the University Scholarship.
During that first year at the University, in addition to the
Intermediate work at University College, she was pursuing, without the
Professors or anyone else knowing it, work beyond the ordinary Degree
standard in zoology--partially under the tuition of an old school
teacher, a friend, and partly at Birkbeck College, where she went to
the Evening Classes for the honours course in zoology--on the small
animaculæ and invertebrates. In this way she gained a considerably
wider training and experience in zoology than is generally recognised,
and this point is of some importance in connection with the rather
absurd criticisms sometimes levelled at her work in human research, to
the effect that she is “only a botanist,” and therefore has no business
to make discoveries in fields outside the floral world. She had in fact
a very adequate training in a number of branches of science, including
microscopic zoological work which pre-eminently qualified her to tackle
scientifically the branch of human research work in connection with
birth control which she took up later on.
For the tripos for her degree she had originally intended to take
chemistry, but having been diverted to an interest in botany greater
than she had expected, and also from a sense of indebtedness to the
Professor of Botany who had so kindly encouraged her work, as well as
from the fact that her scholarship was given on the results of the
botanic examination, she felt it incumbent on her to take botany as the
main subject. Then, too, she had not outgrown the “inferiority complex”
which always made her doubt her own powers, and without telling any of
her Professors, she secretly decided that she would get some practice
in taking examinations, so she quietly entered for the external honours
degree at the end of one year instead of at the end of three. For this
it was possible, in those days, to take only two subjects instead of
three, if the student passed in honours standard in one subject and
obtained a first-class pass in the second. When the Registrar of
the University (Dr.--now Sir--Frank Heath) received this entry as an
external examinee from an internal student at University College, he
sent for her very kindly and begged her to reconsider what she was
doing, saying it was ridiculous and impossible for anyone to try to
do honours as well as first-class pass in one year. A kindly argument
was of no avail, and the headstrong girl said: “I will not only get
first-class pass, I will get honours in _both_ subjects at the end of
the year,” an undertaking which, as the event proved, she made good
under tragic circumstances. The two subjects she then decided on were
botany and geology, and for the geological work she had the immense
advantage of a practical training in the field all through the summer
from a member of the Geological Survey who was training a couple of
young men as mining engineers in survey work. Shortly before the actual
examination took place, on which she had started rather as a joke or a
purely experimental effort, it became seriously urgent and important
for her to succeed, owing to the grave illness of her father. Indeed,
on the night of the main examination in botany the girl was up all
night with the fear that her father would die at any moment. This,
though it reduced the quality of her work, fortunately did not prevent
her winning a first-class honours place, and as her father’s death
appeared imminent, her Professor very kindly obtained the results of
the degree for her privately, so that she was able to tell her father,
before his death, what greatly interested and pleased him, namely, that
she had passed the Bachelor of Science Degree in double honours--though
the published lists were not out until after his death. The mutual love
between herself and her father was exceptionally intense, and the shock
of his loss affected her inner life for many years.
The result of her hurried examination brought her a further
scholarship, which was sufficient to take her abroad; but as she had
defied the Professors and taken the degree after too brief a period
of study, she conscientiously made up the remains of another year at
University College, doing minor research work and completing some
of the classes she ought to have taken. At this period Professor
Oliver and Dr. Scott were actively engaged on a research of great
palæontological significance, which led to the recognition of an
entirely new group of extinct plants. In order to find some small clues
necessary to complete the association of the fragmentary remains of
the fossils, some Sherlock-Holmes-like scientific detective work had
to be done on all the leading collections of fossil plants in England,
and the young student had the good fortune to be deputed by Professor
Oliver and Dr. Scott to do this on their behalf in Manchester and
in some private collection in the north, as well as at the Natural
History Museum. The work on the Owens College collection in Manchester
University was not only of technical value to that research, but of
great educational value to the student, and an incident that occurred
in connection with it proved important to Dr. Stopes later on.
Professor, now Sir William Boyd Dawkins, was the Professor of geology
in whose charge the collections were, and he very kindly arranged to
take the student out on to the moors and show her horizons in which
fossils occur in the Todmorden district. On the morning of the little
expedition there was a hopeless downpour from early dawn, but the
opportunity of going to these districts was too precious to lose, and
of course Marie Stopes turned up at the station, but equally of course
she found no Professor there to meet her. She then decided to go by
herself, though she did not know the district at all; and she spent
the day walking the eight or ten miles across the solitary moor in the
drenching rain, very pleased with herself that she found the various
spots they had planned to visit, but feeling all the time that the
rain, and the absence of the instruction Professor Boyd Dawkins would
have given, meant that she had seen much less than she would have done
on a fine day. She thought no more of the event, but, curiously enough,
this little incident proved to be a turning point in her career; for
Professor Boyd Dawkins was so impressed by her serious interest in the
subject and by her determination and independence of character, that
later on, when a much-coveted post was open for election, he used his
influence in her favour, and she was appointed the first woman to teach
science in the University of Manchester. To return however to the
young student, the post-graduate scholarship from the University was
just sufficient to take her for a year to some foreign University, and
her interest in fructifications and the study of egg-cells and ovules
(fostered both by Professor Oliver’s researches and by her zoological
work), led her to desire to study the fructifications of a unique group
of plants, the cycads. For this purpose Munich was considered the best
continental locality, as Professor Goebel, the famous morphologist, who
had travelled far, had an exceptionally fine collection there, both of
living and spirit material of the kind suitable for research.
Languages had always at school been a main stumbling block between
Marie Stopes and class prizes, and it was therefore rather adventurous
of her to go to Germany, for she had only had three or four lessons in
the language before she reached that country. She found however that
learning a language in a country itself is a very different, and a much
easier thing, than learning it in classes; and though her German was
a source of great amusement to her fellow research-students in the
laboratories, it carried her not only through her University course,
but finally also through the _viva voce_ examination for the degree.
On presenting herself to Professor Goebel, the English student
announced that she had come to study under him the structure of the
ovules and the fertilization of the cycads, and the genial and amused
smile in the vivid blue eyes of the Viking-like Professor encouraged
her, although his words were discouraging. Though some women had
received degrees from Munich University, none had hitherto entered
from the Botanical Institute, and it would require an alteration in
the Regulations to make it possible. Marie Stopes was disappointed,
but replied that she had come to work, and would rather stay and
do the work than go elsewhere and get a degree for work that did
not interest her as much; and after about three months in Professor
Goebel’s research laboratories he came to her one day and said: “It is
ridiculous that any Regulations should stand in the way of you getting
your degree; I will have them changed.” And the Regulations were
changed, so that at the end of the year she was allowed to enter for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. During that year, though working
hard in the laboratory which opened at eight o’clock in the morning,
the young student enjoyed all the pre-war delights of Munich: the
Opera, a great deal of dancing, excursions every week-end to the snow
mountains in the winter and to the Tyrolese flowering valleys in the
summer; while in Goebel’s laboratory she met as many nationalities as
there were research-students, and entered with great zest into the
profound discussions which knots of students often embarked on far from
the fields of their own immediate work. Most of the research-students
in the laboratory that year were themselves Professors or lecturers
in their own countries, and they included a Polish Professor, a
Japanese, a Norwegian, a Dutchman, an American, and a number of other
nationalities and types. Frequently a quartet composed of a Buddhist, a
Roman Catholic, an atheist, and Marie Stopes, would discuss with great
earnestness and animation the problems of the Universe.
[Illustration: The author at Givons Grove with Mrs. Zangwill on his
left, Dr. Marie Stopes kneeling, and her mother on his right.]
[Illustration: Marie Stopes as a student, with a group of professors,
in the mountains. Prof. Goebel on her left.]
Though life at a University College had somewhat educated the girl,
she was still remarkably sexless, and quite unaware of the nature
of the stimulant her presence must have been in this laboratory of
men. One rather amusing incident may be cited. The geological and the
botanical students were taken into the mountains by their Professors
for scientific expeditions, and on one of these occasions a lecturer
from another faculty joined the party and insisted on talking, in
English, to the only girl there. His English however was very poor, and
he neither attracted nor interested her. She spent most of the time
chatting in lively colloquial German with a man on her other hand,
merely saying “Yes, yes,” at intervals to be polite to the lecturer. A
day or two later she was rather surprised to be sent for by Professor
Goebel to his private sanctum, where he broke the news to her startled
incredulity that the relatives of the lecturer who had bored her on
the expedition had been to Professor Goebel with a request to induce
her not to drive this man mad, as they feared for his reason and
that he would have to go to a lunatic asylum if she persisted in her
attitude of not recognising their engagement to be married. Marie
Stopes, in open-mouthed amazement, denied any knowledge of being
supposed to be engaged, and said that the man had never even proposed
to her. It transpired however that the bad English and the many boring
exclamations he had made, to which she had automatically replied “Yes,
yes,” had really included a proposal of marriage, to which the “Yes,
yes,” was naturally enough taken to signify her acceptance. The family
were much distressed when it was made quite clear that no marriage
would be contemplated by Marie Stopes, and they begged that she would
at least permit the man to write to her until she left the country. As
a result she possesses to this day a large pile of unread love letters
in a very small German hand, unread and for her unreadable, as she has
long since forgotten how to read German handwriting.
In such a narrative as this it is perhaps difficult to make it clear
how much hard brain work was included in her days. She told me once
her longest spell of _uninterrupted_ mental work was thirty hours at
a stretch, when she worked with beef-tea and a spirit stove at her
elbow, and did not leave her work even for meals. Steady work, and
the extremely valuable and interesting material supplied by Professor
Goebel, yielded sufficient results in the discovery of new and
interesting features in the cycads to justify the preparation of her
thesis towards the end of the first year, and this she herself wrote in
German, but it was German of such an amusing quality that the Professor
kindly suggested that a Swiss student should sit at the same table as
she did in the laboratory and go through it with her. He was a very
handsome and attractive, but safely married, man, so that a few days
later, when the Professor inquired how she was getting on with him, the
whole laboratory was sent into convulsions, and the Professor himself,
with tears hopping out of his bright blue eyes, sank into a chair
shaking with laughter beyond his control, when she replied that he had
been very kind, “Er ist es mit mir durchgegagen.”
She meant this to be, as it is, a literal translation of “He has
gone through it with me,” and was quite unaware of the fact that the
German phrase means “He has eloped with me.” Laughable however as her
German was, it was very fluent, and when the day of the _viva voce_
examination came it served its purpose sufficiently well. Professor
Hertwig, the great zoologist, meaning no doubt to be kind, questioned
the young botanist on the structure of volvox, a microscopic organism;
and Professor Rothpletz, also meaning to be kind, whispered, “Have they
been nice to you?” before he began his _viva voce_ in geology--for
the _viva voce_ examination for the German degree takes place audibly
in the presence of the University Court, so that the student has not
only the nervous work of replying to the Professor, but of knowing
that outsiders, and critical outsiders at that, are listening to the
replies. She however got a high degree, _Magna cum laude_, and all
the members of the research laboratory were cordially enthusiastic.
Professor Goebel was exceedingly generous and kind to the young foreign
student, and of him Marie Stopes says:
“Although, of course, lots of people had been kind to me before,
Professor Goebel was the first who really treated me as a father
might have done. Toward the end of my time in Munich, when I told
him that I was returning to England, where I must take up work that
would bring me a salary, he said, ‘But it is a shame that you should
not continue doing research work, and if you would only permit me
I would, out of my own purse, defray all the expenses for you for
another few years if you would stay and do research work here.’ He
and his wife lived almost opposite the University Institute and were
on many occasions extraordinarily kind to me, and this was all the
more remarkable as Professor Goebel did not like women to study, and
until I went to his Department and practically forced my way in, he
had never permitted a woman student to work in his laboratories. I
shall never forget his noble generosity and his fine impatience at
the trend of modern life, particularly of German life, his hatred
of the Prussians, and his Viking-like appearance and zest and
joyous gallantry when, in Tyrolese costume, he went to his mountain
laboratories. Munich was a second home to me until the war and the
desolation the war brought.”
A junior lectureship in botany at Manchester University was vacant at
the close of the year in Germany, and for this Marie Stopes sent in
her application. No woman had ever lectured in the science faculty at
Manchester University, and the Committee was nervous about appointing a
woman, for the classes of the junior students were large, and contained
medical students who were notoriously hilarious. The Committee was
helped in its decision to select Marie Stopes, in preference to any of
the male applicants, by an extraordinarily cordial recommendation from
Professor Boyd Dawkins, which resulted from the impression she had made
on him more than a year before, when she had gone by herself through
the drenching rain, over the moors to Todmorden.
CHAPTER IV.
ACADEMIC LIFE.
In other Universities women were beginning to obtain posts hitherto
given only to men, but Manchester had not before had a woman on the
science staff, though a lecturer in English literature had been in
office for some years. Biological classes were attended by large
numbers of the young medical students, who with the engineers are
generally the rowdy element in any University, and the authorities
of the College were in some trepidation as to the result of their
experiment in appointing a young girl to the Staff. With Dr. Marie
Stopes however no untoward events occurred, and the junior classes were
indeed quieter when she lectured or demonstrated to them than they
were in a good many other departments. The staff of Professors and
Lecturers, mostly men from Oxford, Cambridge, and other Universities,
formed a very friendly circle and became truly colleagues to the junior
lady lecturer. Indeed in after years, when Dr. Stopes was appointed
to the staff of her own college in London, she felt the contrast,
for there the Professors’ Common Room was barred to women, whereas
in Manchester she was immediately made a member of the Professors’
Common Room and always cordially welcomed and made to feel at home
whenever she used it. Her immediate chief and those members of the
staff associated with her work made things very easy and pleasant,
and outside the University, too, she made many friends, notably old
Mr. R. D. Darbishire, the philanthropist and founder of the Whitworth
Galleries, who with Miss Dymes, his secretary and companion, made his
home in Victoria Park ever open with a warm welcome for the girl, who
learnt both to reverence and love the fine autocratic old gentleman.
Professor, now Sir Arthur, and Lady Schuster, also in Victoria Park,
were friendly, and the social life in Manchester was an attractive
feature and much more real and cordial than life in London. After the
plentiful dancing and opera of Munich, Dr. Marie Stopes missed dancing
very greatly and, in addition to private dances, took the then rather
audacious social step of giving a dance herself, and cajoled the
elderly Professors to come to it in fancy dress. Out of that sprang a
little dancing club among the members of the staff, which survived for
a good many years after Dr. Stopes left Manchester. The young lecturer,
feeling that she was very inadequately trained in the art of lecturing,
went to hear a number of the Professors and lecturers in the University
deliver their lectures to their students. Mostly, it seems, she learnt
what to avoid in lecturing; she observed a good many little points
which explained the reputed rowdiness of the junior classes. On one
occasion she was present at the back of the room when a distinguished
Professor of world-wide fame faced his class of 200 juniors, and with
a quivering hand took a piece of chalk, drawing a wriggly thing which
might have been a triangle or a hexagon, and commenced his lecture by
saying, “Let us suppose that a circle is a circle”; and he could not
understand the roars, and the cloud of dust from the stamping feet,
with which this opening was greeted. Dr. Marie Stopes was amused to see
how well her own students behaved when they were given the chance.
In addition to the teaching work in the biological classes, time was
available for the young lecturer to follow up her own researches; and
the great interest in fossil plants which must always associate itself
with Manchester University where Williamson’s original work was done,
combined with the fact that the coal mining districts lay so close
all round the town, led her to penetrate to a number of collieries
in search of fossils, as well as to follow out some research on the
structure and deposition of the coal seams. In this connection she
came into personal contact with a number of mine owners, who always
met her with warm cordiality and helpfulness, and among whom a Mr.
Sutcliffe should be particularly remembered. He purchased an extensive
series of microscopic sections of a rare new fossil which had been
discovered, and presented them to the University to be placed at
the service of Dr. Marie Stopes, who undertook the work of their
scientific investigation and description. The fossil proved to be a
species unique in the British Isles, which she named _Tubicaulis
sutcliffii_, and was the subject of the first paper that she read to
the Manchester Philosophical and Literary Society. The work on the
collieries and coal mining industry which began with this connection
in Manchester was persisted in and is still actively continued by
Dr. Stopes to the present time, and has led her to a large number of
scientific discoveries and to the contribution of publications in the
Royal Society and elsewhere (see Appendix B, p. 216). Among the many
interesting people that this collegiate life gave her the opportunity
of meeting, Captain Scott, the Antarctic explorer, was one who most
impressed the girl. She was invited by Lady Schuster to meet him at a
luncheon and, fired by her intense enthusiasm for the palæontological
history of coal, she begged Captain Scott to take her with him on his
then projected Antarctic Expedition. They met again at a dancing party
in the evening. She found him the most “divine waltzer and reverser”
she had ever met, and he promised to take both her and Lady Scott with
him if that was possible, or failing that he undertook to bring her
back the fossil she wanted from the Antarctic. He came down to the
University before leaving Manchester and spent an hour or two with her
studying the external appearance of the fossils, so as to bring back
with him exactly what she desired. The tragedy of this expedition is
known to the world, and it is also known that he was found dead with
a few fragments of fossil plants by him. These however, although so
obviously collected for her, were not given to Dr. Marie Stopes to
describe; and she was glad of it, for unfortunately they were not those
she had longed for from the Antarctic regions.
In all this busy, happy life in Manchester there was however one secret
trial, and that was that after a very few weeks there Dr. Stopes,
whose vitality and general health were quite exceptional, developed
acute neuralgia. This neuralgia vanished immediately vacations came
and she could leave Manchester, but always returned within three days
of sleeping in Manchester. In spite of this her intense vitality
kept her going in many directions, and lectures to the students were
followed by an attempt to organise a seminar on similar lines to those
she had had experience of in Germany, excursions, plant collecting
and fossil collecting up on the moors and, in addition, evening
lecturing to the very poor in the slums at Ancoats; where the Ancoats
Settlement had organised classes of factory hands and others anxious
for intellectual work. There for a time she came in touch with some of
the worst conditions of city life, and she only gave up these lectures
when neuralgia and the acute pain of seeing human beings under such
appalling conditions were undermining her strength to such an extent
that it was impossible to go on. Among her treasured possessions is a
glowing testimonial spontaneously given to her by her poor students at
the Settlement.
By no means exclusively serious, Dr. Stopes, in a skittish mood,
instituted the first, and I believe the only, international comic
scientific journal. She called it _The Sportophyte_, and in it made
fun of a good many of the great biologists, and lampooned the style
of more than one publication. It achieved not a little success, and
one learned Professor said to her: “Oh, of course it is very funny,
but you cannot possibly do it again.” “Why not?” said Dr. Stopes.
“You must not be allowed to do it again; think what _power_ it gives
you.” This was hardly the way to stop the activities of an independent
and enterprising young woman, and _The Sportophyte_ lived until the
international calamity of the war killed the spirit of international
jocularity.
The suffrage movement naturally attracted Dr. Stopes’s interest, and
without becoming an aggressive extremist she put a good deal of time
into quiet work for the suffrage, joining the Tax Resistance League
and lecturing from time to time, as well as joining in processions and
deputations. Fired by a sense of the injustice of obliging women either
to forego marriage or to forego a career, she ardently supported the
efforts to stop the restrictions on married women’s work, and in that
connection met Miss Margaret Ashton, who was then a Councillor and one
of the most active of women’s champions in the north. Her attention
also was drawn to the yet deeper problems of married women by an
incident which occurred to one of her own students, who happened to
be a woman older than herself and who had been assisting a doctor in
dealing with out-patients at a hospital, when a woman had brought in a
miserable little baby which wailed all the time and which, the mother
explained, would not put on any flesh or grow into a nice, healthy baby
whatever she did with it. The mother, with tears in her eyes, made an
intensely earnest appeal to the doctor to tell her what was, to her,
unaccountably wrong with the infant. She said this was her fourth, and
the others had all died when they were very little. The doctor put her
off with some soothing platitudes, but the woman, driven to despair,
said: “I believe there’s something wrong with my man. If there’s
something wrong with my man I won’t have babies no more--it’s just
cruel to see them miserable like this and have them dying one after
the other. Won’t you, for God’s sake, tell me whether there’s anything
wrong with my man or not?” This appeal was met by the assurance that
there was nothing wrong, and she should do her duty by her husband
and go on having babies. The medical woman student said that it was
glaringly obvious that the baby was syphilitic.
That not only such ill-fated mothers, but that _all_ mothers, should be
freed from the appalling slavery of unwilling and undesired motherhood
became a conviction so intense as to necessitate action. Dr. Stopes
realized with the astonishment that youth always feels towards the
cruelty of its elders, that although the knowledge of birth control has
been freely circulating in our country for very many years, it has been
available chiefly for the educated and the well-to-do.
While Dr. Stopes studied more and more deeply the work on the coal
mines, she was following up several branches of research in connection
not only with fossils and their deposition but with their mode of
origin, and in connection with the petrifaction of the internal
tissues which is so wonderful a feature of some structurally preserved
specimens, she was led to the belief that, given certain conditions
in the surrounding horizons, the existence of the type of fossil for
which she was searching could be more or less predicted. Combining
this with an intense desire to discover the origin of the angiosperms,
which was one of the desiderata then, as it still is, of biological
science, she considered the horizons in any and every country in the
world from which she could get the necessary data, and came to the
conclusion that in an horizon in the northern mountainous Island of
Hokkaido petrified specimens of angiosperms, such as she sought, should
be found; and she applied to the Royal Society for financial assistance
to go there and investigate the matter, at the same time having a
sample specimen sent over from Japan, from the rocks _in situ_, and
she had the thrilling experience of seeing her scientific prediction
fulfilled, and finding in the very first cut a beautiful petrified
angiosperm. This strengthened her application to the Royal Society,
which was still under consideration, and though they had never before
sent a young woman out of the country on any such work, her application
was so well backed that an exception was made in her favour, and she
finally went to Japan alone, with a grant from the Royal Society, and
with the assistance of the Japanese Government, through the Imperial
University at Tokio. There she went up country and collected large
quantities of unique and hitherto unknown fossils which, on her return
to Tokio, she cut with the assistance and collaboration of Professor
Fujii, who together with her wrote a memoir, subsequently published
by the Royal Society in its Transactions, containing an account of
a number of plants new to science, and containing also the first
petrifaction of the flower, and the only one yet discovered. In Japan,
as in Manchester, she found the Professorial staff cordial and kindly,
and Baron Hamao, the President of the Imperial University, made her
an honorary member of the Professors’ Luncheon Club, where she met
the personnel of the various faculties, and thus saw the true life of
Japanese intellectual circles in a way seldom permitted to a foreigner.
A room and research facilities were allotted to her in the Institute of
the Imperial University, and in exchange for all this courtesy she gave
a short course of lectures on plant palæontology to the students and to
others of the staff who cared to attend. A fairly full account of her
manifold interests and experiences in Japan was published by Blackie in
her book entitled _A Journal from Japan_. She returned _via_ America,
and a fresh post in Manchester University was offered to her: the
first lectureship in palæobotany in this country. It was exactly the
post for which her researches fitted her and which her heart desired,
and she was happy to get back to her many friends in Manchester; but
it was no good, for the neuralgia, which had not touched her all the
time she was away, returned after a week in Manchester as violently as
before and became intolerable, so that at the end of the first year of
this new post she had to leave it and finally settle in London, which
all along had been her home.
[Illustration: The first portrait in her robes as Doctor of Science of
London.]
After obtaining the degree of Ph.D. in Munich she had, on returning to
England, followed up her B.Sc. in London by obtaining the Doctorate
of Science, London, when she became, I believe, the youngest Doctor
of Science in England, and shortly afterwards she was made a Fellow
of University College, London. She was invited by the Geological
Department of the British Museum to prepare a special memoir for them
on the Cretaceous Flora of the World, a memoir that took several years
to complete, and which was published ultimately in two volumes by
the Trustees of the British Museum. The Royal Society published in
their Transactions some of the results of the Japanese Expedition and
she was invited to exhibit her specimens from Japan at the ladies’
soirée, where she met Count Solms-Laubach, the veteran palæontologist
of Germany, whose classic treatise had been her original text-book.
He, though a woman hater and extremely reserved, showed the kindliest
appreciation of her new species. The advantage of meeting such men,
which all men of any note in the scientific world can do by attending
the Royal Society’s meetings, was a rare privilege to this young
woman. When some of her later discoveries were made she was invited
by representatives of the Royal Society to send her specimens for
exhibition, but not on ladies’ night. She said she could not send them
without being there herself to demonstrate and guard them, and was told
that she could send any of her own men-students, or even her butler,
but could not be admitted herself. With natural indignation she refused
to exhibit. It seems strange that to this day, however brilliant a
woman’s scientific work may be, her sex precludes her from equality
of treatment in the senior Society of Science in the world, and she
can never hope to be made an F.R.S. The Royal Society of Literature,
however, early recognised her, and on the proposal of old Lord Halsbury
she was elected a Fellow.
In the course of her travels for palæontological research Dr. Stopes
was once again in the United States, and took the opportunity of
attending the American Association of Science at St. Louis, where
she met Dr. Gates. He, like many others before him, immediately fell
passionately in love, and proposed marriage within a few days of making
her acquaintance. He was a botanist and in many respects apparently a
suitable husband, and Dr. Stopes and he were married before her return
to England a few months later.
Dating from her earliest childhood, and strengthened by her interest
in the suffrage, Dr. Marie Stopes has always very keenly felt the
rightness of the old Scottish and Norwegian customs, whereby a married
woman retains her patronymic after marriage, and she arranged with Dr.
Gates that she should retain her own name. In English law--though
many people are unaware of it--provision is made for such cases, and
to retain her own name legally, all a married woman has to do is
to announce at the time of her marriage that she intends to do so,
and to use it systematically for legal documents and transactions.
The effect of loss of personality arising from change of name has
undoubtedly had a psychological influence on women, and such a change
is most unreasonable when one has made such a name for herself as Dr.
Stopes had; a name which was then already recorded in thousands of
card-indexes and catalogues in Universities all over the world. A good
deal of press interest was shown in her revival of this old custom of
keeping her own name, and a number of women have followed the example
since, though old-fashioned people try to make things difficult for
a woman who thus desires to preserve her identity, and Dr. Stopes on
more than one occasion has had to threaten to take legal action against
scientific committees and other persons who endeavoured arbitrarily to
decide for her what her name is to be.
This marriage seems to have been arranged by destiny to give Dr.
Stopes the almost unique experience which completed her fitness to
undertake the work on sex-reform by which she is now best known. On her
marriage she was still, in spite of her zoological training and her
travel and experience of men of many countries, amazingly innocent,
and she was quite happy for six months or more. After that she began
to feel instinctively that something was lacking in her marriage.
Although she was living within a stone’s throw of her mother and of
her family doctor, they neither of them detected what was amiss or
offered any help or solution of the problems which confronted her.
Finally her life became quite intolerable, and I heard her say one
day: “I should go mad if it were not that I say to myself, ‘Why have
I a scientific brain and all my scientific knowledge, if it is not
to find out things that seem to puzzle everybody?’” and, in a very
impersonal manner, she took up her own case as a piece of scientific
research. She went to the British Museum and read pretty nearly every
book on sex in English, French, or German, just as she would read
every book on palæontology before publishing on her own subject. She
also read Lord Halsbury’s Laws of England, and then returned to her
family doctor and family lawyer, and when matters were made thoroughly
clear to them, it became a comparatively easy matter to put through
a nullity suit, in which she sued as _virgo intacta_ for the legal
annulment of her marriage, which her husband’s abnormality had never
allowed him to consummate. Dr. Gates was a passionate lover but an
incomplete husband, and as a result, after years of marriage, was not
only leaving his wife a virgin, but had developed an absurd jealousy
and attempted a domination which rendered life intolerable. At that
time I was frequently a witness of ridiculous little scenes, one, for
instance, in which he “forbade” this independent and high-spirited
young woman even to purchase a paper which she had been reading for
years. As was natural perhaps, Dr. Gates made things as difficult
and in some respects as scandalous for her as he could, but the war
was on before the legal case was finally settled, and shortly after
its outbreak he left England and sought refuge in America, returning
however before hostilities were over. Meanwhile, throughout all her
heartbreaking difficulties, Dr. Marie Stopes remained outwardly very
calm, and continued her palæontological work at the British Museum
and at University College, where, following on her Manchester work, a
palæobotanical lectureship was founded for her in London University.
This attracted much interest and attention at the time and her first
lecture was widely attended and published, and there is little doubt
that but for the war, which swept away her classes of young men, it
would have led to the founding of a regular school of palæobotany.
Meanwhile however the war diverted all who were able to do anything
of practical utility, and the more abstruse and academical aspects
of palæobotany were left on one side, and Dr. Stopes concentrated
on what seemed immediately useful, namely, the application of her
knowledge to the problems of fuel, and of coal in particular. The
Scientific and Industrial Research Department of the Government, under
Sir Frank Heath, actively supported her work, and she collaborated
with Dr. R. V. Wheeler of the Home Office Experimental Station in the
preparation of what _Nature_ described as a “classic”--a Monograph on
the Structure, Chemical and Palæontological, of Coal. (See Appendix B,
p. 216.) Following on this, Dr. Stopes continued researches, both in
collaboration with Professor Wheeler and independently; and the Royal
Society, in 1919, published her short paper on the four ingredients of
coal, in which she originated the now well-known words, clarain, durain
and vitrain.
Professor Wheeler and his students and collaborators, and many others
now doing research on fuel, have followed up the initial research of
Dr. Stopes on the ingredients of coal; for her work made possible for
the first time a discrimination in the analysis of different zones
in the same coal, which is leading to a knowledge of its intimate
structure and potential uses of a much more accurate kind than was
previously possible.
In the course of her scientific researches Dr. Stopes has made a great
number of original discoveries, and has published the results in a
number of learned _Transactions_ and journals, a more or less complete
list of which is given in Appendix B.
Among so many additions to scientific knowledge it is difficult to
say in a few words which are her most important contributions, but,
in the main, they deal with three themes: (_a_) the structure of
the reproductive organs both in living and extinct forms; (_b_) the
composition and structure of coal; and (_c_) the structure of the
vegetable inhabitants of the Cretaceous epoch.
Her discoveries of fossils in Japan, which were published jointly with
Professor Fujii in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society (Appendix
B, p. 219), brought to light a flora of the existence of which nothing
was known, and which was of interest and importance as including the
only petrified flower hitherto discovered in any part of the world. The
public perhaps do not realize that the vegetation which is conspicuous
to-day in the landscape, and which alone provides all our agricultural
plants and food, did not come into existence until the early Cretaceous
epoch.
The earliest known angiosperms in the world were also discovered by
Dr. Stopes and described in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society
(Appendix B, p. 218), and further facts about them are embodied in her
big volume published by the Trustees of the British Museum. Of this Dr.
(now Sir A.) Smith Woodward said: “There is so much that is new in it.
No one would have believed it possible to get so much out of the Lower
Greensand; it is quite wonderful.”
As regards coal, when she was first appointed as a junior lecturer in
Manchester, a centre of one of England’s coal mining districts, she
enthusiastically investigated the local mines. She read an important
paper on the subject before the British Association. It was the first
time she had done so, and the then Director of the Geological Survey,
Sir Jethro Teall, attended the lecture. The discussion proved most
interesting and cleared up a number of points hitherto obscure, and Sir
Jethro (then Dr.) Teall said that he was “astonished at the quality and
quantity of the detail given. I went to encourage a young girl, and I
remained to learn from a master.”
Her short paper on the composition of coal before the Royal Society
(Appendix B., p. 216) has led to an enormous change in the attitude
both of palæontologists and chemists towards coal structure, and
the terminology instituted by Dr. Stopes is now not only almost
universally followed, but the ideas in that short paper of hers have
proved fruitful in many directions--see, for instance the work of Dr.
Lessing on coking, of Dr. Ivan Graham, the Assistant Director of Mining
Research at Birmingham, and the many papers in the technical journals
arising from the inspiration in her original paper.
Although the outer public did not know her as a lecturer until
recently, in the course of her academic career Dr. Stopes lectured
regularly in Manchester and London Universities, and had given
brief courses or single lectures in the University of Tokio, in the
Parliament House in Hokkaido, in Chicago University, in Toronto
University, and in many other institutes and halls in various parts of
the British Isles and other countries, and her palæontological work was
utilized by various Government Departments in addition to the British
Museum and the Home Office. The Canadian Government, for instance,
sent for her to settle a problem which had been in dispute for over
40 years, about the age of certain potential coal-bearing deposits in
Eastern Canada, and the results of her investigations were published
by the Geological Survey of Canada in a large Memoir. (See Appendix
B, p. 217.) Amidst this life of manifold activities her relation to
her students was such that she always brought to every lecture some
fresh idea of vital interest. No doubt had she taken up some popular
subject instead of so remote and academic a field as she pursued, her
name would have become a household word among us years sooner than was
actually the case. Her personality was bound to make its impression on
our national life even had she never touched so burning a subject as
that with which she has been recently associated.
In addition to her many scientific associates, Dr. Stopes has had
warm friendships and interesting literary associations with many
distinguished literary men. For instance, with Maurice Hewlett, the
novelist and poet, who was so retiring and _difficile_, a warm
friendship started long before she was known to the world. Hewlett
wrote to her:--
“Yes, the writer of the ‘Letters to Sanchia’ is Senhouse. I can’t say
that he is a portrait of anybody in particular, though it does so
happen that I have known a man who lived, and still lives, much the
same life. But the two have nothing else in common, and I think my
man is more what I should like to believe myself to be than anything
more definite. _Video meliora._ He is one of the better things I see.
I won’t go nearer than that as yet.
“But if you, who have travelled far and been quit (for a time, at
all events) of our horrible trammel of circumstance, find truth and
reason in the substance of what I have imagined, I feel enormously
encouraged to go on. It was really kind of you to tell me so.”
And soon after he wrote:--
“Senhouse will feel that he has done something when such a letter as
yours is communicated to him. You evidently haven’t read his third
volume, ‘Rest Harrow’--which I beg leave to send you herewith.
Therein you will discover how he and Mrs. Germain parted company, and
in what unearthly manner he and his Sanchia found each other--the
where and when as well as the how. I personally am unable to
distinguish the fairy tale from the other tales, or the dream from
the daylight reflection. I don’t know whether I write truth or lies.
To me they are truth--to a large proportion of mankind foolishness:
but I write for myself because I have to, and am lucky to have such
readers as you.”
Israel Zangwill, the author-dramatist, and his wife, the novelist, were
both cordial friends much interested in her literary work before she
became well known through “Married Love,” and it was Edward Carpenter
who first encouraged her to publish “Married Love.”
Both before and after she was well known she has had some friendly and
amusing little encounters with Bernard Shaw, and I may quote a postcard
which he sent to the C.B.C. regretting his inability to attend the
Annual Dinner in November, 1923:--
“I shall not be able to come as I shall not be in London. If it could
possibly be made an M.S. (Marie Stopes) dinner without being a B.C.
one, I should greatly regret this. As it is, it is rather convenient
for me, because I cannot find a satisfactory public position about
B.C. If I went into the movement merely to fight the Malthusians
I should do more harm than good; and I really could not sit quiet
in it and seem to acquiesce with them. I am sure M.’s (Marie’s)
psycho-physiology is right; but neither of us can prove it.
“G. B. SHAW.”
Her poems brought her many warm and interesting letters from literary
men whom she had never met personally. For instance, about these poems
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote:--
“First let me thank you for the little book that brought me such
jolly discoveries as ‘Marjorie’ and ‘Tokio Snow’--and such fine ones
as ‘The Beaters’ and ‘The Brother’ (this last the sort of thing that
walks straight and takes a seat in memory for the rest of one’s
days).”
CHAPTER V.
WORLD TRAVEL.
The taste Dr. Stopes had inherited for travel found practical
justification in many journeys in connection with her scientific
research work. In addition to these expeditions, which were often
long ones, she was continually travelling both in the British Isles
and on the Continent. At the close of the first Session after her
appointment to Manchester she attended a scientific Congress in
Vienna, where she enjoyed the gathering of learned men, and also the
city and its beautiful surroundings. She then returned to Munich for
a further couple of months’ work in Professor Goebel’s department,
including some research in his Alpine laboratory perched high up on the
Bavarian Tyrolese mountains. The research she was engaged on was on the
structure and development of the fertilized ovum or egg-cell, together
with a study of its actual fertilization by the male sperm cell and the
introduction of food granules from the sperm into the ovum. This work
led to very interesting original observations, to make which she had to
be up all night for a series of nights, cutting into the living ovules
and examining their structure under the microscope at regular intervals
through the whole 24 hours. These investigations, though minor in
comparison with her other researches, were part of the preparation
which subsequently enabled her to speak with authority on problems of
fertilization in other connections; for the nucleus and the detailed
structure of ovum and spermatozoa and the immediate after-effects of
fertilization, are remarkably uniform wherever life is sufficiently
evolved to have two distinct sexes.
Holland, especially Amsterdam, and also Leiden, the home of so much
of Holland’s scientific life, were visited several times, as also was
Switzerland and France. On one occasion, after having spent a few weeks
in the University of Caen where she was visiting Professor Lignier, one
of France’s great palæobotanists, she set out to walk from that town
to the distant coast of Brittany, there to form one of an expedition
organized by Professor Oliver, on then new and interesting lines, for
the study of œcology. Sending her luggage on in advance, she started
with a knapsack across Normandy, first making a bee-line for the coast
and then following the ins-and-outs of the rugged headlands and bays.
A characteristic anecdote may be told of this expedition. Failing to
find an hotel in one of the further portions of Brittany, she decided
to sleep on a ledge of rock on the coast which seemed safely far from
the sea and afforded some shelter approximating to a roof. Having a
camper’s equipment with her, she made her evening meal and, curling
up in her long cloak, went peacefully to sleep. Next morning she was
waked by a gurgling suck of water at her very toes, and found that the
ledge, that had afforded a roof at night, shut her in with no possible
outlet of escape. The tide had come in much further than had seemed
possible the evening before. Fortunately the sea was calm, and Dr.
Stopes examined the rock on which she sat and, finding certain lichens
in its crevices, she felt reassured that she would not be swamped out,
and turning round went to sleep again until the tide had receded.
It has sometimes been said by those anxious to destroy her reputation
that she spent her vacations in “very curious ways,” implying that
what she did was improper. Unusual many of her vacations undoubtedly
were. Not the least so was one spent in Norway, when she and the only
Norwegian woman Professor, Frau Resvoll, went together to the north on
an œcological expedition, touching the Lofodon Islands and then going
to the northern coast of Norway, into the Arctic Circle. They walked
back in a bee-line over snowy mountain passes, and past glaciers,
in places where houses were sometimes forty miles apart, carrying
provisions, as well as their clothes, on their backs, sleeping on more
than one occasion in little isolated huts provided by the community
for those who travel in the only way possible in these districts,
namely, on foot. In Norway, accompanied by one so well known and
appreciated as Frau Professor Resvoll, she saw something of the type of
life which years before had influenced Ibsen when writing his plays.
A deep impression was made upon her by the austerity and difficulty
of the life in some of those isolated homes, where the flatbrød was
baked only once a year, and the muscles of dried reindeer were scraped
to a kind of powder for meat, and where, except for brief seasons in
the summer, potatoes and fruit were an unknown luxury. She will never
forget looking down from a mountain crest and seeing a herd of reindeer
fording the icy water below, and she has an equally keen recollection
of the exhilarating effect of a sun that set at 11 p.m. and rose again
at 1 a.m. In Christiania she and Frau Professor Resvoll were the only
women present at the opening of the University by King Haakon, and was
afterwards heard laughingly to say he was the only king with whom she
could fall in love! However abstruse and scientific the work occupying
her days in the laboratories and in the various Universities she
visited, time was always found in the evening for opera or theatre, and
she was fortunate enough to see “Peer Gynt” presented in its native
theatre, as well as to meet some of those who had been connected with
its original production.
The journey to Japan, of which mention has already been made (p. 66)
and which preceded her marriage to Dr. Gates, opened new and delightful
vistas. Dr. Stopes went across the Continent, embarking at Genoa,
visiting Naples and the great aquarium there, and then proceeded
down the Red Sea. Of this she says: “I was peculiarly fortunate when
travelling through the Red Sea to have it shown me in such a way as to
understand its name. One evening I came on deck and found the whole sky
from east to west and north to south one blazing crimson and copper
fiery mass of light; this was reflected in the sea itself, so that
it looked blood red, and the desert rocks on either side glowed in
orange and coppery colours. I should never have believed such a sight
possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. After a quarter of an
hour or so it had almost faded, but I saw that the Red Sea undoubtedly
can be red.” Aden, with its ostrich feathers and diving natives, its
pathetic “ladies’ garden” and rock-bound sterility, was succeeded by
the luxuriant beauty of Ceylon and Singapore. At Singapore the ship
stayed in port two or three days, enabling Dr. Stopes to visit the
botanical gardens, one of the famous gardens of the world, where she
collected specimens, besides seeing living in their native haunts many
plants which had hitherto only been significant names to her. Shanghai,
with its great river, affords a curious little memory. Of this Dr.
Stopes says: “I noticed telegraph lines, and thought them incongruous
enough in ancient China, but I was surprised to see them made of what
looked like barbed wire. On closer examination I found that what I had
taken for the barbs were seated dragon-flies perched at intervals from
each other as far as the eye could see all along the wire.” In Shanghai
a sidelight on the population problem gripped the girl’s heart. With
the rest of the tourists she was investigating the town in a rickshaw;
there on the street, kicked aside by the passers-by like garbage in the
gutter, was a dead baby.
Penang left a memory of moonlight and wonderful sleeping trees. Some
of the wide streets were lined by avenues of some kind of leguminous
tree which folded its leaves in sleep as a clover does. In the native
quarter an outdoor stage was showing one of the interminable Chinese
plays, which had lasted all day and was still going on at midnight.
Finally Japan was reached, and about this I need not say very much, for
the _Journal_ kept by Dr. Stopes has been published. From that book, _A
Journal from Japan_ (Blackie, 1909), one may take a few characteristic
passages, but, first of all, let us note Dr. Stopes’s remarks on
a trait in her own character which, though perhaps an inevitable
accompaniment of some of her best qualities, has struck many people as
a defect. It is not surprising that an able, energetic and successful
woman should exhibit a high degree of self-confidence, tenacity and
perseverance in pursuing her aims. There is a driving power about
Dr. Stopes which, if mistakenly applied, would be blameworthy, and
those who have not had experience of her uncanny trick of being right
have often been taken aback by the decision and emphasis with which
she speaks and acts. It is unwise to expect a racehorse always to go
quietly, and if one expected Dr. Stopes to be placid in her activities
and struggles, one would be courting disappointment. But let us see
what she herself says on this matter in her _Journal_.
“In many ways I had wonderful opportunities of touching the living
reality in the Japanese; opportunities so exceptional that it is
to my lasting shame that my stock of patience and sympathy was not
always equal to them.... It is true that from an ordinary standpoint
there are many things in Japan which are exasperating to a Westerner,
but that was no excuse for me. Let me quote as an illustration a
small incident that I have ever since regretted. On page 43 (of the
_Journal_) you will find the account of my involuntary visit to the
courteous principal of a College, when I was really bound for a
coal mine. This young gentleman asked me to give a lecture to his
young men, and I refused. It is true that I was really anxious to go
directly to that mine, that it would upset my plans if I were at all
delayed, and that at the moment the disturbance of those plans seemed
a serious matter. But nevertheless I was the first European woman
that many of the people there had seen, and the first scientific
woman that any of them had seen or heard of. Their curiosity and
interest about me were as natural as my curiosity and interest about
their coal mine, but I gratified my own curiosity and not theirs....
It would be practically impossible for them to realize how many
other claims had been made on that hasty young scientist who visited
them; they would only feel that in place of the human interest and
understanding which might have been shown there was a blank wall of
refusal. I tried to explain that science is a hard taskmaster, but
what good are explanations?...”
The following entries in the _Journal_ give some idea both of her work
and her play while in Japan:--
“Some of the Professors kindly took me to visit the Principal of
the University in solemn state; he was most gracious, and (through
an interpreter) said most ridiculously flattering things. According
to him only one ‘specialist’ lady has visited Japan before, and she
was elderly. Therefore, they all marvel at me, as though I were some
curious kind of butterfly! We then visited the Director of the
Imperial Geological Survey. The Director is _most_ kind, as is also
the Chief Inspector of Mines, and they put every facility in my way.
The Director gave me all the information he could and the largest
geological map of the district, which is very small, only about
one-hundredth part of the scale I am accustomed to do geological
work with, so that things will be difficult. The Government here has
kindly written to the Governor of Hokkaido and to the owners of the
mines, so that I shall fare as well as possible.”
* * * * *
[In Hokkaido.] “The Governor insists that as well as Professor
Y---- (who is to be interpreter), _as well_ as an official from the
Department of Agriculture and Commerce, _as well_ as several coolies,
I must have a policeman to escort me to the mountains. I besought
him not to enforce him on me, but it is an honour they delight to
give me, and I had to submit. Too much zeal and too much kindness
are as difficult to contend with as too little. We then called on
the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, and there were more
formalities and more talk--when I shall get to the actual hammering
of rocks I can’t imagine.”
* * * * *
“We began the day at five, and the regular escort is now raised to
ten, with temporary additions between every stage! I have given up
protesting that so many people require quantities of food, which will
have to be carried, and will now look on 100 without a murmur.
“We went through the forest and up the river prospecting, and found
scrambling along the steep banks of friable shale by no means easy;
but the escort assists me greatly, and one of them carries me on his
back on the frequent occasions when it is necessary to cross the
river. The only use the policeman has been so far was to lend his
sword to cut chopsticks which had been forgotten, and of course we
had no knives and forks with us at all, for I have learnt to get on
very comfortably without.”
* * * * *
“A long day going up-stream collecting nodules, which are very
big and very hard to break. The scenery up the rivers, with the
magnificent forests, is very fine. It is a curious sensation to be
in the midst of this boundless forest and see peak after peak densely
clad by trees which no man has touched.”
* * * * *
“Really it is hard work to carry tents and everything along these
rivers. Often I alone find it difficult to go, and I have nothing to
carry--except my fan and my hammer, both of which are in constant
use. Sometimes it would be impossible to go where we have been with
boots, the straw-sandals give such a clinging grasp that we are able
to get a foothold on a steep rock which in boots it would be mad to
attempt.
“Fortunately the river, into which one would be precipitated, is
seldom deep enough to be dangerous. The day’s scientific results are
solid, but not thrilling. Tents are a luxury, but I would rather
sleep out under the stars. With all these coolies and people I am not
allowed to do my own cooking, but I most fervently wish I might.”
* * * * *
“Sapporo once more. A day of official calls, bowing, compliments
and formalities. They asked me to lecture to the women’s Aikoku
Fujinkai: the request of the Governor can hardly be refused after all
he has done, so it had to be. The lecture was held in the large hall
of the Government House, the body of the hall filled with women, the
galleries with men; the Governor acting as Chairman and giving an
immensely lengthy introductory speech, of which I could only guess
the drift from words here and there, Professor My---- following on
with another. It is easy to speak in an interpreted address, because
there is so much time to think between the paragraphs; but I am sure
it has not the same effect on an audience as the direct address.
Some, of course, understood my English. Before the lecture there was
a reception, and I was regaled with tea and cakes and left to the
tender mercies of the ladies, and men who can only speak Japanese;
later, however, the Governor’s German was available, and so it was
all right, and we were quite cheerful till the interpreter arrived
with a solemn face and a black suit.”
* * * * *
“[Tokio.] Professor Sakurai took me to visit Count Okuma in the
morning; he has a lovely house and grounds, which he was gracious
enough to show me. Every ordinary day he has about thirty or forty
visitors, and is one of the busiest men in the country. He has an old
face, with almost no hair, and is tall for a Japanese, and dignified
in his silken robes, and distinctly pleasing. He could speak no
English, so that conversation was rather limited, as he spoke more
than usually indistinctly, but he was amused with Professor S----’s
account of me and very gracious. The rooms are nearly all provided
with European chairs and tables, rich and handsome, the drawing-room
in which he received me upholstered in gold brocaded silk, which
harmonized well with the handsome old gold and painted screens from
ancient Japan which stood around the room. I begged to see the
Japanese wing of the house, which he showed me. His Japanese guest
chambers were, to my taste, far more beautiful, though perforce less
able to display his wealth. He is the Chamberlain of Japan in one
sense, and has the finest orchid houses in the country.”
* * * * *
“November 24.--This morning early I started off on foot in glorious
hot sunshine to get the fossils, and succeeded in getting more
than my coolie could carry. I am almost the only visitor in the
place, and everyone is very kind and very interested. My colloquial
Japanese comes a cropper now and then--but I get what I want, which
is the main thing. The rocky valleys and woods are very lovely, and
I appreciate the loneliness after these Tokio weeks. I should like
always to live in complete solitude two days in seven.”
* * * * *
“[Tokio.] All yesterday the Institute had been undergoing
extensive cleaning, and this morning was spent in expectation and
preparation of exhibits--the great Dr. Koch, the world-famed German
bacteriologist, was coming to see the Institute. Professor Fujii was
brought back from the mountain before his cure was finished, to be
on duty; my fossil slides were borrowed and put under microscope,
and the spermatozoids of _ginkgo_ were on show. He came, after
the whole Institute and Baron Hamao had waited in a flutter of
excitement for nearly an hour; he is a big stout man, not very
intellectual-looking. Though interested, he had evidently been
trotted round a great deal. He seemed to like my fossils, and asked
me to show him a section of a leaf, as well as those I had under the
microscope.”
* * * * *
“[Tokio.] I went early to the Institute, where there is grand
excitement over _ginkgo_; the sperms are just swimming out, and they
only do it for a day or two each year. It is no such easy business to
catch them, in 100 you can only get five with sperms at the best of
times, and may get one and be thankful. I spent pretty well the whole
day over them and got three, and several in the pollen tube, not yet
quite ripe. It is most entertaining to watch them swimming, their
spiral of cilia wave energetically.”
* * * * *
“[Tokio.] At work all the morning, lunch with the Faculty at the
Goten, and then at work all the afternoon. The fossils proved so
enticing that though I had worn a traily frock all day intending to
go to the Belgian Legation garden party, when it came to the point
the fossils won, and I didn’t go. In the evening I cycled down to
dinner at our Embassy.
“When once one makes up one’s mind to a cycle, one can even go out to
dinner on it. I wondered, however, what the footman thought when he
had to lift it into the Embassy hall in case of thieves getting it
in the garden (I was told he has a brother who is an attaché at the
French Embassy! The Japanese are very quaint that way--one Count or
Baron or other is driven up to the door every day by his own brother
as a coachman). Thanks to the unmoved countenance of flunkeydom,
added to the immobility of the Japanese, I could sail into the
dining-room, past the same man, trailing a pink silk skirt with
apparent dignity.”
* * * * *
“[Tokio.] ... When I got to the Embassy garden party (it was given
to welcome Admiral Sperry and the American fleet) I found it had
been postponed in the morning, but as the weather was now so lovely
it was put on again. That is to say, it was half on and would be
repeated to-morrow. So we had one of the bands and quite a lot of the
American officers and other people turned up. The chief sight was
seeing Admiral Sperry and Admiral Togo sitting side by side looking
on at a kind of sword dance.... Admiral Sperry, though not imposing
or impressive in any way, seemed pleasant and keen, and was tall.”
* * * * *
“[Tokio.] Sven Hedin lectured to-day at the University, and I had
been asked to tea previously to meet him before it.... He gave me the
impression of being a genial, friendly, hardy, _pushful_, but not a
great man. The only other lady there was Madame G----, the mother of
the French Ambassador, whom I think I have mentioned before. She was
very gracious, as she always is, but cannot speak a word of anything
but French. We all walked over to the Lecture Hall from the Goten--a
slow and solemn procession. About the only people who spoke were
Hedin and Madame G----, a few people said a sentence or two to me,
but even the genial Dean seemed to be overpowered by the funereal
solemnity of the march. I had my cycle, and the French Ambassador
helped me to haul it up the steps! His only remark was _très
moderne_, which was very moderate of him. In the lecture I was placed
in the front row, between Madame G---- and Baron K----, and got into
nice hot water! The poor lady couldn’t understand a word of the
lecture, and Hedin often said things to make us laugh, and she could
not join in, so now and then I translated a word or two for her. This
upset Baron K----, who nudged me violently from the other side, so I
had to stop, but then I hurt the lady, for I didn’t dare answer her
further questions.”
* * * * *
“[Tokio.] Almost immediately after lunch we went over to--where do
you think?--Lafcadio Hearn’s house to see his wife and family! A
rare privilege, for the sanctum is unusually well guarded. But Mrs.
Noguchi’s friendship has won me the way in, for, as I said, the
eldest boy learns English from her and is devoted to her....
“As we entered we passed along an _engawa_ (verandah) bounding a tiny
internal square of garden on our way to the reception-room. This was
in the purest Japanese style, well-built, with pretty woodwork, a
thing one learns to notice in this country. I immediately observed
the _kakemono_, which was exceptionally beautiful, tall peaks of bare
rock pillars standing up against a grey sky, where a moon half shone
through a band of cloud. A picture that one could never forget and
yet would ever wish to see instead of merely remembering. I remarked
on it to Mrs. Hearn, who told me that ‘Lafcadio had very good taste
in _kakemonos_,’ and always bought only what pleased him exactly.
Wise man! when he had the cash! There was also a bronze in the room,
the bent stalk of a fading lotus leaf with the collapsed blade of the
leaf, and though there sounds no beauty in that, the bronze throbbed
with it. Mrs. Hearn was very friendly: less shy and quiet than most
Japanese women, she was yet distinctly Japanese in her shyness and
quietness. Without beauty, she pleased.
“She and the children were all in usual Japanese costume, and the
only ‘foreign’ things in the room were ourselves and the cakes and
cups of tea she brought us. I inquired if she liked foreign food, and
she told me that she did, _very_ much, and that ‘Lafcadio’ always
ate it, for though he liked all the things to be pure Japanese, and
would have nothing he could help that was not, Japanese food upset
him, and he always had foreign food, but that now she never prepared
it. We chatted about many things, and she spoke freely of Hearn, of
whom I did not dare at first to ask any questions till she had spoken
voluntarily so much, to show that she liked to speak of him....
“The children were with us most of the evening, showing Brownie
picture-books, of which they had a fine stock. Hearn evidently liked
Andrew Lang’s fairy books, for they were nearly all there.
“In his study, where we had supper, was the little family shrine,
built rather like a miniature temple of plain wood; within was
Hearn’s photo, and before it burnt a tiny lamp and stood dainty
vases of small flowers. According to Japanese ideas, the spirit of
the departed inhabits this dwelling and needs the love and attention
of his kindred, and takes part in their life. Is Christianity more
consoling to the bereaved than this? From the window by the shrine
could be seen the grove of the tall bamboo Hearn loved, and in the
room floated one or two of the mosquitoes with which he had such
sympathy.”
Some of the Japanese ways must have startled a girl brought up in the
propriety of the Stopes family. One finds indications of this in such
passages as the following of _A Journal from Japan_:--
“The life in this train is different from anything I have yet
seen in trains, yet very comfortable, with dining-car where they
cook beside you what you order. Near me was sitting a smart man,
cultured-looking, and extremely well-dressed in perfect English
style. Thus he remained for an hour; then, the heat being great, he
took off his coat, then his waistcoat, and finally came to his shirt
alone! Then he pulled over him a loose kimono and removed every
stitch but that, finally winding a soft silk sash round his waist and
sitting down, all without removing his gold-rimmed glasses or turning
a hair! The transformation was extraordinary, and during the whole
ridiculous scene, acted within two feet of me, he was so utterly
unconscious and dignified, and so many others in the long car did
the same, that I began to wonder if we aren’t a little super-prudish
in England. During the night that man was most thoughtful and kind
to me, insisting on my using his rug, and finally doing an act
of service that called for such unselfishness that I am sure we
underrate the innate courtesy of Japanese men to women; and he was,
of course, a perfect stranger.”
And also from Hokkaido:
“I arrived at Aomori early this morning, and lost much temper because
I had to lose much time in getting on to the ship. The language, of
course, was partly the difficulty, but the natives are excruciatingly
slow to move. After _three hours_ of talking and arguing and going
over things again and again, at last I reached the steamer--a very
good little ship with nice state-rooms and saloons; of course
_very_ small. The state-rooms have three berths, and I find my two
companions are men. It was a shock at first, but they seemed so
surprised at my being surprised, that I thought again that we have
too much of the trail of the serpent about our customs. I slept in
the train with men near me, why not in the steamer? It is only for
one night.”
And again:
“Life in the Club-house last night was not without its interest.
I couldn’t get to bed for constant visits and interviews from
officials; the last gentleman came after I had prepared for bed,
and I conversed with him in my night-gown (which, mercifully, was
long and rather like a tea-gown), but he never turned a hair--coming
in on me before I could put on a dressing-gown. The maids are all
excessively sweet and polite, but they slide open the partitions
noiselessly, with no warning, and catch me unawares.
“I put up at a little hotel near the sea, and after six went down for
a bathe. The coast was perfect, shelving rocks sloping out to sea,
with little bathing coves and sheltering rocks, and, as I imagined,
perfect solitude. But, of course, in this out-of-the-way place I had
been noticed, and before I was in the water a minute a crowd of women
and children had collected. Nothing I could do or say would drive
them away, and so I had to get out and dress under the fire of their
eyes and criticisms. In their long-drawn country tones they kept up
a running commentary, ‘Ooá--how white she is!’ ‘Is she married?’ ‘Why
does she wear a dress in the sea?’ ‘How old can she be?’ ‘Perhaps
twenty years.’ There was no escape from nearly fifty people forming
a cordon but three feet away from me; if I had fled they would have
followed, so I dressed, as leisurely and as unconcernedly as if I
were at home, and gravely buttoned the little buttons of my bodice
and put on my stockings while I returned the compliment and made a
searching examination of them.
“The boy children were naked, with smooth glowing copper limbs like
sun-burned clay--as indeed they were. The girl children had usually
some floating robe of a dressing-gown nature, open to show the whole
body, or caught at the waist and turned down to leave the upper part
free. Bright-eyed they were and muddy-cheeked, but neither pretty
nor attractive. The women were naked to below the waist, the kimono
being turned down over the girdle to form a kind of double skirt.
No one wore any ornament of any kind, save a few coloured beads to
tie their hair, but few of them had even that. The men wore three
inches of cloth round their waists and sometimes a band round their
heads made of a small Japanese towel. All were perfectly quiet, and
the remarks were made one at a time by the older women; the children
stood open-mouthed. I know that the blue of the sea-water makes one
gleam like white ivory, and as all my clothes were white, I suppose
the effect must have seemed novel to them. The deep colour of the
Japanese is chiefly due to sunburn, but as they are exposed to it
from their earliest days, it gets so ingrained that they may not
realize it is an attempt at clothing on the part of a body otherwise
so unprotected.”
From the above extracts it will be realized that, after a short stay
at Tokio, Dr. Stopes set off by herself to the northern trackless
forests in Hokkaido. She found however that the introductions kindly
sent by Sir Edward Grey and the Royal Society left her less free than
she would otherwise have been to travel in obscurity, and on arriving
in Hokkaido an interchange of visits with the Governor was necessary.
Before matters were settled she found that an escort of considerable
magnitude was considered essential. Among them of course was an
interpreter, as she had no knowledge of the Japanese language. Whilst
on the expedition with a party of coolies however the town of Hakodate
was burnt down entirely and the interpreter had to return hurriedly to
see to his family affairs, leaving her, with the meagerest smattering
of Japanese, to cope with her entire expedition, an experience she
found most salutary and not a little amusing. In many of the villages
to which Dr. Stopes penetrated, no white person of any sort, male
or female, had ever been seen before, and the curiosity her arrival
aroused was naturally great and often embarrassing, as, for instance,
when an entire school was brought to watch her dress, the natives
having noiselessly removed the sliding panels of her room before
waking her. The fossils she sought proved to be there, and her coolies
returned laden with specimens of great interest and new to science.
From Tokio she made many expeditions in other directions, including
one to the Southern Island of Amakusa, where coal mines of a very
primitive sort existed. Throughout her stay in Japan she continually
experienced difficulties in consequence of the ramifications of
Japanese interests she aroused. “It was so difficult,” she said,
“to get anywhere I wanted to go because they always wanted me to do
something else!”
In Japan the aristocratic or “No” plays greatly attracted and
interested Dr. Stopes, and she attended as many performances of these
as possible; and in collaboration with Professor Sakurai, then the Dean
of the Imperial University, she made the first translation of three of
them into English. They were published by Heinemann in 1913, with her
notes on this most interesting and archaic of all still living forms of
the drama. Concerning this, Baron Kato, then Japanese Ambassador, wrote
of Dr. Stopes and her co-translator: “I am glad to be able to extend
to them my sincere congratulations on their remarkable achievement.
They have succeeded in their work to the best extent anyone can hope to
succeed, and in my opinion have placed Western students of Japanese art
and literature under a debt of gratitude to them.”
After living for some time as a paying guest with a Japanese officer’s
family, Dr. Stopes decided to try the experiment of having a little
Japanese home of her own in Tokio, which city she always made her
headquarters. To run this, she had a delightful Japanese maid, and
lived as nearly as was convenient in the Japanese style, using
chopsticks and sleeping on silk quilts on the floor, though she kept to
European cooking. As the French Ambassador said, “Next to the French,
the properly trained Japanese made the very best cooks in the world,”
and her maid was remarkably skilful over a little charcoal brazier.
The many dances and dinners, garden-parties, and receptions at the
Embassies, which social life at Tokio offered, afforded ample gaiety as
a contrast to her serious and arduous palæontological work. At an “At
Home” in Tokio one day a matron, talking to a slender young woman in a
pretty art gown of blue velvet, said: “Who is this Dr. Stopes people
are talking about? He collects fossils, and I expect he is a bit of a
fossil himself.” Later on the same lady said to her hostess: “Who is
that nice girl I have been talking to in the blue dress?”--“That is
Dr. Stopes, the learned geologist,” said the hostess, and the Yokohama
matron collapsed. But Dr. Stopes wanted some social activity rather
more serious than any that were available, and so she hit on the idea
of founding a ladies’ debating society like one her mother founded
many years earlier in London. For the ladies in Tokio nothing beyond
the superficialities of social life existed, since, being foreigners,
the various fields of social usefulness open to women in their own
countries were not available, and her idea was taken up with zest. The
debates were both animated and interesting, but, to the amazement of
all concerned, no men were admitted. This of course, in such a circle
as the Tokio diplomatic one, caused great astonishment, and Baroness
d’Anethon, the English wife of the Belgian Minister, who was the doyen
in Tokio, pleaded in vain when the debate was held in her house,
for exception to be made in favour of the Baron. This being sternly
refused, he hid in the room, and had to be dislodged amid laughter. In
looking back, Dr. Stopes thinks that this unexpected attitude of the
women was what secured the initial success of the little Society. It
undoubtedly filled a want, and it took root, and in an expanded form,
with many added activities, is now the Tokio Ladies’ Club. Dr. Stopes
also initiated a club for both men and women, the London University
Club, in Tokio. She, as a graduate of London University, felt that the
graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, who each had their club in Japan,
should not be the only ones to foregather. In this undertaking she
was much helped by the fact that several of the most distinguished
statesmen in Japan, as well as Professor Sakurai, the Dean of the
Imperial University, were graduates, or had been students, at London
University. That club, too, still maintains its existence and from time
to time communicates with her.
On leaving Japan Dr. Stopes was the recipient of many beautiful
gifts from various departments, including a pair of exquisite silver
cloisonné vases, with a dedication to her from the Japanese Government
“in recognition of the service she had been to science in Japan.”
After a year and a half in Japan Dr. Stopes returned home across the
Pacific and _via_ Canada. The ship encountered a terrific storm. The
manuscript containing her original drawings and the only copy of the
results of Professor Fujii’s and her work for the last year and a half
was with her in her cabin. The sea broke in, bursting the port-hole,
and before anything could be done water was waist deep in her cabin
and the precious manuscript was floating about with the rest of her
luggage. When rescued it was well-nigh ruined, but, having been tightly
tied up, there was some hope of saving it if it could be dried quickly.
The storm by this time was so terrific that she could not walk along
the corridor of the ship at all, and, with her heart in her mouth,
had to see the manuscript taken out of her care to the engine-room to
be dried, while she was tightly wedged in with pillows and fastened
into her bunk. Some days later the manuscript, with its pages entirely
disarranged, was retrieved; and from that experience the authoress
learnt a lesson she has never forgotten, and never now allows a
manuscript of hers to remain uncopied.
On her arrival in Vancouver she was asked to lecture before the
Women’s Canadian Club. In Toronto, too, she was most cordially received
and made much of by Dr. Helen MacMurchy, a well-known figure in the
medical and Government circles of Canada. She then proceeded to New
York, where she received much cordial and friendly hospitality.
It was not very long before she returned to America for a stay of
over three months, a large part of which was spent in Washington,
where she was correlating the palæontological collections with those
in the British Museum, in preparation for the volumes published later
by the Trustees of the British Museum. She was the guest then of
Hennen Jennings and his charming wife, who gave her many delightful
opportunities of meeting Americans of note. At a dinner-party to meet
Viscount Bryce, in whom she found an Ambassador not merely broad and
sympathetic, but with a profound knowledge of unexpected subjects, as
he showed in his table talk. Of him she says: “He was the only man of
general world-culture and note I have ever met who knew the correct
scientific names of fossils in coal-bearing horizons and mentioned
them as though they were everyday matters of conversation. He amazed
and delighted me.”
In New York she met Andrew Carnegie, who invited her to his palatial
home, and she found him very different from the hard old man rumour had
described him as being. He gave her tea in tête-à-tête comfort, and
though he refused an endowment for palæontological research in London,
which she asked him for, he received the request with such humour and
such personal charm that she went away feeling she had gained a great
deal. And perhaps she had, for this wise old man said to her: “You are
far too clever, my dear, to be wasting your time over fossils; _things
that live matter more_. If you had come to me with a proposition that
would help the peace of the world, I would not have given you a quarter
of a million” (dollars, presumably), “I would have given you a million,
and gladly. Take my advice, and do not waste your time over these
dead-and-gone things.” (Alas for the later work of Dr. Stopes, that
is so essentially calculated to help the peace of the world, Carnegie
died before she was ready to ask him to redeem his promise.) The
palæontological enthusiast then pointed out to him that the whole of
his wealth rested on the use of coal, and therefore the palæontological
study of its nature and structure must have value, even to him. But
he would not see it, and said: “You are clever enough to make all the
millions you want for yourself. We dug coal before you scientists
existed, and we can go on digging it without you.” Patting her kindly,
he led her downstairs, right down his front steps on to the street in
most kindly and fatherly fashion, and next day sent her a book of his
own, inscribed as follows: “For relief from severer studies likely to
destruct the brain.”
In St. Louis, as has already been mentioned, Dr. Marie Stopes met
Dr. Gates whom she afterwards married, and in Chicago, where she was
invited to lecture at the University, she met Jane Adams, the great
social worker, and a number of academic men of world note. Of American
cities, Boston, next to Washington, attracted her most, and there
she was entertained by old Mrs. Fields, whose home was one of the
last links between modern times and the glorious days of American
literature, and who showed her a manuscript collection of many of
the great English authors. Other friends in Boston gave a dinner for
her to meet Henry James on his native heath. “That night,” she said,
“I really felt that I had achieved fame. Henry James entertained the
dinner-table with a number of stories from one of my books. I suppose
he had forgotten their origin, but I played up, and laughed in the
proper place every time. I felt for the first time in my life that I
really had accomplished something.”
In Ottawa she was the guest, at Government House, of the
Governor-General and Lady Grey. Here she met the Premier, Sir Wilfred
Laurier, who was full of reminiscences and confidences about his youth.
The Minister of Finance sat next to her at dinner one evening, and
semi-officially asked her to name her own terms for remaining in Canada
to develop palæontological work in connection with their Government
departments, but she then felt that she would rather have a junior’s
salary in London than comparative riches elsewhere.
Shortly after this she went on to Montreal, staying only a few
days. Lord Grey, who was visiting Montreal at the time, opened Lord
Strathcona’s house and gave a luncheon party to Dr. Stopes. In Montreal
she visited Professor Penhallow, the palæobotanist, who had charge of
many interesting fossil specimens, some of them dating from the famous
Dawson’s time. She also met Sir John Macdonell and Professor Adami and
others of the University staff.
In Montreal she was married to Dr. Gates, who came to meet her there
for that purpose.
Dr. Stopes has twice seen Niagara: once in brilliant summer sunshine,
pouring over in torrential floods, and once frozen, with an ice halo
round all the neighbouring trees, with an ice bridge across it, and a
rainbow sparkling in the sunshine from the small central stream.
In Stockholm, Professor Nathorst, one of the greatest palæobotanists
in the world, had unique collections it was necessary for her to
correlate with those in the British Museum. She stayed a good many
weeks in Stockholm, and while she was there the city was also visited
by Professor Seward (now the Master of Downing College, Cambridge), a
palæobotanist, and his wife and daughter. This palæobotanical party,
together with Professor Nathorst, was invited to a lunch by the British
Minister, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, at his beautiful summer villa some way
out of Stockholm, who made a deep personal impression on Dr. Stopes.
His sympathetic and charming personality and real interest in science
was unusual. She had often experienced in Japan, where she moved
freely among the diplomats, and at Washington and elsewhere where she
met Ambassadors and their kind, a superficial courtesy and a pretence
of interest which seemed to her unreal, but Sir Cecil created an
impression of noble sincerity and sympathetic understanding.
Since the war Dr. Stopes has travelled little, though she has been once
to New York and in 1923 attended the Fuel Congress in Paris, where she
had been invited to give a paper on her researches on the structure of
coal.
[Illustration: HUMPHREY VERDON ROE.]
CHAPTER VI.
MARRIAGE.
About eighteen months after having been freed from the legal
matrimonial entanglement which had proved itself no true marriage,
Dr. Marie Stopes and her real husband met at a luncheon party given
by a mutual friend. They were immediately attracted to each other
under rather curious circumstances, each having been invited to meet
the other and each of them thinking that the other had not turned up,
but that the delightful young person they were meeting was a son or
daughter of the one they were to have met.
Humphrey Verdon Roe was the son of Dr. Edwin H. Roe and Annie Verdon,
his wife, and was one of seven children. Medical men were numerous in
his family, and he was the son, nephew, and brother, of medicals. He
himself went straight into the Army from school and from his crammer,
and entered the First Battalion of the Manchester Regiment as a
subaltern. The regiment was stationed in Gibraltar, where he first saw
foreign service with its vivid new experiences, and the regiment was
drafted to South Africa in 1899, where he served through the whole
siege of Ladysmith, suffering permanently in health to some slight
extent from the starvation he then endured. At the end of the South
African war he resigned his commission and entered first one and then
another business, making himself independent of his family. A brother
a year older than he, Alliott, who had a varied engineering experience
and a great gift for invention, was interested from a very early date
in the possibilities of flying. Humphrey Verdon Roe placed his business
knowledge and resources at his brother’s command, and the two worked
in partnership: a partnership in which Alliott benefited by the keen
common sense of Humphrey, who kept a steering-wheel on the development
of the many ideas coruscating from his brother. The development of
those that could lead to solid results was organized by Humphrey, and
the machine they then constructed is still of value. Together the
two brothers founded the firm which manufactured the “Avro” biplane
in 1910, when flying was still thought to be almost an impossibility,
and only a few years after _The Times_ had published an article saying
that from an engineering point of view it was not possible to fly, the
brothers had mastered the obstacles before them. In the first year
of the war Humphrey Roe’s policy was more than justified. Avros were
on active service all over the place, and in November, 1914, Avros
were selected for the successful raid on the Zeppelin headquarters at
Fridrichshafen.
The development of the production of Avros, and others modelled on
them, naturally expanded enormously during the war, but Humphrey
Roe, though at the head of a rapidly increasing business, at once
endeavoured to take up a fresh commission in the Army, but was held
back as being of more service to the country as a producer of flying
machines. In 1917 however, the huge expansion of production having been
fully organized and established, he succeeded in rejoining the Army;
and resigning all direct interest in the firm, got his commission, and
went flying in France. At this time, at the age of 39, he was in such
good physical condition that he went night-bombing over the German
lines. His machine was brought down, and he was sent home with a broken
foot and a jarred spine, gaining a wound stripe early in 1918. An
account, with a photograph, of his night-bombing work is given in the
“Annals of the 100th Squadron.”
Besides being a successful business man of many interests, H. V.
Roe has been through life a most abstemious liver, a teetotaller, a
non-smoker, and of very simple personal tastes and habits. Before he
met Dr. Marie Stopes, in conjunction with Councillor Margaret Ashton,
M.A., the well-known philanthropist and social worker in Manchester, he
had, for some time, been endeavouring to improve the lot of the working
women by founding a clinic for birth control. Indeed he made an offer
to a Manchester Hospital of £1,000 a year for five years and £12,000 at
his death if they would open such a clinic, but through fear of losing
some of their other supporters if they took such an advanced step, they
regretfully refused to do so. On going to the front Mr. Roe made a
will, leaving his whole property for the endowment of birth control
and the foundation of various scholarships. It is an indication of the
extraordinary ignorance that then prevailed on that very important
subject, that his solicitors in 1917 were exceedingly chary about
allowing him to make any bequest for birth control, warning him that
probate might be refused. Fortunately however his marriage with Dr.
Marie Stopes in 1918, who was equally anxious to promote birth control,
resulted in the mutual efforts they have made to do this in their own
lifetimes. They founded the first clinic for birth control in the
British Empire, which under their supervision has steadily progressed.
[Illustration: Dr. Marie Stopes at the time of her marriage to Mr. H.
V. Roe. 1918.]
His meeting with Dr. Marie Stopes took place just before he went to
France, but on his return he and she decided to marry as soon as he was
allowed out of hospital, and arrangements were made for the marriage to
take place at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the Bishop of Birmingham, an
old friend of Dr. Stopes, and Mr. Roe’s uncle, the Rev. Russell Napier,
the Vicar of Old Windsor, were to officiate. The demand for officers
was then so great however that he was ordered to the front sooner
than had been anticipated, and they were hastily and secretly married
a month earlier than had been planned, at the Registrar’s Office at
Westminster. Then, fortunately, his orders were changed, and the
religious marriage at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, could proceed. The
couple were then in the amusing position of having been really married
a month when, with all due pomp and solemnity, they were in the eyes of
the world, being married for the first time. No one but myself, and one
other friend,--not even the bride’s mother--had been informed of the
first marriage hastily arranged in view of the tragic possibilities at
that time.
Humphrey Verdon Roe had many years previously determined to retire
from business at 40, and, after his marriage, he and his wife decided,
when the war should be over, to devote their whole leisure to public
service in one form or another. In addition to his interest in birth
control Mr. Roe, as an employer of labour, had often endeavoured to
bring employers and employed to a better understanding, and he
actively took up the work of the Industrial League and Council, joining
its committee and furthering its efforts to promote Whitleyism. He was
also interested in other public service, in particular, town planning.
Dr. Stopes had for some time been living at Leatherhead, and as the
district offered just the kind of beauty and facility of access to
London they desired, he bought a beautiful property and they settled
down at Givons Grove, where they now live.
[Illustration: An Industrial Conference at Givons Grove.]
After they had been married fifteen months their first baby son was
born, a beautiful and well-built boy of 8-3/4 lb., whose tragic death,
and all the attendant circumstances, involve a story too strange and
horrible for me to tell here. Fortunately, their second son, who was
born in 1924 (and who also weighed 8-3/4 lb. at birth), is another
beautiful and sturdy baby, so like the first that he might be his own
elder brother come to life again.
Humphrey Verdon Roe was so severely injured in France, where he had a
foot broken and two bones in his spine jarred, that he was invalided
out of the Army before the close of the war. With the exception of
a brief visit to Switzerland, he and his wife have done none of the
travelling they had planned, but have lived very quietly since their
marriage. Whatever strength each of them has had has been devoted
principally to work in connection with birth control: the founding of
the clinic for birth control, and the Society for Constructive Birth
Control, of which H. V. Roe is honorary secretary. Further reference to
this will be given later (p. 221).
Those who, like myself, have often stayed at Givons Grove, know
well how complete and real a marriage this is. Much is said of the
Brownings’ ideal marriage, but here, in living fact, is another
equally perfect in harmony and sentiment and in many respects more
actively vital. Each with a pioneering instinct, though exercised
in different directions, each serene in disregard of their own
immediate advancement, each having an almost childlike sentiment and
sensitiveness, they have strengthened and completed each other in the
happiest way. No reference to life at Givons Grove would be complete
without mention of their beloved Chow dog, who goes everywhere with
them, even on their honeymoons, and whose affectionate disposition fits
well into the home life there.
[Illustration: Dr. Stopes, seated, with her husband’s father and
mother.]
[Illustration: Mr. H. V. Roe and “Wuffles” as a puppy.]
I am convinced that Dr. Stopes is one of those rare people whose mental
and moral energy never allows them to rest long on their oars, but who
when they have mastered one problem have to engage on another. The mere
diversity of tasks she has already undertaken indicates this, including
as it does a considerable body of important scientific work, besides
elementary text-books, a book of travels, a book of poems, plays, a
cinema story, and fairy tales, as well as the series of works on sex
that have had such a large circulation here, and have been translated
into French, German, Swedish, Danish, Czeck, Polish, Roumanian, Dutch
and Spanish. This forms a surprisingly varied output for anyone, and
still more for a woman of her age, and there is every reason to expect
much more from her yet.
The characteristics observable when one gets to know her well are a
curious blend of feminine charm with a trenchant intellectuality such
as one rarely encounters. She is clear-headed, but not of the aridly
intellectual type; on the contrary she frequently jumps to conclusions
by a kind of intuition, though she verifies and tests them afterwards.
I have already alluded to the exceptional tenacity--some people would
say obstinacy--with which she clings to her purpose, great or small,
and also to the surprising frequency with which she reaches her aim
when an onlooker does not see at all why she should. Perhaps I may
illustrate this by an example. When her husband bought Givons Grove,
Dr. Stopes set to work to beautify and decorate it, a task for which
she is highly qualified. Well, at Givons Grove she resolved, among
other things, that the upper part of the dining-room walls were to be
painted a particular shade of blue. It was war-time, and after the
decorators at her instigation had tried a dozen different sources,
they declared the required paint to be quite unobtainable. Dr. Stopes
would not have the walls painted any other colour. About that time she
underwent the serious operation previously mentioned, and stayed at
Torquay to recuperate. The first day she was strong enough to go
out, she asked a policeman to direct her to the best oil and colour
shop in the town. He did so, and on reaching it Dr. Stopes asked for
two pots of the shade of blue paint she required. The shop-keeper said
he had none of it, but Dr. Stopes insisted he had. She said she must
have it, and would he please be quick and examine the stock in his
cellar, as she was not at all well and very weak, did not want to wait
long, and _knew_ he had it in the shop. She was, in fact, by this time
so exhausted with weakness as to be almost collapsing over the counter
at which she sat. The man replied that he had no cellar; but, on being
questioned, he admitted that he had a small attic, and at her bidding
he went to see what was there. He soon returned, having to his surprise
found just two pots of the identical shade required, which Dr. Stopes
promptly purchased, and the paint from which is now on her dining-room
walls.
[Illustration: Members of the Birth Rate Commission. The Bishop of
Birmingham in the centre. Dr. Stopes on his left.]
[Illustration: Dr. Marie Stopes and her Baby, Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe,
aged 3 months.]
Physically Dr. Stopes matured slowly, and must have been nearly thirty
before her sex-instincts were at all fully developed. Slowness of
development does not however imply any incompleteness, and besides
being very happily married, she is the mother of an unusually fine
baby: a particularly bonny, healthy little chap, whom she nurses
herself and who, in the first six months of his life, has never had a
wakeful night, and spends all his waking daylight hours laughing and
crowing.
CHAPTER VII.
“MARRIED LOVE” AND ITS DEVELOPMENTS.
The book, _Married Love_, was the outcome of Dr. Stopes’s scientific
investigation of her own case, in the course of which, as already
mentioned, she had read in the British Museum and elsewhere nearly
everything that mattered on cognate subjects. This research revealed
to her the great gaps that exist in the information available to
ordinary people, as well as the lack of a book of instruction in
sex, sufficiently simple to be understood, scientifically accurate,
yet sympathetic, and written with a basis of romance and poetry,
which she deemed to be the atmosphere in which alone the subject can
properly be broached. In addition to this, she made a very fundamental
physiological discovery on the subject of women’s spontaneous
sex-rhythm and potential response to sex appeal. Concerning this Dr.
Stopes brought to the science of human physiology a contribution which
has already had, and should yet have, far-reaching sociological
results. In her chapter on Rhythm, together with charts, a fundamental
law was laid down, or rather the existence of it was detected, but
couched in simple and direct language suitable for the readers of any
ordinary book instead of for the _Transactions_ of a learned Society.
Its profound value has still perhaps not been fully realized, although
it was followed up by Havelock Ellis, whose reference to it has already
been quoted.
_Married Love_, drafted at first to crystallize her own ideas, was
approximately completed in 1914, but Dr. Stopes then made no definite
effort to publish it, and it was early in 1918 before she felt that
the time for it was absolutely ripe and that it should immediately
be published. I had read it in manuscript, and thought it of great
interest, but I did not think it would find a ready market, and
told her she would be fortunate if 2,000 copies of it were sold in
twenty years in the form in which it was being published. In her
usual independent way Dr. Marie Stopes laughed, and her laughter was
justified, for the first 2,000 copies were sold in a fortnight. The
second and third editions were sold without a single advertisement,
and Mr. Fifield, who was the original publisher, soon began to be
oppressed with the burden of keeping the market supplied. When Dr.
Marie Stopes, who knew him to be in general an active, efficient and
capable publisher, went to him with the book (sole control of which
she retained), she asked him in the initial interview whether he could
deal with a book likely to sell by the ten thousand for some years,
and probably ultimately by the million, and Mr. Fifield assured her
that such was his capacity and desire. He put his heart into the
publication of the book, and it owes much to his initial care. When,
however, it had begun to get into the ten thousands the successful
author was rather astonished to receive urgent telegrams from the
publisher saying, “Stop this boom,” and letters bewailing that he had
to sit up all night to deal with the orders, and she was startled to
find that where she had ordered a printing of 10,000 copies he had cut
it down to 7,000. She pathetically remarked, “Most publishers, I should
have thought, would be only too glad to have an author who helped them
sell their books,” particularly when no financial responsibility was
involved. In order to get the book out early in 1918, when paper was
at a premium, Dr. Marie Stopes took everything in hand herself, and
within three weeks of deciding it should be published, had it on the
market. She bought the paper herself, and had to go from one wholesaler
to another to obtain the supplies of paper needed for the successive
reprintings, as paper was at that time rationed, and it was no small
achievement to have kept the book on the market in the way it was.
Ultimately, as Mr. Fifield was in any case retiring from business, in
the most friendly fashion she transferred the book to Messrs. Putnam,
who have published since then.
When first bringing out _Married Love_ I remember hearing Dr. Stopes
say that she thought knowledge on these sex matters now so urgent and
so well worth her time that she would risk her academic position in
London University and everything short of life itself to bring it out.
She was quite prepared to be imprisoned. The one thing she was not
prepared for was the avalanche of thanks and heartfelt gratitude, the
thousands and tens of thousands of touching letters which inundated
her from all parts of the world. Indeed, for the first year or two
after the publication of _Married Love_ Dr. Stopes’s life was made
a positive burden by grateful readers. She had deliberately in this
book said very little on the subject of birth control, deeming it a
minor matter, for _Married Love_ presupposes a knowledge of birth
control, and was planned to give instruction in the general problems
facing potentially happy married people. But such a large number of
her letters were not only from private individuals requiring birth
control help, but from those who had been to their doctors and been
refused information, or whose doctors knew nothing satisfactory to
tell them, and so large a proportion were from medical men themselves
thanking her for the information she gave and asking for more, that it
became impossible to reply to the individual letters, and instead of
a letter she wrote a very small book called _Wise Parenthood_, which
was first published in paper covers as a pamphlet. This has grown, and
been kept up-to-date as a small book concerning several methods of
contraception, and is planned for the general reader. Public memory
is very short, and it may not be generally realized or remembered how
great has been the effect of Dr. Stopes’s outspoken and scientific
work on the subject of sex in general and contraception in particular.
Before 1918 it was the exceptional doctor who was able and willing to
give contraceptive information to his parents; to-day the position is
almost reversed. After some time a further need became apparent, for
a centre where trained experts could give personal advice to the very
large number of people who require individual attention and cannot
follow written instructions, and Dr. Stopes and Mr. Roe often spoke of
the idea of a clinic and endeavoured to urge suitable societies and
institutions to found one. Everyone feared to do so and shirked the
responsibility. At last they said: “We seem to be the only two people
independent enough, and with the necessary freedom, resources, and
determination, to do it. No one can oust us from our positions, no one
can stop us; obviously _we have got to do it ourselves_.”
The first birth control clinic in the British Empire therefore was
founded by Dr. Marie Stopes and her husband in 1921 as a demonstration
of what was needed throughout the country. It was deliberately kept
small and simple, because they did not desire, as reformers often do,
to create a large institution with an expensive staff, but desired
to demonstrate how, with a simple everyday shop and rooms, easy of
access, with equipment costing only a small sum well within the means
of every welfare centre in the country, the knowledge of the control
of conception could be brought to the very poor and ignorant. As they
explain in the little brochure describing the first foundation of the
clinic: “Here mothers will be considered not only as the producers of
mere babies, _but as the creators of splendid babies_. Only motherhood
which is in the control of the mother, can now truly advance our
race.... Birth control knowledge will be given not in the crude
repulsive form it is advocated in some quarters, but as the keystone in
the arch of progress towards racial health and happiness.”
In order not to be hampered by the conflict of ideas and ideals, no
committee was organized in connection with this first clinic, but a
number of distinguished persons from different social circles kindly
showed their interest in the work by lending their names as patrons,
including several distinguished medical men and women. The clinic was
opened on March 17, 1921, and its simple accommodation was very soon
overtaxed to such an extent that it has hardly dared to advertise its
existence since the first great meeting of welcome which was held at
the Queen’s Hall.
Dr. Stopes served as a member both on the Cinema Commission and on the
Birth Rate Commission. The latter in its previous Report had dealt with
birth control questions, and in the Sessions arranged for 1920-1921
intended not to deal with that subject. Dr. Stopes was willing to take
no active part in drawing attention to it; but witness after witness
skirted so near the subject in giving evidence, that questions on it
were unavoidable, and it ultimately became one of the most important
topics before this Commission as it had been on the former one.
At the conclusion, however, contrary to the weight of the evidence, a
majority of the Commission signed a reservation opposed to scientific
birth control; whereupon a minority resolution was drawn up by Dr.
Marie Stopes, which was signed by Lord and Lady Willoughby de Broke,
Dr. C. W. Saleeby and herself.
About the time of the foundation of the clinic Dr. Marie Stopes, in
connection with coal mining and other work, was to some extent in
touch with Downing Street and met the Prime Minister personally, who
naturally could not at that stage commit himself to any open approval
of a subject which had not yet been voiced in a reputable public
manner. He said to her however, “Show us that there is a public behind
you; hold great meetings. There has never been a really _respectable_
great meeting on the subject in the country.” Dr. Marie Stopes
responded. “All right,” she said, “I will take the Queen’s Hall myself
and pack it,” and this she did without any committee or backing beyond
that of a small number of private friends, and a brilliant platform of
speakers gathered round her. The Hall itself was packed to overflowing,
and the phrase “Constructive Birth Control” coined and set in
circulation. An American journalist who was present said: “That meeting
took my breath away; twice you knocked us sideways. Once by daring to
do it at all, and the second time when you gave us that idea that birth
control could be _constructive_, a pro-baby idea; we had always thought
of it as a purely negative and repressive movement.” Letters of cordial
approval and support were sent for public reading at this meeting by
Miss Maude Royden, Lady Constance Lytton, the Lady Glenconnor, Sir
James Barr, C.B.E., M.D., and many others.
Speeches were made by Rt. Hon. G. H. Roberts, Dr. Jane L. Hawthorne,
Dr. Killick Millard, Admiral Sir Percy Scott, Councillor H. V. Roe, Dr.
Marie Stopes, and myself.
All the speeches were reported verbatim, and are published in a
pamphlet,[1] together with some impressions of the meeting by people
who were present.
Dr. Jane Hawthorne said:
“I am here this evening to represent those who have neither the
opportunity nor the power to make their own appeal, and therefore I
am anxious to put before you as clearly as possible the position of
the very poor, hard-worked wife and mother.... The other week a woman
came into one of our clinics to tell us that in twelve years she was
the mother of nine children, and of these two only were alive, and
this, ladies and gentlemen, is the history of that family.”
After giving terrible details of this and a second family, Dr.
Hawthorne continued:
“Another woman, whom I know well, comes regularly to the Infant
Welfare Clinic every eighteen months with a new baby, and that mother
is mentally deficient, whilst her husband is deaf and dumb. None of
these children are normal, and so they are born to very quickly find
their way into the hospitals, the asylums and other institutions.
“These, ladies and gentlemen, are only a few--a very few--of the
hundreds of similar cases which one meets with in the year, and
yet it seems to me that these few voice an appeal which ought to
be irresistible to those of us who have ears to hear, and those
of us who have the knowledge and power to help. By what right
do we withhold this knowledge and take upon ourselves so great a
responsibility?”
In the course of her own speech Dr. Stopes said:
“Sometimes those who feel intensely with me, yet shrink from doing
anything for the poor mothers, because they think that by so helping
them young girls and others will learn methods of birth control and
may thus be sent downhill on a life they ought not to embark upon.
So I want to make it clear once and for all that such an idea must
not be allowed to hinder us. One of the very first experiences in the
Birth Control Clinic was a strong case to show how misguided that
would be. The second person who came to my Clinic when it was first
opened came on behalf of a girl of twenty who was pregnant for the
sixth time! And every previous time she had had an abortion performed
by her own mother! We, of course, had no help for that girl. We
cannot deal with such cases. Yet it shows that in that terrible
underworld of misery and anguish which we selfish, self-centred,
lazy people so seldom visualize and understand, there _is_ already
‘knowledge’ of a kind. ‘Knowledge’ is going round which is utterly
detrimental, utterly unwholesome and tragic in its effects. The
true knowledge which we are bringing to counteract that is clean
and wholesome, and is pure physiological information to replace the
miserable half-knowledge which already exists.
“Then, too, another aspect of my Birth Control Clinic is lit up
by the fact that by the word ‘control’ I mean CONTROL. It is
extraordinary how the words ‘birth control’ have become associated
with a negative and repressive movement. Now, in my opinion, control
consists in being able to go uphill just as well as to go downhill;
to turn to the right as well as to the left. I will tell you the
story of one woman who came a fortnight ago.
“She was one of the type that certain clergymen in their pulpits
would refer to as ‘those wicked women who refuse maternity.’ All
through her marriage she had openly declared she did not want
children. But to me she came for help and said: ‘I have been married
seventeen years and have not had a child.’ I asked her whether she
wished she had one and she said: ‘Of course, _of course_ I want a
child, but I’ve never told anyone; I pretend that I do not want one
because I can’t get it,’ and then she cried, and exclaimed: ‘I would
give my life, and suffer any torture to have a child.’ We gave her
information which I think will help, and I hope that in about nine
months there may be a Clinic baby in that home.”
There have been many other cases yielding “Clinic babies” since then.
Dr. Stopes continued:
“Another incredible thing is the general lack of knowledge about sex
and all the wonderful and beautiful mysteries of marriage. The extent
of this ignorance is extraordinary. Do you know we had five cases of
people married for years, and in each case the husband has not known
how to play his part, and the wife is still a virgin and she wonders
why she does not have a child!...
“We have already to-day sufficient sound physiological knowledge to,
from this moment (if one could only get everyone to know of it),
check the birth of every diseased, unhealthy, unprepared-for child.
We really can, as Dr. Killick Millard quoted, stem at the source
this incessant stream of misery which is always greater than our
resources can deal with.
“How great this misery, and how great the expense of it is to
our race, can be found by reading a few of these Blue-books. You
could very advantageously spend a few shillings at Imperial House,
Kingsway, buying Reports in regard to prisons, costs of maintenance
of schools of detention for the feeble-minded, asylums for the blind,
schools for the defective, and so forth. Surely it is far better to
spend the money on healthy, happy children who cost us far less per
head than the wastrels! (Applause.)
“To get rid of the wastrels in a Christian way we must see that they
are not born.
“Beyond this, this ideal which I present is not _merely_ that we
shall be simply healthy people and have only healthy children born;
it is further that we shall consciously step forward to a greater
potentiality of health, beauty, happiness, and understanding of life.
An old false idea, which early got incorporated into Christianity, is
that the enjoyment of beauty and sex-life in marriage was a wrong,
or at any rate a lesser thing than the ascetic and repressed life.
That idea is now doing us infinite harm. It is a lower and baser
ideal which was suited to the earlier stages of evolution, but we
have now passed through the stages of human evolution, when that
idea is of any further use. The ideal which humanity to-day needs is
the ideal of a full joyous life of real understanding, coupled with
control, and with the full use of every beautiful aspect of the life
of man and woman together....
“I absolutely deny that the so-called ‘self-control’ which consists
of the ascetic repressing of mutual love between man and woman is a
high ideal. It was a temporary ideal suited to a phase of life in
which there was no scientific knowledge. I now say quite clearly that
the truest and a far higher ideal is for a man and woman to love each
other profoundly as a pair of individuals, and to benefit by that
love and interchange which each needs from the other. And at the same
time, but as a separate conscious act, to create only those children
for which they have sufficient means, sufficient love, and sufficient
health. That is to say, that married lovers should play the part of
parents _only_ when they can add individuals of value to the race.”
Following Dr. Stopes, I said:
“Some three or four thousand years ago Moses and his successors,
using the scientific knowledge of their times, and well understanding
the difficulties and dangers of the small Jewish tribe they
represented, formulated a code of morality based on the broad
common-sense principle that everything possible should be done to
induce their women to bear as many children as possible for fear
the race should be exterminated by the hostile nations and the wild
beasts that surrounded them on all sides.
“That morality no longer fits our case to-day. If every woman in
England were induced to bear a score of children the resulting misery
would totally eclipse the sufferings caused by the Great War. It
was very well 3,000 years ago to say: ‘Happy is the man that hath
his quiver full of them (i.e., children); they shall not be ashamed
when they speak with their enemies in the gate.’ With twenty fine,
strapping sons of his own, he could indeed talk ‘like a father’ to
any foe.
“But times have changed. We no longer insist on a man going to his
deceased brother’s widow to perform the husband’s duty and raise
up seed to increase the family. We even place obstacles in the way
of his marrying his deceased brother’s widow if he wants to. Then
again, we do not tolerate public polygamy in the old-fashioned way,
and we should be much scandalized if we had a king whose matrimonial
experiences were as melancholy and as multitudinous as those of King
Solomon.
“Evidently in our new conditions we need some clear guidance suited
to our present-day conditions, but which shall preserve the spirit
of ancient religion by dealing with the questions of marriage and
motherhood on lines as clear, broad, reasonable, and humane, as were
the precepts of Mosaic morality for the people and time when they
were formulated. It is not creditable to those who now sit in Moses’s
seat that they have made no serious attempt to do this. They have
tithed the mint and anise of church ceremonies and legal enactments
while forgetting the weightier matters necessary to the promotion
of healthy and happy homes for men and women rearing cheerier and
sturdier offspring to fill our places when we have passed to the
Great Beyond. It was under these circumstances that Dr. Stopes, three
years ago, produced her great work, ‘Married Love,’ which has since
been followed by ‘Radiant Motherhood’ and other works.
“These offer sound and sane guidance which we can oppose to the
quackery, ignorant confusion of thought, and ascetic malignity, of
those who love the darkness rather than the light. That is why I wish
particularly to emphasize the thanks due to Dr. Marie Stopes.”
Mrs. Zangwill, the authoress, wrote of that meeting:
“I had not heard Dr. Stopes speak in public before, and so was
unprepared for the beauty of her voice, and the amazing way in which
it carries. She put forward yet another aspect of the case. Birth
control is control and not negation, she insisted. Her clinic is not
only to prevent the unwanted baby; it is to produce the wanted. She
touched on instances of disastrous marital ignorance--ignorance that
is only possible through our ignoring the most important subject in
life--the subject that _is_ life.”
It seemed that the enthusiasm and interest showed at this meeting
should not be allowed to die down with no permanent growth, and
consequently a Society was founded to carry on birth control propaganda
and work on the lines indicated at the meeting. The Society for
Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress was founded at the
Hotel Cecil on August 16, 1921, Mr. H. V. Roe being elected honorary
secretary and Dr. Marie Stopes president, with a distinguished
committee and list of vice-presidents. In a few weeks this Society
secured more public support than the old Malthusian League had done
in forty years, for it was run in a way more in keeping with the
feeling of the time, a yearning for constructive help for a pro-baby
organization which recognized the sacredness of motherhood and the need
of knowledge to space babies so as to give the best conditions for both
mother and child. This spirit is embodied in the tenets of the Society
(see Appendix C). Regular meetings have been held in London, and a
number of others all over the country, which have stimulated men and
women in many directions, so that now the birth control movement is a
powerful constructive movement in the country, though it is not yet
fully organized, nor are its adherents all conscious of how large is
the number of those who, like themselves, privately approve but still
fear their next door neighbour--who also probably privately approves,
but fears to say so.
Following her first presidential address to the Constructive Birth
Control Society, Dr. Marie Stopes responded to an invitation to speak
in the Town Hall in New York, and “popped across” the Atlantic for a
three-days’ visit. She found herself compelled to stay five days, as
there was no suitable return sailing, and during that time she gave an
address to the first great meeting on the subject in the Town Hall in
New York, a verbatim report of which was published by the Voluntary
Parenthood League; besides which she spoke at some private drawing-room
meetings at which the formation of clinics for birth control in America
was discussed and a scheme set on foot.
Dr. Stopes’s little book, “Truth About Venereal Disease,” had the
good fortune to be mentioned with praise and approval in the House of
Lords by the presidents of both the then opposing Societies that were
combating the evil--Lord Gorell and Lord Willoughby de Broke--and it
did something towards the object with which it was written, namely, the
unification of the opposing factions.
The Society for Constructive Birth Control, finding the press
indifferent, needed an organ, and when it held its first public dinner
(a very successful affair), Dr. Marie Stopes produced from under her
dinner napkin, as a surprise, the first number of the _Birth Control
News_, which was circulated among the guests. This monthly, in the
form of an ordinary newspaper so as to be readable and attractive to
the man-in-the-street, has ever since then chronicled the world-wide
development and interest in birth control, which is now beginning to be
recognized by thinkers in all directions as one of the most useful and
urgent subjects for social consideration.
When _Married Love_ was first published Dr. Marie Stopes won the
approval of almost everyone, as it was written in a sympathetic strain
of idealism. With its plea for temperate wholesome living and the
spread of sound knowledge it was difficult to disagree, and she had
too, in the first six editions of the book, the cordially expressed
support of a Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus, who said:
“DEAR DR. STOPES,--
“I have read _Married Love_ with deep interest. As a piece of
thoughtful, scientific writing I find it admirable throughout, and
it seems to me that your theme could not have been treated in more
beautiful or more delicate language, or with a truer ring of sympathy
for those who, through ignorance or want of thought, make shipwreck
of their married happiness.
“Your clear exposition of the rhythmic curve of sex-feeling and of
the misinterpretation on the part of so many husbands of what they
call their wives’ contrariness, arising from their ignorance of its
existence, should bring happiness to many married couples whose lives
are drifting apart through want of knowledge. In the exercise of my
ministry I have repeatedly traced the beginnings of the rift to this
want of knowledge, and consequently of sympathy.
“So far we are in complete agreement, but our ways part when you
treat of birth control.”
Then follow the usual Roman Catholic objections to birth control, in
the course of which he says:
“Let me take in illustration of my meaning the case you give of the
worn-out mother of twelve. The Catholic belief is that the loss
of health on her part for a few years of life and the diminished
vitality on the part of her later children would be a very small
price indeed to pay for an endless happiness on the part of all.”
He does not explain why “endless happiness” should be obtained by
irrational conduct, but concludes his letter with the words:
“I cannot end without thanking you very sincerely for allowing me
to read your book. Apart from what, as a Catholic, I object to in
it, it contains so much most helpful matter that I feel sure it will
bring to many a happiness in married life now wanting through the
ignorance and the consequent want of sympathy which you so rightly
deplore.”
After Dr. Stopes and her husband founded the clinic however, and
thus came into the arena not merely as dreamers and talkers, but
as people who were practically active, hostilities arose of which
something will be said in the next chapter. These pioneers naturally
enough encountered sporadic animosity often in unexpected quarters,
and sometimes, much to their distress and surprise, in the very
quarters from which they had expected helpful co-operation; but no
organized opposition exists except in one direction, namely, in the
official attitude of the Roman Catholic Church and its associates,
which became actively hostile after the founding of the clinic. Until
then many Roman Catholics had been Dr. Stopes’s ardent admirers and
public supporters, but after that date they were forbidden to express
public approval, and were positively encouraged to suppress knowledge
of her and of her work, as well as to pursue a hostile policy. These
hostilities began to take the form of scurrilous articles in the press,
which Dr. Stopes was advised to ignore. Later however a Roman Catholic
medical practitioner published a book which contained statements
against which Dr. Stopes, as the leader of a movement, felt herself
bound to take legal proceedings. Owing to the fact that at the time of
writing an appeal is before the House of Lords, this case is still _sub
judice_, and cannot be discussed in detail; but I may be permitted to
say that among its remarkable features were the medical contradictions
voiced by the defendant’s witnesses. In the _Birth Control News_ for
November, 1923, some of this medical evidence was analysed.
This case, though costing Dr. Stopes many thousands of pounds and
incalculable worry and waste of time, did not hinder the birth control
movement; on the contrary it gave it a great advertisement and educated
large numbers of people into becoming sympathizers who had previously
held aloof not realizing the issue at stake. All over the country,
meetings continued to be held on the whole question of contraception,
social economics, and sex life. Among the larger meetings addressed
by Mr. H. V. Roe and Dr. Marie Stopes was one at Stockport, organized
by the Labour Party, which was attended by a packed audience of 3,000.
A couple of thousand squeezed into the Central Hall in Edinburgh; a
meeting of 1,000 was held in the Battersea Town Hall; a meeting of over
1,000 in Liverpool.
Previously, in 1922, a meeting had been held at the Town Hall at
Deptford, when the mayor in office officially countenanced the meeting
by taking the chair. Delicate health alone has prevented Dr. Marie
Stopes from “stumping the country”; for a few years ago she had to
undergo a serious operation, and has never regained sufficient strength
to travel as she did previously. From the point of view of the movement
this is unfortunate, for undoubtedly the time is ripe, and Dr. Marie
Stopes, going from town to town, would set fire to the great mass of
public opinion now smouldering red hot in its demand that birth control
shall be made available at the Welfare Centres, or in small clinics all
over the country, and that the self-respecting, thrifty, and healthy,
members of the community shall no longer be burdened with the upkeep
of large families of C3’s and wastrels who are on the rates, and, still
more important, that the enslavement of mother shall no longer exist
among us.
Unable herself to speak night after night, she devised the idea of
making others speak for her, and wrote a play. Nothing has so far been
said here of Dr. Stopes’s interest in the drama. That also is, perhaps,
inherited from her mother’s passionate interest in Shakespeare. But I
know that if she had not so many other calls on her time, she would
have devoted herself to the drama. As it is she has published an
interesting volume on the _No_ plays of Japan (see p. 110 and Appendix
A), one of which was produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre,
besides being set to music by Boughton and performed several times
by the Glastonbury Festival Company. She has also published two or
three modern plays besides “Our Ostriches.” One of them, “Conquest,”
is symptomatic of the tendencies which led up to the inception of the
League of Nations.
The birth control play, “Our Ostriches,” ran at the Royal Court
Theatre, London, for three months, and contained an amusing scene in
which a Commission (a replica of many official Commissions) sat on
the stage, the heroine of the play eliciting ardent applause every
night from the audience. “Our Ostriches” afforded Dr. Marie Stopes the
experience of a riotously successful first night, when, in reply to
calls for “Author,” she gave a short speech in which she mentioned that
this birth control play had been permitted, but another play of hers, a
pro-baby one, had been blocked by the Lord Chamberlain.
[1] _Queen’s Hall Meeting on Constructive Birth Control._ Putnam’s
Sons, Ltd. 1921. 1s. net.
CHAPTER VIII.
OPPONENTS.
No one of so dynamic a temperament could pass through life without
making some enemies and rousing opposition, but until recent years
the number of Dr. Stopes’s opponents or enemies was remarkably few.
Before she published “Married Love” she once said to me: “I believe
the only people who do not like me, and try to minimize what I do, are
the men who have made love to me--and, of course, to whom I have not
been able to respond.” There were also a few small-minded wives of the
professional men with whom she came in contact, whose instinct was
to feel that any woman who could enter into the intellectual fields
pursued by their husbands must be dangerous, but beyond these trifling
and sporadic difficulties she might be said to have had no enemies
until she encountered the Roman Catholics. That she encountered them,
purely by accident, was due to the publication of her book of poems,
_Man, Other Poems and a Preface_. Up to that date she had not realized
that such a thing as organized Roman Catholic hostility to any person
existed, nor, consequently, that it was possible to arouse it, and
she was much surprised to find she had aroused the rabid hostility of
a botanist on the staff of the British Museum, Mr. James Britten. He
was a Roman Catholic and an exceedingly active worker for the Catholic
Truth Society.
Dr. Stopes tried, but failed, to make him understand she had had no
intention of offending Roman Catholics, and could not imagine that
they would apply to themselves the words of her poem, as she had no
antagonistic thought when they were penned. The hostility of this Roman
Catholic botanical editor was unappeasable however.
Warned by this previous encounter, when she published _Married Love_,
she thought she would secure herself by obtaining a commendation from a
Roman Catholic, and, as previously mentioned (see p. 155), she obtained
a most cordial foreword of approval of the book from a member of the
Society of Jesus. Undoubtedly this safeguarded the first appearance
of the work, which was hailed by many Roman Catholics and was pushed
actively by them in many directions until her more practical work in
the foundation of a birth control clinic aroused the hostility of the
Church of Rome. Thereafter her books were taboo, the cordial treatment
she had received from many experienced Catholics who well knew the
value of her work was quenched, and organized hostility against her was
instituted which, to those who have not themselves suffered from such
organized hostility, may appear incredible in England in the twentieth
century. What Dr. Stopes has to tell of underground opposition would
fill a volume, and includes whispered slander of the most personal
kind, definite tales and stories circulated in London clubs, some of
which sound very plausible, for almost correct anecdotes about her are
subtly twisted to convey a false meaning. Almost every newspaper has
been bombarded by her enemies.
In illustration, let me note what happened in _The Times_. Up to the
date of this hostility, and after the publication of _Married Love_,
Dr. Marie Stopes had always had very kindly treatment from _The Times_
newspaper. She was, for instance, one of the few people of a literary
tendency who had never had a letter refused for publication, nor an
article rejected. Indeed, one day she took down an article of a column
length and said: “This simply _must_ go in to-morrow, and I hope you
will put it in,” and it appeared. Other papers would often telegraph to
her to send articles by return, but since the Roman Catholic campaign
against her began changes in the attitude of the newspaper press became
so remarkable that some details of them should be mentioned. One may
say, in general, that editors and advertisement managers are very busy
people whose chief contact with their public is through correspondence,
and that if they receive two or three dozen letters expressing more
or less similar opinions, they are apt to imagine that these letters
represent a general feeling, and to allow themselves to be guided by
them.
A skilfully organized campaign of anonymous and also of signed letters,
against Dr. Stopes and the work that she stands for, is a part of the
Roman Catholic campaign. Evidence of this appeared in the course of
the trial in the High Court between herself and Dr. Sutherland, a Roman
Catholic, when, before giving judgment, Lord Justice Scrutton made the
following statement:--
“Since we reserved judgment in this case I, in common with other
members of the Court, have been pestered by anonymous communications
all proceeding from and advocating the side of the defendant.
Of course, I acquit the legal representatives of the defendant
absolutely of having anything to do with these communications. I have
also no reason to believe that the defendant himself had anything to
do with these communications, but I think it is right to say that
such communications are absolutely improper and are punishable as
contempt of Court.”
Judges in the High Court are not, of course, swayed by correspondents,
but letters fictitiously signed, or signed by persons paid to write
them, in addition to those written by individuals who really feel what
they write, are handy weapons to use against an opponent whose natural
outlet through the press certain people wish to stop. The result of
such influences is seen in _The Times’_ refusal of advertisements
of her books for the last year or two, though they were previously
advertised in its columns, as indeed in those of almost every other
reputable paper in the country. _The Times_ also began to refuse the
lecture announcements of the C.B.C. Society when they contained Dr.
Stopes’ name as taking the chair, and it was necessary to see one of
the Directors to get this ban lifted, as it has recently been, since
when the Society’s announcements have regularly appeared. Still more
incredible seems the fact that a double advertisement of the birth
of her son was refused by _The Times_, although the announcement
was worded in the simplest and quite usual form,[2] first, under
the surname “Roe”; second, under the surname “Stopes” (as the baby
will have both surnames, Stopes-Roe), and in the exact wording of
the announcement which appeared in the _Morning Post_, the _Daily
Telegraph_, and other first-class papers. Moreover this refusal was
not made to an employee, but personally to Mr. Roe, who took the
advertisement himself to all the offices that there should be no
mistake. After the birth of her son Dr. Marie Stopes was seriously ill
for a long time.--As a consequence of her world-wide travels she has
many friends in various parts of the world who are anxious to have
news of her. _The Times_ is the principal paper to penetrate Embassies
and outlying British homes, and was therefore practically the only
convenient medium of communication with those friends, but a short
paragraph for the Social Column, announcing that she was out of danger,
was also refused, and friends consequently remained in ignorance of the
state of her health, although a little later on an advertisement was
accepted by a different department for the personal column. Neither Dr.
Stopes nor her friends attribute such disheartening incidents to any
definite policy on the part of the press, but to the sporadic successes
her enemies achieve through individuals who come directly or indirectly
under their influence.
_The Times_ report of the Sutherland case had been quite fair, yet in
its legal columns reporting her application against two Roman Catholic
editors, the words of her own Counsel, as also of the Judge, were
altered so as to degrade her from being “Dr. Stopes” to “Mrs. Stopes.”
On the day that this appeared, her solicitor wrote to _The Times_
drawing the editor’s attention to this mistake. Nevertheless a few days
later in the Judgment of Mr. Justice Roche _The Times_ report again
altered his words so as to alter her description, and this in a case
in which the title to which, as a learned Doctor of Science, she is by
Act of Parliament entitled, was of material importance to her. This is
amazing, considering the reputation _The Times_ has long enjoyed for
accuracy, and the fact that it is frequently referred to in Court as
evidence of what has occurred.
It is hard to calculate what Dr. Stopes’s movement has lost by the
absence of the normal press publicity and support to which her work is
entitled, and which it would no doubt have continued to receive from
the press had it not been for the machinations of the Roman Catholics,
for the public forms its opinions of persons and movements very largely
by what it reads of them in the press.
Those who wish to minimize her work sometimes say of Dr. Stopes: “But
she is not a _proper_ doctor, and is therefore not qualified to deal
with these matters.” But, in the first place, under the laws of the
land, only the learned doctors of the various Faculties, that is to
say, Doctors of Science, Doctors of Laws, Doctors of Medicine, Doctors
of Music, Doctors of Divinity, and so on, are legally entitled to
be called “Doctor,” though the practising medical profession very
frequently and impudently appropriates that title, and many who are
only Bachelors of Medicine, or even less, call themselves “Doctors,”
and are so called by the public.
An M.B. (_bachelor_ of medicine) is, of course, fully qualified to
practise in this country as a physician, but this does not legally, and
should not in any way, confuse him with the learned _doctors_. If a
short name is wanted, he should be called a “Medico.” Dr. Marie Stopes,
as a learned Doctor of Science, has more right to the title than the
majority of the medical profession.
It should also be pointed out that what the ordinary medico practises,
he or she has learned from the Doctors of Biological and Medical
Science. Pasteur was not a practising medical, but nearly the whole
science of medicine now bases itself upon his scientific foundations.
It is fully within the province of a learned Doctor of Biology to
instruct practising medicals on the scientific bases of any advances in
any branch of their science, and to contribute new knowledge to it. To
give a more recent example, the late lamented Sir William Bayliss, the
greatest physiologist in the world, was not a practising medical, but
medical practitioners all over the world are proud to learn from him.
Dr. Stopes has even lectured to medical students at more than one
medical school. As a fully trained biologist she has published the
first medical and scientific manual in any language on contraception.
This book is entitled “Contraception: Its Theory, History and Practice,
A Manual for the Medical and Legal Professions.” It is published by
a Medical Publisher, and has been cordially received by the medical
press, the _Lancet_ saying:
“Much of the evidence contained in the book is quite unobtainable
elsewhere.”
Dr. Christopher Rolleston, a Medical Officer of Health, said of this
publication:
“I predict a great success for the work, and I wish to record my
thanks to the author for her pioneer work in preventive medicine.”
It is also warmly endorsed by Sir James Barr, M.D., a former president
of the Medical Association, and many doctors from all over the world
use it as the source of their practice.
The fact is that the medical profession had in the past seriously
neglected this subject, which greatly affects the health of the present
and future generations. No instruction in the use of contraceptives
was included in the training of doctors at any of our hospitals before
Dr. Stopes’s work appeared, and practising doctors are generally too
busy to investigate matters not included in their training, and even
if they had the time, most of them lack the kind of training needed
for original research in sex-problems and especially in the relation
of those problems to women. Yet when a qualified woman scientist
specializes in the matter and supplies what the doctors had failed to
provide--the objection is raised that she does not belong to their
trade union, and that matters should continue to be neglected till one
of them some day finds time to deal with the matter.
But while the doctors neglected the subject, another class of people
were actively harmful in disseminating erroneous information. These
were the Roman Catholic priests, whose celibacy, one would suppose,
deprives them of sexual experience and renders them ill-qualified to
deal with the problems of married life, even apart from the fact that a
theological training is a poor substitute for the scientific training
needed for the investigation of such questions.
I have no feeling of ill-will towards the Roman Catholics, whose Church
at various times has rendered great service to humanity, but I feel
sure that many Catholics who value intellectual integrity must blush to
read the pitiful futilities that are put forward as the Catholic case
against birth control.
Beyond the bald assertion that it is “wrong”--which, being the very
question at issue, cannot be decided by mere assertion--they rely on an
obvious misrepresentation of the plain meaning of the 38th chapter of
Genesis, and on other statements and arguments that are so childish as
to be ridiculous. For instance, they habitually confuse abortion--that
is, the killing of the embryo after conception--which is a dangerous
and harmful practice, and a criminal offence in English law, with the
prevention of conception, which is neither dangerous, nor harmful, nor
a legal offence. Those who confuse these two different matters are
either so ignorant that they have no business to offer guidance on the
subject, or they seek with deliberate mendacity to darken counsel by
their words.
Besides this, we have statements that a rational control of births,
to ensure a moderate birth rate with a high survival rate among those
who are born, and a healthy posterity, is “race suicide,” leading
to the depopulation of the world, the spread of immorality, and
various other evils. These assertions are backed by references to the
state of France (a Roman Catholic country, in which birth control
information and the sale of contraceptives is illegal), where, in
spite of a terrible amount of abortion, the birth rate, as shown by
recent statistics, is higher than in England, but the death-rate among
children is so great that the survival rate is very low.
It is natural that people who obstinately opposed the dissemination of
knowledge on these subjects, and have no better arguments than these
to adduce in support of their views, are tempted to betake themselves
to methods such as those referred to above in what has been said about
the pressure exerted on the press to stifle news of the birth control
movement, and the falsehoods disseminated about Dr. Stopes herself.
Before long it may occur to the more intelligent among Dr. Stopes’s
opponents, that when a great public question fundamentally affects
the vigour of the race, the health of mothers and children, and the
happiness of the whole people, a thin black line of priests and their
dupes cannot permanently block the way to the free and open discussion
of the subject.
The public is naturally asking for an authoritative statement from
the medical profession on the matter, and it should be more generally
known that there is now a Medical Research Committee dealing with
the technique of contraception. When it issued a statement to the
medical and general press early this year after sitting two years
its composition was as follows: Sir James Barr, C.B.E., M.D., LL.D.,
F.R.C.P., F.R.S.E.; Professor Sir William Bayliss, F.R.S., M.A., D.Sc.;
Harold Chapple, Esq., M.C., F.R.C.S.; Dr. Jane L. Hawthorne; Geo.
Jones, Esq., M.A., M.B., D.P.H., Barrister-at-Law; Dr. Maude Kerslake;
Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, Bart., C.B., M.B., M.S.; Sir John MacAlister,
F.S.A., F.R.G.S.; Sir Archdall Reid, M.B., F.R.S. Ed.; Christopher
Rolleston, Esq., M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.H.; D. Sommerville, Esq., B.A.,
M.Sc., M.D., M.R.C.P.; Marie C. Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D., F.L.S., F.G.S.;
H. M. Telling, Esq., M.D., F.R.C.P.; Dr. Mather Thomson; E. B. Turner,
Esq., F.R.C.S.
It will be noted that the majority of the Committee are medicals,
and biological science was represented by Sir William Bayliss, Dr.
Sommerville, and the President of the Society, Dr. Marie Stopes. In
addition to the medical members of the Committee, other distinguished
practitioners are in helpful association with it.
In accordance with the objects of its foundation, the Committee
considers a variety of current affairs concerning Contraception, but
its proceedings and minutes are strictly confidential and none of its
deliberations are published, except about points which are specially
passed for publication. The Committee, feeling the importance of the
questions concerned, is in no hurry to draw up reports or make public
statements, but desires to observe and investigate carefully. A number
of new, or supposedly new methods have been brought before it from
various quarters. Due consideration confirms the view that no one
method is applicable, but that several of the simple and well-known
methods which have had a long trial still are the best to meet ordinary
requirements.
At a Committee meeting last spring the following resolution was passed
for publication in suitable quarters:
“The Medical Research Committee of the Society for Constructive
Birth Control and Racial Progress wishes to place on record its
joint and several opinion that the methods now used at the _Mothers’
Clinic_ are the best known at the present time.”
The Mothers’ Clinic, it will be remembered, is the Birth Control Clinic
founded by Dr. Stopes and her husband which has been the subject of so
much ignorant attack.
[Illustration: DR. MARIE STOPES.]
Her Roman Catholic opponents scored a great coup in connection with
Dr. Marie Stopes’s film _Married Love_, or _Maisie’s Marriage_,
which was beautifully produced by Messrs. Samuelsons. The producers,
Captain Walter Summers who collaborated and Dr. Stopes, all agreed
that it should _not_ be pre-eminently a birth control play, but a
melodramatic story of general interest. Dr. Stopes had been a member of
the Cinema Commission, and always desired to produce a film to which
no exception could be taken. This she thought she had done, and the
producers did not believe it possible that any objection could be made
to a film which had been so cautiously produced. The trade show was
very successful, but the Censor, instead of giving the certificate
necessary for universal exhibition in a few hours or a day or two as is
usually done, _held up the matter for four weeks_, a delay which caused
great loss to the producers, for in the cinema world everything must
come like hot cakes after the first announcements. It is an unfortunate
coincidence in this case that the Chief Censor, Mr. T. P. O’Connor,
is a Roman Catholic. In a personal interview all the facts presented
to him failed to influence him, and he insisted on alterations so
harassing that the author could not consent to them. For instance,
though no exception was taken to a cabaret scene that occurs in the
picture, he considered a beautiful rose which faded into a baby’s face
to be improper, and demanded its excision! The play however in its
_complete_ form, exactly as written by the author, was shown to the
trade, was rapturously received, and obtained excellent reviews in many
solid papers such as the _Daily Telegraph_, and has been shown in its
original form in many of the large towns in England with the approval
of the local Watch Committees; for instance, the very strict Manchester
Watch Committee approved of it, and the film was shown to packed
houses in Manchester. Sometimes efforts were made locally to block it,
but generally the committees came out in its favour; for as Colonel
Giles, of the Folkestone Watch Committee, reported in the _Morning
Post_, said: “One could safely take one’s grandmother to see it,
there being nothing obnoxious in it.” Scotland too welcomed it in its
original form. Mr. T. P. O’Connor wanted to enforce his alterations,
though he had no real _power_ to do so if local Watch Committees
approve of a film he bans. The L.C.C., misinformed about details,
backed the Censor, and at one time even endeavoured to stop the use of
the words “Married Love” in association with the film. Dr. Marie Stopes
received a letter from the L.C.C., however, as a result of her personal
interview with the Theatres and Music Halls Committee, in which they
stated: “The Council has not raised, and will not raise, objection to
the use, in posters and descriptive pamphlets issued in connection with
the film, of the description ‘Maisie’s Marriage,’ a story by Dr. Marie
Stopes, the author of ‘Married Love,’ provided that the words ‘the
author of “Married Love”’ are printed in type which is appropriate to
the description of that nature, and relatively small compared with the
type used for the title ‘Maisie’s Marriage.’”
One wonders under what statutory right they dictated to the advertising
world of the cinema the size of type they may use!
Mr. O’Connor’s intervention with the Home Office led to a circular
letter being sent out from the Home Office to every Chief Constable in
England. Such communications from the Home Office led to local trouble
here and there, notably in Portsmouth, where the booking was cancelled.
Dr. Stopes was personally in Portsmouth the same week and saw the Chief
Constable, and the Town Clerk under whose orders he acted, and they
assured her that there was a misapprehension and mistake in the matter,
and if it came up again no exception would be taken to the display
and exhibition of the film under the above title. Fortunately those
authorities did not take a tape measure to the lettering.
It was a curious coincidence that the week she was banned in the
cinema, Dr. Stopes spoke from the pulpit in Portsmouth. At the Sunday
evening service at which she spoke, the crowds down the aisle, and
standing even on the gravestones outside to hear through the windows,
were so great that people asked if some member of the Royal Family was
there, as they could think of no other attraction likely to draw such
crowds.
Mr. T. P. O’Connor’s interference seemed likely to become the subject
of a public inquiry. In the printed order of the day for the House of
Lords, “Bills appointed and Notices” for Wednesday, November 13, 1923,
the following appeared:
“The Earl Russell.--To call attention to a communication from the
Home Office, of June 30 last, addressed to the Chief Constables and
Watch Committees and marked ‘Confidential,’ attempting to interfere
with the production of a film entitled ‘Married Love,’ by Dr. Marie
Stopes, and to ask His Majesty’s’ Government what official status, if
any, the Board of Film Censors has; whether the censorship is in fact
administered by Mr. T. P. O’Connor; and whether it is the practice
of the Home Office to act as Mr. T. P. O’Connor’s representative in
endeavouring to interfere with the production of particular films
without any independent inquiry on their part.”
Unfortunately it was a few hours too late, for the Baldwin Ministry
resigned, and under the rules of the House the subject could not again
be raised in the succeeding Administration, despite the injury done to
private individuals, who, one would think, should have some means of
obtaining redress from those who succeeded to office. It is a pity that
Mr. Baldwin did not hold the reins a little longer, for in a debate in
the Lords many things of considerable general interest would have come
to light.
[2] Exact wording of the advertisement was--“Roe--On the 27th March
to Dr. Marie Stopes, wife of H. V. Roe, of Givons Grove, Leatherhead,
Surrey--a son”; and “Stopes--On the 27th March, to Marie Carmichael
Stopes and her husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, of Givons Grove,
Leatherhead, Surrey--a son.”
CHAPTER IX.
INNER LIFE.
In any life that is worth writing at all the outward events have
but a superficial interest in comparison with the landmarks in the
development of consciousness and the soul. This was pre-eminently so in
the life of Tolstoy, whose biography I wrote chiefly because it was in
so marked a degree a spiritual adventure.
My many years’ acquaintance with Dr. Marie Stopes have made me in
some small degree acquainted with the landmarks in the development
of her inner life, but as in the case of Tolstoy the data carrying
conviction are those afforded by autobiographical evidence. So I feel
in the present instance that we must await an autobiography fully to
understand the character whose life it has here been my task to sketch
in outline.
A certain amount of autobiographical detail is to be found in the
volume of travels already referred to, the _Journal from Japan_, as
also in the preface to _Man, Other Poems, and a Preface_; on these I
have drawn, but for the main outline of her spiritual growth I depend
upon personal notes which I asked Dr. Stopes to write.
“From my earliest childhood religion, not in its narrowest sense
of outward performance but in the inner sense of absolute reality,
has been a matter of the very greatest concern to me. My mother was
Scottish of almost Calvinistic tendencies, and my father a Quaker,
but one who felt that the religious education of a little girl should
be left absolutely to the mother. I was brought up in the rigours
of the stern Scottish old-fashioned Presbyterianism, in which hell
was presented to me as an absolute reality which I stood in imminent
danger of inheriting; special books were kept for Sunday reading; no
toys were allowed on Sundays, when Bible chapters and texts had to
be learnt as well as church attendances fulfilled. All this I took
with childlike literalness, which was rendered all the more intense
by a feeling of guilt at being unable to _see_ Christ and the angels,
which I felt, somehow, was my own fault. In spite of my father’s lack
of interference I used, even in the very earliest days, to feel that
he was wiser than mother, and that his aloofness from our religious
observances was not hostile, but something superior; that in fact he
dwelt in more direct communion with God than we, who had to make an
outward office of it. This, I think, shows how through all the early
years of my childhood he must have exercised the greatest care not to
interfere in any way with my mother’s more specific instructions.
“One of the earliest religious landmarks that I remember was when, at
the age of six or seven, my manifold sins had been made very evident
to me, and I felt that if only I were a better girl I would _feel_
the actual floods of the Blood of Jesus which would purify me. I
felt I must try to be converted in such a way that I really could
see and feel these things. I remember placing myself at the foot of
a long flight of stairs at the bottom of which was a sheepskin mat,
dyed crimson, and I rubbed myself in the crimson wool of the mat and
shut my eyes and tried to picture the stream of the Blood of the Lamb
cascading down the stairs and over me, purifying me and taking away
my manifold sins. I was discovered by nurse before this process had
completed itself, and was led away, but I remember to this day the
feeling that the only barrier between me and an actual sensation
of the Blood of the Lamb was my manifold crimes of omission and
commission, and that I stood in imminent danger of hell-fire if I did
not succeed in persuading my senses really to feel the Blood of Jesus.
“Childhood’s memory fades concerning the resolution of that problem;
and next I remember clearly, at the age of about eight, getting into
very profound religious difficulties over the conflict between the
existence of hell-fire, in which human beings, and even children,
were burnt eternally, and an all-loving and all-kind God. These
difficulties worried me to the extent of keeping me awake at night.
The problem was not one that I could take to my mother, because
when I was seven years old I had one day observed her sewing in her
bedroom on a Sunday, and had hence come to the conclusion that she
was ‘not truly religious.’ My grandmother, however, who read the
Bible every day and was always spoken of as a very saintly woman,
seemed to me to be in immediate communication with God and to be the
person to whom I should take this very profound difficulty. I well
remember going into her room with her breakfast tray, finding her
reading her Bible as usual in bed. Sitting down near her, I began to
ask her about the problem of hell and a loving God. She laughed; I
suppose I must have sounded absurd, but it shut me up so completely
within myself that I do not think I ever spoke of the difficulty
to anyone for years. But I remember, most clearly, thinking it out
for myself, and in the course of a few months evolving in elaborate
detail, something that resembled the Roman Catholic faith, with the
exception that I omitted, of course, any idea of the Pope. No Roman
Catholic was in contact with me, and my home, as I have explained,
was a Calvinistic and Quaker establishment, and yet I came to the
conclusion that the only possible God, that was the true God, must
be one who did not entirely burn people up in hell, but only allowed
them to burn so far as to burn the badness out of them, and that the
goodness was then allowed to go into Heaven as a very tiny baby and
grow there big enough to be a grown-up soul in Heaven; in short, the
theory of purgatory. I evolved also, in my inner consciousness, the
theory of saints, and I remember most clearly, night after night
through the winter, lying on my side, taking up the least possible
room at the edge of my bed, and spreading the bed-clothes comfortably
across the part of the bed that I did not inhabit, so as to allow
the saints, whom I fancied were there guarding me and talking to me,
to be comfortable and warm while they were there. I was convinced
that they were there, and felt that it was my own wickedness which
prevented my feeling their presence.
“This phase, of course, also passed, although I do not remember when.
Then I remember clearly, from the age of about eight to ten, or nine
to ten, reading the whole of the Bible through, including all the
enormously long and dreary chapters in the Old Testament. I was still
ignorant of the Roman numerals, and could not understand them, and
I remember going through the Bible with a pencil and counting up on
my fingers the numbers of the chapters as I read them and writing
them in ordinary numerals, so that I should know how far I had got.
The thin pages adhering here and there, naturally the sequence of
the Roman numerals was transcribed quite wrongly, a thing I only
discovered a good many years after, when I came to look through the
same Bible again. At the time I felt that perhaps, if I were good
enough to read the whole Bible without skipping a word, I might
understand the religious puzzles which still haunted me. At the age
of eleven I was still so much a believer in the literal understanding
of the Bible that when I was asked by one of my aunts what I wanted
for a birthday present, I asked for a New Testament small enough to
put in my little pocket, so that I could continue to study it and try
to learn the whole of the New Testament by heart.
“At the age of eleven I remember most vividly another experience
which was perhaps rather remarkable for a young child. My grandmother
was then apparently in good health, living in Edinburgh, and my
mother and we children were staying a night or two in Edinburgh.
No anxiety had warned us of my grandmother’s condition, but one
evening, after being put to bed, I could not sleep for a terrible
feeling of icy coldness and death. I had never thought of death
before, and my sister and I were sharing a large bed, and all night
through I kept putting my hand across, quietly, to see if she were
cold, or if it was only I who was cold, and wondering who was dead
and what death meant, feeling that it was very, very near. The next
day my grandmother was found, quietly sleeping after her afternoon
nap, dead in her bed. I may say that quite a number of times during
my life similar premonitions of events before they have happened have
come to me, but not with a sufficient regularity to allow me to plan
my life on the assurance that they will come. Such foreknowledge is
always scrappy and incompletely conveyed.
“A few days before I was twelve I was sent to school in Edinburgh,
living with a family and attending St. George’s School. The family
with whom I stayed were also old-fashioned, extremely Protestant,
Scottish people, and I remember being shown, with such strong
expressions of disapproval that I looked upon the whole surrounding
atmosphere as contaminated by it, an Anglican Church near Alva
Street in which the people were wicked enough to have an organ to
sing with. I remember my young indignation at such ‘Popery,’ a word
that by that time I had learnt, although I still did not realize its
meaning. At that age, too, the sense of responsibility, which I felt
very early became intensely oppressive. I think it was due to the
fact that my parents had admonished me so very much to take care of
my younger sister, but it was deeper in origin and seemed to embrace
the whole world. It developed about that age into a feeling that I
was so terribly guilty that I corresponded to a ‘Jonah,’ like the
one whose presence risked the lives of all his fellow-travellers in
the ship, and that my guilty presence in the world was responsible
for disasters to others. I remember clearly one day the lady with
whom we stayed reading some paragraph from a paper about a great
calamity abroad--I think an earthquake--when I burst out crying, and
said: ‘Oh, but I can’t help it; I can’t help it. It is really not my
fault.’ I have never entirely lost this sense of _burden_, and I
still do my birth control work because I feel that the responsibility
for the unborn whom I had not helped would be unbearable if I were
not to carry it on.
“Life in the more mellowed atmosphere of Kent, where the only church
possible for us to attend at Swanscombe was the English Parish
church, removed some of the childish supersensitive feeling of guilt,
and life became a little easier, more normal, and less narrow. I
remember, however, always feeling on my guard against the errors
of the Anglican Church, and although I became a communicant, there
were certain words and phrases in the creeds and hymns that would
cause me to close my mouth firmly, and that nothing could induce
me to say. My father still held aloof from religious discussion,
but I had a feeling that when I grew up to him, there within him
was wisdom that would understand me and that I could meet. Looking
back on the extraordinary intimacy and quite exceptionally profound
affection between my father and myself, I feel it very curious that
I did not go to him with my religious puzzles. I think possibly I
may have done so, and that he may have said that I must do what my
mother told me in these things till I was older. Certainly about the
age of fifteen or sixteen I began to realize the difference between
a Friend, that is, a member of the Quaker Society of Friends, and
members of other religions, and to feel all my sympathies with the
Friends.
“When at the age of sixteen I was away at the seaside, somewhere near
Folkestone, in a little village (I do not know what was its name),
I used to take long rambles by myself, and I remember one Sunday
attending a Quaker meeting on an explorative expedition of my own.
At that Quakers’ meeting a very remarkable incident occurred which
made the profoundest impression upon me, and which I have narrated
literally in a poem called ‘The Brother’ in _Man, Other Poems, and
a Preface_. This incident coloured my life for many years, and
inhibited all further desire openly to become a Quaker. So deep was
my affection for my father and our mutual understanding, that I
always felt that if I could find the proper, old-fashioned type of
Quaker community, there would be my spiritual home.
“About this time we gave up the Swanscombe home and moved to
Hampstead. In this house I had a little study in which I prepared my
ordinary school work and, in addition, read unobserved and without
even the companionship of my sister. This was a great pleasure, for
by this time I had developed a characteristic which has remained with
me, that is, intensely to desire as much solitude as is possible,
and to feel certain powers and the capacity to understand what I am
reading very much reduced by the presence of any other person in
the room. From the age of sixteen to eighteen I read voraciously.
The Hampstead Lending Library was an exceptionally good one, and I
tapped its uttermost resources. I also had access to a number of
other supplies of books. I read all sorts of things, but particularly
comparative theology, and a number of works seldom read even by
adults to-day; for instance, in these years I read pretty nearly
everything that I could get in English by Swedenborg, all Kant’s
voluminous philosophy, and a number of old-fashioned and curiously
abstruse books, such as the early histories of the Rosicrucians,
translations of the Vedas, books of Buddhistic philosophy,
Confucius’s writings, and many theological works. Walter Pater and
George Meredith were my favourite authors of a lighter kind. I also
read all Darwin’s published books, and can well remember one Sunday,
when about sixteen or seventeen, my mother’s sister, a very religious
Scottish woman, being shocked by some chance phrase of my father,
who was speaking of his collection of flint implements. This aunt
was shocked to learn that my father read Darwin and took his work
seriously, and still more shocked that mention of such a man should
be made in the presence of an innocent young girl. I, naturally
enough, championed the cause for which my father stood, and proudly
boasted that I also had read Darwin. I remember my aunt said no more,
but followed me up to my little study to demand my repentance and
recantation. When she could not obtain these, she solemnly committed
me to hell. I was still young enough, and the childish memories of
hell were still sufficiently easily revived, for this to make a
great impression upon me, but, of course, not in the least to alter
my loyalty to my father or to affect the scientific attitude of
mind which was growing in me. I remember not very long after that,
I think when I was sixteen and a half, being taken for our spring
vacation to Jersey, and there delighting in the stretches of rock and
solitude into which it was possible to escape owing to the fact that
my sister had caught a cold on the voyage and was laid up, and, my
mother taking care of her, I was sent out for walks by myself. Here
then I found sunny corners and enjoyed what had already become, and
has remained through life, one of my deepest enjoyments as well as my
greatest restorative--lying flat on my back without moving for hours.
In Jersey a spiritual renaissance, one might call it, took place
after a succession of such happy days, and that experience is also
published in _Man_, in a form written at the time, ‘Revelation.’
“I was always very sensitive to the marital relations of those with
whom I came in contact, and I remember, as a very young girl, being
shocked and hurt by matrimonial bickering. We met Mr. and Mrs. James
Huddart (the Huddart who originally planned, many years before, the
All Red Route _via_ Canada and Australia), and I was enchanted by
something exceptionally feminine and sweet in Mrs. Huddart, and also
by the beautiful devotion of her husband and sons. She reciprocated
to some extent the feeling I had for her and became one of my warmest
friends, and as a girl I was often invited to stay at her house,
and there learnt many things that only an older woman of sweet
disposition could teach a girl, and which I should never have learnt
but for her. Certainly chief among the lessons she taught me was the
recognition of the vital importance of the relationship between the
two who are the centre of any home life, and how far-reaching may be
the influence of any home. I think I may say that here was laid the
first seeds of a desire to do the work which ultimately resulted in
_Married Love_.
“The religious phases of my early childhood having been lived
through, I naturally enough entered into a phase of scientific
materialism, but had already grown out of it by the time I was
commencing my college studies, and I remember the keen sense of
appreciation and delight with which I listened to Professor Sir
William Ramsay, whose classes I attended, once speaking to his large
chemistry class, when dealing with the waves of light in vacuum
tubes, of the mysticism which is compatible with a profound knowledge
of science. I cannot remember his exact words, but they were to
the effect that atheism and hostility to religion was no longer in
keeping with a really profound knowledge of the wonders of natural
science, and that whenever one knew more deeply the details of any
subject, it led always to an ultimate mystery in which one might well
maintain that the truths of religion could reside. So far as I can
remember that was the only reference of any sort at all that I heard
to either religion or the deeper philosophy of life in the whole of
my time as a student at the University, and his few words, passed
over so swiftly in his physical chemistry lecture, left me with a
sense of tremendous respect for Sir William Ramsay.
“Before my first term at college I had reached the phase in my inner
development that included a great deal of reading on psychological
and psychic themes, and so, naturally enough, I wanted to see if
I had any psychic powers. At first I spoke to no one about these
subjects. No one at all, neither my teacher, nor my college friends;
only my school friend, Olga Kapteyn, was in the least degree in my
confidence, and she not very completely, as by this time she was
staying once more in Amsterdam. I tested in one or two ways at the
University whether I had power to hypnotize and perform some of the
various semi-psychic tricks made much of in some of the books I was
then reading. Under the influence of a member of the Theosophical
Society I found I had undoubtedly such powers, but I very sanely came
to the conclusion that their use was mean--not quite playing the
game--and also that I should undoubtedly be in danger of becoming
nervous and ‘queer,’ as I observed the people who claimed such
powers generally were. Hence I, to myself, formally, definitely and
specifically renounced their use, and decided for the next few years,
at any rate, to lead my life in accordance with the revelation in
Jersey. I have never again attempted to use these powers.
[Illustration: DR. MARIE STOPES.]
“Now, many years later, I still think it most important not
to hasten the human acquisition of what we call supernatural or
supernormal powers. I feel that having taken so long a time to become
human, and being now in the present imperfect link between the past
and the future, we serve the race and whatever cosmic design there
may be behind our existence best by being the best kind of human
beings we can; by starving neither our bodies nor our minds, nor
wearing out one aspect of ourselves at the expense of normality. The
neurotic, half-starved, highly-abnormal ascetic, the psychic, the
‘spiritual’ healer, and other cranks generally fill me with a slight
feeling of repugnance and a profound feeling of regret that they
took on a job for which they are so obviously unfitted. Even as a
young girl I did not wish to become like that. My ambition is to be
as normal, healthy, and wholesome a human being as I can be while I
am a human being; it will not be very long in any event, even if one
outlives the Biblical three-score years and ten.
“I have always had a peculiar sympathy with stones, undoubtedly
inherited, for my father’s delight in fossils and flint implements
is traceable to his earliest childhood, and I have a sympathy with
them which, curiously enough, often includes a knowledge of where
they are, almost as if I were a stone-diviner, like water-diviners.
Their smell delights me. Of course not all stones have a very
noticeable smell, but to me, in quarries, almost every freshly
chipped stone has a peculiar, and most have a pleasing, smell. The
consciousness of fossils, even at a distance from them, has often
manifested itself most usefully in my expeditions, and I may give
just one example of this. I remember Dr. D. H. Scott, the leading
English palæobotanist, in a discussion at the Linnean Society,
speaking of a classical find of a well-preserved fossil in the
Isle of Wight, saying that in this deposit, which he had himself
examined, there remained no more petrifactions. Like a sudden flash
of light a queer, intense feeling came to me that there were lots of
petrifactions there calling to me and waiting to be found. Within
a few weeks I was able to take my vacation in that locality, at
Luccomb Chine in the Isle of Wight, and spent the first day lying
comfortably on the shore in hot sunshine gazing up at the cliffs. By
the afternoon I had come to the conclusion that at a certain point
up the cliffs I should find these specimens, and the next day I went
there and found enough to enable me to bring away nearly a bushel,
many of which were new to science, and some of which are described
and illustrated in my volume on the Palæontology of this horizon,
published by the Trustees of the British Museum (Appendix B, p. 217).
“Useful in another way is this sympathy with stones, and I remember
on one occasion my sister and I had spent a whole holiday together
camping in a cave on the coast of Devonshire. She and I had played
at Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday for five or six weeks, sleeping in
this cave by the sea with a sense of perfect security and peace, when
one night I suddenly felt that I must not allow her to stop there,
for it would be most dangerous for us to sleep there, and we must go
into the open. We shifted our sleeping bags along the pebbles of the
beach, right into the open and away from the cave, leaving however
all our little cooking utensils and other camp equipment in the cave.
When I went back next morning I found part of the roof had fallen
in, with a large slab of stone just where my head would have been.
The next night we were quite calmly and happily sleeping in the cave
again, probably most foolishly, but nothing happened.
“Possibly correlated with this feeling for stones is the
consciousness I have had since early childhood in my spine of the
direction of the north. It is as though I were a magnet, and I
shall never forget my delight, when I was a girl, at discovering Du
Maurier’s book, ‘Peter Ibbetson,’ in which one of the characters is
conscious of the position of the north, for I thought I alone was
peculiar in this, and was greatly pleased to find that someone else
shared that sensitiveness. In childhood it took the curious form of
making me twist round and wake with a dazed feeling in bed if my bed
was placed wrongly. And still, unless I sleep either north and south,
or south and north, I tend to twist round in the night and lie in the
direction of the magnetic field, sometimes waking up to find myself
lying right across the bed if I am staying in a house where the bed
cannot be placed correctly before I go to sleep. A long illness, or
a number of nights in London or a big city, tend to reduce this
sensitiveness, but when I have been long alone or in the country it
becomes intensely strong, and I remember being tested once in a thick
fog--a fog so blanket-like that one could not see a yard before one’s
face, when I was being trained by Mr. W. H. Dalton, F.G.S., a member
of the Geological Survey. At first he laughed at my saying that I
could feel the north, and led me zigzags and twists and turns, and
then tested me with his compass. Every time I was dead right. Since
I have had an operation however this capacity is much reduced, and I
only feel it intermittently, depending, I fancy, on some electrical
condition of the atmosphere.
“My passion for solitude resulted in a very curious initiation
for me at the beginning of the war. I had, when staying earlier
as a guest of Lord and Lady Grey at Howick Castle, been greatly
attracted by the long stretches of sandy bays and quiet rocks in the
neighbourhood, absolutely out of reach of the tripper, and longed
to pitch my tent there, which I did, through their kindness, in the
summer of 1914. This time I had not even my sister with me, desiring
to be absolutely alone, because I felt within me ripe for birth
a very long poem which, at the time, seemed important. Life in my
tiny tent, weighing only two pounds, had for years been one of my
principal enjoyments, and I fixed my tent on psamma grass at the
corner of a rocky bay with wide stretches of sand between me and the
sunsets. There I deliberately cut myself off from everyone, only
going into a neighbouring farmhouse now and then to get fresh scones
and bread, and having milk brought to me by one of the farmer’s bonny
children. I deliberately refused to read newspapers, and the result
was that I had no conception that even a cloud or rumour of war had
settled on Europe. I had not heard of the murders at Serajevo. One
evening, however, I suddenly felt that the long poem I had come
to write had died within me. In the dusk I felt, literally, that
I suddenly saw, green and horrible, the corpse of a young man and
another standing over him smiting at his dead body. The impression
was most vivid, and for two days afterwards I was restless, and could
not concentrate in the least on the work I had intended to do. The
third night after this I, still unconscious as an unborn babe that
anything in the way of war was affecting Europe, tucked myself into
my sleeping bag, lying with my head and shoulders outside my tent, as
I generally slept, and went off into a sound sleep, to be awakened
most startlingly by a young man with a bayonet shouting to me ‘Halt!
Who goes there?’ Wakened out of sleep, I replied rather absurdly,
‘Halt yourself; I am lying down.’ I had not succeeded in explaining
my existence to the young man before another young man with a fixed
bayonet rushed up to him and the bayonets clashed. I thought the two
were going to fight each other, both contending that I was their
prisoner. I, thinking it was some absurd joke and that an appeal to
Lord Grey would straighten matters out, explained that I was there,
although not in the house, in a sense as the guest and under the
protection of the Greys, and they might leave me in peace until the
morning and then decide whose prisoner I really was. Their story that
a war was on I took as nonsense. They allowed me to sleep, and by six
o’clock in the morning, after some hours of cold, wet mists, both of
them were very thankful, rancour ended, to creep to my tent for a cup
of hot cocoa. One, a young fellow from Manchester, had not weathered
a night on a solitary coast before, and his teeth were literally
chattering. I got out my maps and directed them to the nearest place
where they could get a square meal, and that was the last I heard
of being anybody’s prisoner. I went however into the village to buy
newspapers and, running across Viscount Howick (now Lord Grey), was
reassured by his telling me that his uncle, Sir Edward, was at the
helm and doing everything possible to maintain peace. He asked me
to hop into his car, and went round villages and outlying districts
reassuring and calming the people. Soon, warships were stationed
directly opposite us and rushed up and down, because a landing was
actually expected within a mile or two of where I was camping, and
the Greys were hurriedly turning Howick Castle into a potential
hospital. I think no one who was plunged into the horror of the war
thus with no preparation, can ever get over the shock of the first
few days and of the news of what was done in Belgium. Perhaps the
next generation may again feel the ease and security that we all felt
before this war, but shall never feel again. Since that poem was
slain on Howick shore, I have never really been able to do the things
that I have personally wanted most to do, always being impelled to
expend what power I had only on things that seem urgently necessary,
either in connection with scientific research on coal and fuel, or in
connection with the sex and birth control work. Since the publication
of _Married Love_ early in 1918, nearly the whole of my time has been
spent in a very inadequate response to the anguished cries of poor
mothers and their potential babies for that knowledge and help which
is available if it can but be brought to them.
[Illustration: Inner home life: Dr. Stopes as gardener, and her husband
with the car.]
“1918 was an important year; I published _Married Love_, _Wise
Parenthood_, and, in conjunction with Dr. R. V. Wheeler, _The
Constitution of Coal_, and I met and married my husband, Humphrey
Verdon Roe.
“In 1920 I was impelled, against my worldly judgment, to publish a
brief piece of writing called _The New Gospel to All Peoples_. In its
preface I explained how and why it was written, and sent to each
of the Bishops in Conference at Lambeth in that year. About sending
it to the Bishops I had no hesitation, my orders were so explicit,
but my mundane intelligence was perfectly aware that from a purely
worldly point of view I was doing a foolish thing in _publishing_ it.
The matter was simply taken out of my hands however, and my inner
life rendered unlivable until I decided to do what was necessary to
get it published. When I say that I was unwilling to publish it, I
do not mean to imply that I in any way shirk what is said therein;
but knowing the materialistic spirit which rules the greater part
of the intellectual world at present, I knew very well that I was,
to some extent, jeopardizing the approval of those whose opinion
I valued. Beyond a little chaff however and the antagonism of a
few materialists, I have suffered nothing to weigh in the balance
against the wonderful adherence of other souls and the joy of seeing
my message spreading in the whole Empire, now often from the lips
of others. For instance, that great heroine, Lady Constance Lytton,
wrote to me: ‘I cannot say how much I thank you for sending me
your beautiful _A New Gospel_. It is so reverently given forth, so
beautiful in the way it is given. I have promised to write a little
article on Constructive Birth Control. I hope you will approve of it,
for all I know of constructive birth control is through you.’
“The work for birth control and a reformation in the sex life of the
people has for years been a consciously performed task--but all the
time I realize that the need for it is a phase in human progress,
and my immortal soul has other interests--and a desire ‘to paint
the things as I see them for the God of things as they are.’ And
among the things I have always desired to do is to write a volume of
fairy tales. In my opinion, fairy tales rank among the very highest
form of literature. I remember Professor Alexander, the Professor
of Philosophy, once saying that all our scientific discoveries were
ephemeral and bound to be swept away, and that the only really
lasting thing anyone could do is to write a poem. I incline now to
agree with him, although then I hotly disputed his conclusion. A
good fairy tale, being essentially a poem though in prose, might
have well-nigh as long a life as a poem. But in the press of work of
recent years I have not had time to write the volume of tales I so
much desire, and only one or two have been completed and published.
Certainly one of my proudest achievements is the fact that I have
had a fairy tale in the _Fortnightly Review_, the only fairy tale, I
think, that periodical ever published. I have also had two or three
fairy tales in the _English Review_; but the rest have either been
slaughtered unborn, or await the leisure I am always longing once
more to have, to do the things that _I want to do_ instead of those I
am impelled to do by the present crisis in human affairs.
“What am I? An immortal soul, having lived previously to this
particular life on earth, and destined to live again after my body
wears out; of that I am as certain as that I am in the world at
present. _Nothing_ can remove me from the universe; one plays at
being human for a while, and it is great fun. _Why_ one is given such
hard jobs and has to encounter such difficulties on one’s own behalf
and on behalf of others I don’t know, but I still feel as I felt at
the age of sixteen and a half when I wrote the poem ‘Revelation’
(later on published in _Man, Other Poems, and a Preface_), that
one should ‘be tranquil, at the same time that you strive ... for
_joyous_ life alone is perfected.’”
The sketch of her inner life given in the above autobiographical notes
may well conclude this short life of one who is still in mid-career.
Dr. Stopes is an example of the truth of John Stuart Mill’s forecast
that, as soon as the obstacles that hampered the exercise of women’s
powers were removed, they would prove themselves the equals of the
best men in fields where they had heretofore always been regarded as
inferior. Though she is a very modern woman, Dr. Stopes, in another
aspect, reminds one by the variety of her achievements of those
artist-scientists of the Renaissance who, before specialization had
become so customary as it is to-day, claimed all science and all art as
their province.
APPENDIX A.
List of Books and Pamphlets by Dr. Marie Stopes.
SEXOLOGY.
“=Contraception.=” Published by Bale and Danielsson, 1923, pp. xxiii,
1-418, plates iv.
“=Married Love.=” First published by Fifield, 1918; now in Fourteenth
Edition, published by Putnams, pp. xxi, 1-169.
“=Wise Parenthood.=” First published by Fifield, 1918; now in
Eleventh Edition, published by Putnams, 1918, pp. xii, 1-62.
“=Radiant Motherhood.=” Published by Putnams, 1920, pp. ix, 1-236.
“=Truth about Venereal Disease.=” Published by Putnams, 1921, pp.
vii, 1-52.
“=A New Gospel.=” Published by A. L. Humphreys, 1922, pp. 1-27.
“=A Letter to Working Mothers.=” Published by the Author, 1919; now
by the Clinic; pp. 1-16.
“=Early Days of Birth Control.=” Published by Putnams, 1922, pp. 1-32.
“=Mother, how was I Born?=” Published by Putnams, 1923, pp. 1-25.
“=The Control of Parenthood.=” By the Bishop of Birmingham and
others. Edited by Rev. Sir James Marchant. (One Chapter in this
published by Putnams.)
“=Queen’s Hall Meeting on C.B.C.=” Published by Putnams, 1921, pp.
1-48. (Contains report of Dr. Stopes’s speech.)
“=Verbatim Report of the Town Hall Meeting.=” Published by the
Voluntary Parenthood League, New York City, 1921, pp. 1-23. (Contains
report of Dr. Stopes’s speech.)
BOTANY.
“=Ancient Plants.=” Published by Blackie and Son, 1910. Pp. viii,
1-199.
“=The Study of Plant Life.=” Published by Blackie, 1906. Pp. xii,
1-202.
“=Exploitation of Plants.=” Edited by Prof. Oliver. Published by
Dent. (One Chapter in this.)
“=The Sportophyte: ‘The Botanical Punch.=’” Founded and Edited for
the years 1911-1914.
TRAVEL.
“=A Journal from Japan.=” Pp. 1-250, illustrated. Published by
Blackie.
LITERARY.
“=Man, Other Poems and a Preface.=” Pp. 1-76. Published by Heinemann.
“=Conquest=,” a Three-Act Play. Published by French. Pp. 1-94.
“=Gold in the Wood=” and “=The Race=.” Two Plays. Published by
Fifield. Pp. 1-101.
“=Our Ostriches.=” Produced at the Court Theatre. Published by
Putnams, 1923, pp. 1-105.
“=Plays of Old Japan: The Nõ.=” (With Prof. J. Sakurai.) Published by
Heinemann. Pp. 1-102, illustrated.
“=A Japanese Mediæval Drama.=” _Transactions of the Royal Society of
Literature_, vol. 29; (separate) pp. 1-26.
Also fairy stories in the _Fortnightly Review_, _English Review_;
articles in _The Times_, _Manchester Guardian_, _Science Progress_,
Reviews in the _Athenæum_, etc.
APPENDIX B.
List of Dr. Stopes’s Scientific Memoirs, etc., Embodying her New
Discoveries.
“=Contribution Paléobotanique à la Connaissance du Charbon.=” Résumé
of Communication to the Congress in Paris. Published in _Chaleur et
Industrie_, Paris, 1923.
“=The Spontaneous Combustion of Coal.=” (With Prof. R. V. Wheeler.)
Bulletin No. 1 of “Fuel.” Published _Colliery Guardian_, London,
1923, pp. 1-125, 2 plates and text figs.
“=Terminology in Coal Research.=” (With Prof. R. V. Wheeler.) In
“Fuel,” London, 1923, pp. 5-9, 1 plate.
“=The Constitution of Coal, Palæobotanical Aspects.=” Lecture
published (with those of others in pamphlet called “Coal”), Colliery
Guardian Company, London, 1922, pp. 1-8, and text figs.
“=The Missing Link in _Osmundites_.=” _Annals of Botany_, vol. 35,
1921, pp. 56-61, text fig. and plate.
“_Bennettites Scottii_, Sp. Nov., =A European Petrifaction with
Foliage=.” Extr. _Linnean Society’s Journal_, 1920, vol. 44, pp.
483-496, plates xix and xx.
“=The Four Visible Ingredients in Banded Bituminous Coal: Studies in
the Composition of Coal=,” No. 1. _Proceedings Royal Society B_, vol.
90, 1919, pp. 470-487, plates xi and xii.
“=New Bennettitean Cones from the British Cretaceous.=” _Phil.
Transactions Royal Society B_, vol. 208, 1918, pp. 389-440, plates
xix-xxiv.
“=The Constitution of Coal.=” (With Dr. R. V. Wheeler.) Monograph,
published by H.M. Stationery Office for the Department of Scientific
and Industrial Research, 1918, pp. 1-58, plates i-iii.
“=Roots in _Bennettites_.=” _Annals of Botany_, vol. 31, 1917, No.
122, pp. 257-259, plate xiv.
“=Plants as a Source of National Power in the Exploitation of
Plants.=” Edited by Prof. F. W. Oliver. Published Dent, 1917, pp.
155-170.
“=An Early Type of the Abietineæ (?) from the Cretaceous of New
Zealand.=” _Annals of Botany_, vol. 30, 1916, pp. 111-125, text figs.
1-7, plates iv.
“=The Cretaceous Flora in the British Museum (Natural History), Part
II: Lower Greensand (Aptian) Plants of Britain.=” Published by the
Trustees of the British Museum, 1915, pp. i-xxxvi, 1-360, plates
i-xxxii, 112 text figs.
“=The ‘Fern Ledges’ Carboniferous Flora of St. John, New Brunswick.=”
Published by the Geological Survey of Canada: Memoir 41, Ottawa 1914,
pp. i-vi, 1-142, plates i-xxv, 21 text figs.
“=The Cretaceous Flora in the British Museum (Natural History), Part
I: Bibliography, Algæ and Fungi.=” Published by the Trustees of the
British Museum, 1913, pp. i-xxiii, 1-285, plates i-xi, 25 text figs.
“=A New Cretaceous Plant from Nigeria.=” _Geological Magazine_, Dec.
5, 1914, vol. 1, No. 604, pp. 433-435, plate xxxiii, text fig.
“=A New _Araucarioxylon_ from New Zealand.=” (Published by permission
of the Director of the Geological Survey of New Zealand.) _Annals of
Botany_, vol. 28, 1914, pp. 341-350, plates xx, text figs. 1-3.
“=Palæobotany: Its Past and Its Future.=” _Knowledge_, vol. 37, 1914,
pp. 15-24, figs. 24-30.
“=Palæobotany versus Stratigraphy in New Brunswick.=” _British
Association Report_, 1912, Dundee.
“=The Red Crag Portrait.=” _Geological Magazine_, vol. 9, Dec. 5,
1912, pp. 285-6, text fig. 1.
“=Petrifactions of the Earliest European Angiosperms.=” _Proceedings
Royal Society B_, vol. 85, 1912 (Abstract).
“=Petrifactions of the Earliest European Angiosperms.=” _Transactions
Royal Society B_, vol. 203, 1912, pp. 75-100, plates vi-viii.
“=The Correct Name for the Dragon Tree of the Kentish Rag.=”
_Geological Magazine_, vol. 8, 1911, No. 568, pp. 467-9.
“=The Dragon Tree of the Kentish Rag.=” _Geological Magazine_, vol.
8, Dec. 5, 1911, pp. 55-59, text fig.
“=On the True Nature of the Cretaceous Plant _Ophioglossum
granulatum_, Heer.=” _Annals of Botany_, vol. 25, 1911, pp. 903-907,
text figs. 1-2.
“=A Reply to Prof. Jeffrey’s Article on _Yezonia_ and
_Cryptomeriopsis_.=” _Annals of Botany_, vol. 25, 1911, pp. 269-270.
“=The Value and Interest of Japanese Fossils.=” _Transactions Japan
Society_, vol. 9, 1910, pp. 1-12, plates i-iii.
“=Further Observations on the Fossil Flower, _Cretovarium_.=” _Annals
of Botany_, vol. 24, 1910, pp. 679-681, plates lvi-lvii.
“=Adventitious Budding and Branching in Cycas.=” _New Phytologist_,
vol. 9, 1910, pp. 235-241, text figs. 8-14.
“=The Anatomy of Cretaceous Pine Leaves.=” (With Miss Kershaw.)
_Annals of Botany_, vol. 24, 1910, pp. 395-402, plates xxvii-xxviii.
“=The Internal Anatomy of _Nilssonia Orientalis_.=” _Annals of
Botany_, vol. 24, 1910, pp. 389-393, plate xxvi.
“=Studies on the Structure and Affinities of Cretaceous Plants.=”
(With Prof. Fujii.) _Phil. Transactions Royal Society B_, vol. 201,
1910, pp. 1-90, plates i-ix.
“=Plant containing Nodules from Japan.=” _Quarterly Journal
Geological Society_, vol. 65, 1909, pp. 195-205, plate ix.
“=On the Tent-building Habits of the Ant _Lasius niger_ Linn. in
Japan.=” (With Dr. Gordon Hewitt.) “Memoirs” and _Proceedings
Manchester Literary Philo. Society_, vol. 53, 1909, pt. 3, pp. 1-6,
plate 1.
“=On the Present Distribution and Origin of the Calcareous
Concretions in Coal Seams, known as ‘Coal Balls.’=” (With D. M. S.
Watson.) _Phil. Transactions Royal Society B_, vol. 200, 1908, pp.
167-218, plates xvii-xix.
“=The Flora of the Inferior Oolite of Brora.=” _Quarterly Journal
Geological Society_, vol. 63, 1907, pp. 375-382, plate xxvii.
“=The Relation of the Concretionary Nodules of the Yarra to the
Calcareous Nodules known as ‘Coal Balls.’=” _Geological Magazine_,
Dec. 5, 1907, vol. 4, pp. 106-108.
“=The Xerophytic Character of the Gymnosperms.=” _New Phytologist_,
vol. 6, 1907, pp. 46-50.
“=A Note on a Wounded Calamite.=” _Annals Botany_, vol. 21, 1907, pp.
277-280, plate xxiii, text figs. 1-4.
“=The Nutritive Relations of the Surrounding Tissues to the
Archegonia in Gymnosperms.=” (With Prof. Fujii.) _Beihefte zum Botan.
Centralblatt_, vol. 20, 1906, pp. 1-24, plate 1.
“=A New Fern from the Coal Measures: _Tubicaulis Sutcliffii_=, Sp.
Nov.” “Memoirs” and _Proceedings Manchester Literary Philo. Society_,
vol. 50, 1906, pp. 1-34, plates i-iii.
APPENDIX C.
THE TENETS OF THE C.B.C.
=The objects for which the C.B.C. was founded are as follows:--=
The objects of the Society are (_a_) to bring home to all the
fundamental nature of the reforms involved in conscious and
constructive control of conception and the illumination of sex life as
a basis of racial progress; (_b_) to consider the individual, national,
international, racial, political, economic, scientific, spiritual and
other aspects of the theme, for which purpose meetings will be held,
publications issued, Research Committees, Commissions of Enquiry and
other activities will be organized from time to time as circumstances
require and facilities offer; (_c_) to supply all who still need it
with the full knowledge of sound physiological methods of control.
As these objects indicate, =the scope of the Society is very wide, its
interests far-reaching, and its possibilities of future development
very elastic=. Even to-day the tenets which appear fundamental to
different members of the Society will naturally vary, hence =no one of
the following is binding on an individual member. General agreement
with the objects of the Society suffices for membership.=
Nevertheless, it has been felt that it would be useful explicitly to
state in concise form what may be described as the bedrock of general
agreement in the Society. This is as follows:--
1.--The hygiene of sex is as suitable and proper a subject for
scientific and serious study as the hygiene of nutrition, locomotion,
or any other human function.
2.--Owing to the shamefaced attitude which has until recently
characterized our dealings with the subject, all the manifold data
involved in the different aspects of sex life have not had the direct,
scientific and physiological handling they deserve and require. We
deplore this and shall endeavour to remedy it.
3.--We maintain that the highest spiritual development, the noblest
intellectual illumination, and the sweetest romantic possibilities
of individual sex experience, are not damaged by sound scientific
knowledge, but contrariwise, are enhanced and elevated.
4.--We consider that in relation to the procreation of additional
members of the community, the best possible knowledge of scientific
and technical details should be available to those undertaking this
important social duty.
5.--We believe that the haphazard production of children by ignorant,
coerced, or diseased mothers is profoundly detrimental to the race. We
believe, therefore, that parenthood should no longer be the result of
ignorance or accident, but should be a power used voluntarily and with
knowledge.
6.--We maintain that to achieve this result a knowledge of the simple
hygiene of contraception is essential.
7.--We advocate no individual contraceptive measure as final or
fundamental, but maintain that the =best= measures =available= at any
time should be taught and known by the people.
8.--We desire to keep constantly in touch with all advances in science
which may have a bearing on the practical details of contraceptive
measures, and for this purpose we have organized a Medical Research
Committee to keep our Society informed as to the current scientific
position of the hygiene of contraception.
9.--AS REGARDS THE POPULATION AT PRESENT. We say that there are
unfortunately many men and women who should be prevented from
procreating children at all, because of their individual ill-health, or
the diseased and degenerate nature of the offspring that they may be
expected to produce. These considerations would not apply to a better
and healthier world.
10.--There are many women unfortunately so constructed--suffering from
weakness of certain organs--that they would risk death if they were to
attempt to bear children, and who, therefore, should not bear them.
11.--There are unfortunately many couples so ill-provided with this
world’s goods, or with means to acquire them, that they cannot support
further children, and therefore should not bear them. Women, owing to
their own or their husband’s incapacity to be self-supporting, may be
permanently or temporarily in such a position owing to disaster or
unemployment. The following Resolution was passed by our Society:
_Resolution passed at General Meeting November 22nd, 1921._
“Both to spare your own personal distress and to avoid bringing
a weakly child into the world, it is important that all should
realize that no one should conceive in times of individual misery
or ill-health. Of course wherever a child is already on the way,
the best must be made of it. But sound and wholesome methods of
Birth Control (Control of Conception) are known, and advice will be
given free by a qualified nurse to all unemployed married persons
who present this slip at the Mother’s Clinic, 61, Marlborough Road,
Holloway, London, N. 19.”
12.--The Society approves and welcomes the work done by the first
British Birth Control Clinic (The Mother’s Clinic, 61, Marlborough
Road, Holloway, N.19), where the very poor and ignorant receive
personal instruction; but we consider that this public service should
not be left to private enterprise to maintain, and hence that the
Ministry of Health should supply suitable help and contraceptive
instruction to working-class women at the many Ante-natal Clinics,
Welfare Centres, etc., already in existence all over the country.
13.--We maintain that science has already made available contraceptive
measures as safe and as simple to use as any other hygienic measures
widely known and practised, such as brushing one’s teeth, or the
removal daily of a dental plate by one who has artificial teeth. We,
therefore, maintain that knowledge and instruction in these matters
for the normal and healthy is an =hygienic= and not a medical matter.
The problem of controlling conception on the part of those who are
diseased, abnormal and unhealthy is on the other hand a purely medical
matter and may involve measures which this Society would not advocate
for general use.
14.--We as a Society are at present working for the dissemination of
the best possible hygienic knowledge to all who are intelligent enough
to be capable of using it, but we recognize the grave National problem
raised by the fertility of those too degenerate or too careless to be
capable of using any form of contraceptive.
15.--We are convinced that children spaced by voluntary means have
a less mortality, and that the mother of such children has time to
recover her health and attend to the young child in a better way, than
if the pregnancies follow rapidly one after the other, and we are
therefore in favour of voluntarily spacing all the desired children of
even the healthiest woman.
16.--In short, we are profoundly and fundamentally a pro-baby
organisation, in favour of producing the largest possible number of
healthy, happy children without detriment to the mother, and with the
minimum wastage of infants by premature death. We, therefore, as a
Society, regret the relatively small families of those best fitted to
care for children. In this connection our motto has been “Babies in
the right place,” and it is just as much the aim of Constructive Birth
Control to secure conception to those married people who are healthy,
childless, and desire children, as it is to furnish security from
conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened
with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.
17.--We hold no fixed opinions concerning the total numbers either of
individual families or of populations, desiring only that the =optimum=
shall be attained.
Passed by the Executive Committee, C.B.C.
March, 1923.
_Everyone who is interested in securing the best future for our Race
should join the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial
Progress._ _Apply for Membership forms to the Hon. Secretary_, =C.B.C.,
4-5, Adam St., Adelphi, London, W.C.2. Gerrard 4431.=
Transcriber’s Notes.
Italic text is indicated with _underscores_, bold text with =equals=.
Small/mixed capitals have been replaced with ALL CAPITALS.
Evident typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected
silently. Inconsistent spelling/hyphenation has been normalised.
Half-titles and reiterations of chapter titles have been discarded.
End of page footnotes have been sequentially numbered and relocated to
the end of the relevant chapter.
Illustrations have been relocated between paragraphs.
A Table of Contents and List of Illustrations have been compiled by the
transcriber.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
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