Marie Stopes

[I am speaking of]......the super-physical entity created by the perfect union in love of man and woman. Together, untied by love bonds which hold them together, they are a new and wondrous thing surpassing, and different from, the arithmetical sum of them both when separate.
So seldom has the perfection of this new creation been experienced, that we are still far short even of imagining its full potentialities, but it must have mighty powers we dimly realise.”

Marie Stopes

It is one of those synchronicity moments once more. There I was on Sunday discussing the need to look more closely at a range of women who have a thing or two to say about sexuality and by chance today, I almost fell across Marie Stopes.
This week, when I started writing, I had no intention whatsoever to look at the lives and works of specific women and yet, here I am once more about to write about another woman from another time or place.

Like Joumana Haddad, Marie Stopes had certain obstacles to overcome in order to get her work noticed, appreciated and understood without being admonished and even condemned for what she had written.
Clearly, one cannot agree with everything that these women say, especially Marie Stopes!
However, the fact that they have put themselves forward, knowing that in some way, they will be pioneers for a cause, is enough to congratulate them, almost, though I am concerned to congratulate a woman who appears to have some Nazi links/tendencies.

Personally, I think Marie Stopes had some extraordinarily awful ideas, particularly about her views on Eugenics, especially when you consider her links to Hitler, who was allegedly a personal friend.
She also held some pretty abhorrent views on Lesbianism, probably from an indoctrinated Scottish Presbyterian background.
However, she spoke some truth and she also was a strong advocate of birth control in a time when many people thought this was tantamount to the cruellest of murders (and yes, I am aware that some still do).

If Marie Stopes had not spoken out about the need for birth control, ignoring the taunts of fellow scientists and the hounding from certain members of the cloth, I may not be in a position today to enjoy the sexual liberty that I do. Many hundreds and thousands of women should be eternally grateful that there were people like Marie Stopes before us, doing the work, enduring the suffering for women like me to enjoy my sexuality.

Where does one start with the woman?
Marie Carmichael Stopes was born in October 1880 and died shortly before her 78th birthday. She was a renowned botanist and geologist and overcome all sorts of prejudice to secure her job as the first female academic at the University of Manchester.
Whilst there, she managed to secure work in Japan where she had an affair with a fellow professor, Kenjiro Fujii. It all ended rather abruptly and acrimoniously and she returned to Britain.

In 1911 she married scientist Reginald Gates but had the marriage annulled on the grounds of his impotence, something that she discovered by reading great swathes of volumes on human sexuality that she discovered in a locked cupboard at the British Museum!
At the court hearing, her husband said that Stopes was “super-sexed to a degree that was almost pathological” and that “he could have satisfied the demands of any normal woman”.

In 1916, she published what became known as the first sex manual, named “Married Love”. This was followed by a manual on child rearing called “Wise Parenthood”. The former publication was banned for many years in the States – more of this later.
How she managed to get it published in this country is an interesting tale, but it culminated in her marrying her publisher!



But of course, Marie Stopes is most famous for her sexual health clinics. She opened the first one in London in 1921 on the Holloway Road. This Mother Clinic moved to central London in 1925 where it remains today.

So who was this Marie Stopes, what did she write about and why do I think she was a consummate liar?

Let us take that quote from “Married Love” from the top of the page. She had this published in 1916, the same year that she had her marriage annulled, a big five years after the wedding. Now I have no idea how long it would take for a 120 page book to get published in the early 20th century but there wasn’t that much time between the annulment of the marriage and the publication.

This woman, a scientist whose main study was the reproductive elements of plant life, apparently needed a mass of books to realise that her husband was impotent. Well, call me a cynic but I am not sure that I believe this.
You see, I have a sneaking suspicion that she had actually had sexual encounters with the Japanese counterpart whilst she was on her travels. How I come to this conclusion I will demonstrate through her writing but also bear in mind that during her second marriage, she had a contract written to “allow” her to take young lovers.
This woman appears to know her sex and sexuality and if she had been in a sexless marriage for five years, how did she come to express loving sex so succinctly as she does in that opening passage.

Here is another one.

“With the dreams and bodily changes of adolescence, come to the youth and maiden the strange and powerful influences of the racial instinct. The bodily differences of the two, now accentuated, become mystical, alluring, enchanting in their promise. Their differences unite and hold together the man and the woman so that their bodily union is the solid nucleus of an immense fabric of interwoven strands reaching to the uppermost ends of the earth; some lighter than the flimsiest cobweb, or than the softest wave of music, iridescent with the colours, not only of the visible rainbow, but of all the invisible glories of the wave-length of the soul.”

Now it may be that she was quite a poetic person and that creative licence is part of her work but I somehow suspect that she has an inkling of understanding about the type of sexual togetherness that takes you to a new dimension; a spiritual high.

Here she is talking about orgasms, and female ones at that.

“The half swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit in that eternal moment at the apex of rapture sweeps into its flaming tides the whole essence of the man and woman, and, as it were, the heat of the contact vaporises their consciousness so that it fills the whole of cosmic space.”

Can you really talk in these terms and fully understand what you are saying unless you have experienced female orgasms? Vaporising consciousness is a beautiful phrase.

And so to knowledge.

“When knowledge and love together go the making of each marriage, the joy of that new unit, the pair, will reach from the physical foundations of its bodies to the heavens where its head is crowned with stars.”
“..... the fundamental knowledge which is necessary so that a man and a woman may understand each other, and love each other in the best way, is so often lacking and it was in order to give the knowledge of the normal right experience and relationship between men and women that I wrote this book.”

Without actually saying it in explicit terms, this woman is saying that the best sex, the most divine, fulfilling and perfect love is about intelligence. It is about a regard for others as much as yourself. It is about knowledge and using that knowledge and understanding of one another to talk you to a different realm.

And all of this, she tried to convey to an awaiting audience during the First World War. How frightening, nay shocking that we are still here nearly 100 years later, still living in an unenlightened world where “So seldom has the perfection of this new creation been experienced, that we are still far short even of imagining its full potentialities, but it must have mighty powers we dimly realise”.

It is vital that those of us who have experience this “new creation” open our mouths to tell the world that it is out there to be experienced. I have said this so many times, and I cannot say it too frequently.

Stopes continues to advocate time, using the senses to arouse and stimulate. She thought that city life was unbecoming to a healthy sex life.

“Even for those who have leisure to spend on love-making, the opportunities for peaceful, romantic dalliances are less day-to-day in a city with its tubes and cinema shows than in woods and gardens where the pulling of rosemary and lavender may be the sweet excuse for the slow and profound mutual rousing of passion.”

Whilst I agree that smelling the roses or the lavender are all very positive for sex, a healthy sexuality and sexual activity can take place in the city! It is about making the time to make it good!

Marie Stopes continued to discuss the roles of women and men in a marriage and the need for equality of emotion. Throughout the book she explains the need to recognise female desire. Although she discolours her argument with nasty comments about prostitutes, she is making the point, I suppose, that women should be enabled to be more like the “loose women” that their husbands like to have sex with. I think she was hoping that if women were more forthcoming in their sexuality then she could eradicate prostitution at the same time!

“By the majority of “nice” people woman is supposed to have no spontaneous sex impulses. By this I do not mean a sentimental “falling in love”, but a physical, a physiological state of stimulation which arises spontaneously and quite apart from any particular man. It is in truth a creative impulse and an expression of a high power of vitality. So widespread in our country is the view that it is only depraved women who have such feelings that most women would rather die than own that they do at times feel a physical yearning indescribable, but as profound as hunger for food.”

There we have it! A woman in the turn of the century stating that this is instinctual and women are as much entitled to sexual instinct as men.

Essentially, Marie Stopes tried to tell women that they had the right to enjoy sex and that they should probably be doing it with their husband and then all will be right with the world.
That is the basic premise.

Clearly there needs to be far more discussion.
The woman has some interesting points that are deeply clouded by a flawed view on genetics and a scary Christian standpoint that ensures that this book is definitely in the “subjective”. However, it cannot be ignored.

I am in currently trying to decide whether I ought to look at rewriting “Married Love” and calling it something else that encompasses all relationships that reflects the pinnacle of love-making that I discussed a few blogs ago. Perhaps I ought to rewrite it as “Satori Love” dispelling further myths, taking the main chapters of Stopes’s book but giving it a more Zen-like and contemporary feel.

As I said earlier, due to her Nazi sympathies that have not been proved yet have hardly been dispelled, I cannot feel completely happy with saying that this woman appeared to be on the way to an enlightened stance on sexuality. I mean, a woman who writes her only son out of her will because he married a short-sighted woman, cannot ever be called enlightened, but read those passages again. She is a thread away from getting to something real.
Her standpoint was to try and encourage marriage, and that in advocating female sexuality, it would enhance the monogamous state of being. Evidently, I am not going to argue for such a straitjacket but there has to be some applause for anyone to even mention female sexuality at a time where it was buried and only a decade on from women being treated for hysteria with electric shock treatment if they could not maintain a healthy sexual relationship with their husband.

Irrespective of whether she lied about her virginity, she did obviously have some problems with her first husband.

“In my own marriage, I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel the knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity”.

This probably led to all sorts of problems and may have contributed to the following statement.

“When a wife is sleepless through the neglect of the mate who slumbers healthily by her side, it is not surprising if she spends the long hours reviewing their mutual position; and the review cannot yield her much pleasure or satisfaction. For, deprived of the physical delight of mutual orgasm, she sees in the sex act an arrangement where pleasure, relief and subsequent sleep, are all on her husband’s side......health not merely passive but is actively abused”

I sympathise.

Anyway, she got her book published and with the help of an American judge, it became one of the best known books in the States, given more credence than Einstein’s theories.
Here is an extract from the judge, John. M. Woolsey, who agreed to allow the book to be published.

"[Married Love] makes also some apparently justified criticisms of the inopportune exercise, by the man in the marriage relation, of what are often referred to as his conjugal or marital rights, and it pleads with seriousness, and not without some eloquence, for a better understanding by husbands of the physical and emotional side of the sex life of their wives."

"It [the suppression of sex-education books] demonstrates once more, and with shocking conclusiveness, that the government agencies vested with the power of initiating suppression are grossly unfit for the task. It emphasizes once more the truth that changing times mean changing morals; that the pernicious methods of secrecy and prudishness which characterized the treatment of sex for generations are things of the past; that with our modern attitude of encouraging and satisfying wholesome curiosity, of meeting our problems squarely and openly, we have come to regard sex not as something vile and unmentionable, not as something to be thrust into the background and to be smirkingly whispered about, but as a human function of momentous importance both to the individual and to society."

Why that last paragraph could have been written yesterday!
.......................................................................................................................................
And to conclude, here is a poem that Stopes used in the book.
I suspect this needs a blog in itself.

“To mate with men who have no soul above
Earth grubbing; who, the bridal night, forsooth,
Killed sparks that rise from instinct fires of life,
And left us frozen things, alone to fashion,
Our souls to dust, masked with the name of wife –
Long years of youth – love years – the years of passion
Yawning before us. So, shamming to the end,
All shrivelled by the side of him we wed,
Hoping that peace may ripen years attend,
Mere odalisques are we – well housed, well fed.”

Katherine Nelson

Oh, how I cry.