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An excellent book

Founding the UK’s first birth control clinic in 1921, Marie Stopes is a feminist icon throughout the world. ‘I am writing a book which will electrify England,’ Marie Stopes told a friend, ‘a book about the plain facts of marriage.’ Her book, Married Love, was published in 1918, sold over a million copies and was translated into 13 languages. Yet its 37-year-old author, a lecturer in fossil plants, was, she insisted, a virgin. Celebrated through the UK as a pioneer of women’s rights, Stopes lead a remarkable life, travelling across the globe. Remaining braless until her seventies and married to a man so exhausted he agreed to her taking any lover she pleased, Marie marched to the beat of her own drum. Drawing on hitherto unpublished family and personal letters and papers, a diary and Marie’s unpublished novel, June Rose throws new light on the interweaving of the public and personal life of a fascinating and formidable woman.

Praise for Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution
‘A fascinating account of a fascinating woman’ – Philippa Gregory, Sunday Times

‘June Rose gives a picture of a woman of extraordinary and enduring achievement’ The Independent
‘Rose… has written an objective and readable study… This is an important contribution to women’s studies’ Publishers Weekly

June Rose (1926-2018) was a writer and broadcaster who specialised in probing into the human and historical background of the social issues of the day. She authored several biographies, including Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, Elizabeth Fry, the nineteenth-century prison reformer and Modigliani, the twentieth-century Italian painter and Susan Valadon: Mistress of Montmartre.

Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958) was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women’s rights. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes publicly opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed, though her actions in private were at odds with her public pronouncements.

As a supporter of eugenics one of her stated aims was “to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased”. In reaction to this attitude, Marie Stopes International in 2020 changed its name to “MSI Reproductive Choices” with no other changes.