October 2, 1958—Having disinherited her son for marrying a woman not completely healthy (the daughter-in-law was nearsighted) and left her money to an organization that had called for racial purity and forced sterilization, Marie Stopes—scientist, poet, novelist, and birth-control advocate—died of breast cancer at age 77 in Dorking, England.
Together with her partner in family planning across the Atlantic, Margaret Sanger, Stopes has been hailed as a feminist icon who played a crucial role in securing reproductive rights for women.
It ought to be possible to consider the morality of contraception separately from abortion, just as it should be possible to evaluate the lives of these women without resorting to hagiography. When the study of history becomes politicized, however, as in these two cases, questions of motive and character that inevitably figure in assessing legacies are shunted to the side.
As implied by the opening sentence of this post, eugenics and scientific racism formed indelible parts of Stopes’ view on population control. That worldview underlay such developments in the first half of the 20th century as immigration restrictions, minority quotas in higher education, race theory, bans on interracial marriage, and the Nazis’ euthanasia program, the dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. (For a fine discussion of this shamefully broad-based movement, see Peter Quinn’s 2003 article “Race Cleansing in America” in American Heritage—or, if you’re inclined toward excellent historical fiction or mysteries, read the same author’s novel Hour of the Cat.)
Yet this aspect of the thinking of some of the most important family-planning pioneers has been, if not sanitized, then decidedly softpedaled by their biographers. Sanger, for instance, has been labeled a “Woman of Valor” by Ellen Chesler.
Anthony Comstock, the demented Puritan whose hysterical anti-obscenity campaigns led George Bernard Shaw to coin the term “Comstockery,” makes a convenient villain in the traditional narrative about Sanger’s drive to dispense birth-control advice. How often, however, do women’s studies curricula inform students that Sanger saw eugenics as “the great biological interpretation of the human race” that provided “the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems”? ("The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," Birth Control Review, October 1921) Or that “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race"? (Woman, Morality, and Birth Control, 1922).
Marie Stopes represents, at one and the same time, a more brilliant and problematic heroine than her friend Sanger. As a paleobotany student and lecturer, she not only broke down barriers to women but surpassed male colleagues.
Together with her partner in family planning across the Atlantic, Margaret Sanger, Stopes has been hailed as a feminist icon who played a crucial role in securing reproductive rights for women.
It ought to be possible to consider the morality of contraception separately from abortion, just as it should be possible to evaluate the lives of these women without resorting to hagiography. When the study of history becomes politicized, however, as in these two cases, questions of motive and character that inevitably figure in assessing legacies are shunted to the side.
As implied by the opening sentence of this post, eugenics and scientific racism formed indelible parts of Stopes’ view on population control. That worldview underlay such developments in the first half of the 20th century as immigration restrictions, minority quotas in higher education, race theory, bans on interracial marriage, and the Nazis’ euthanasia program, the dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. (For a fine discussion of this shamefully broad-based movement, see Peter Quinn’s 2003 article “Race Cleansing in America” in American Heritage—or, if you’re inclined toward excellent historical fiction or mysteries, read the same author’s novel Hour of the Cat.)
Yet this aspect of the thinking of some of the most important family-planning pioneers has been, if not sanitized, then decidedly softpedaled by their biographers. Sanger, for instance, has been labeled a “Woman of Valor” by Ellen Chesler.
Anthony Comstock, the demented Puritan whose hysterical anti-obscenity campaigns led George Bernard Shaw to coin the term “Comstockery,” makes a convenient villain in the traditional narrative about Sanger’s drive to dispense birth-control advice. How often, however, do women’s studies curricula inform students that Sanger saw eugenics as “the great biological interpretation of the human race” that provided “the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems”? ("The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," Birth Control Review, October 1921) Or that “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race"? (Woman, Morality, and Birth Control, 1922).
Marie Stopes represents, at one and the same time, a more brilliant and problematic heroine than her friend Sanger. As a paleobotany student and lecturer, she not only broke down barriers to women but surpassed male colleagues.
Yet her unsuccessful attempt to help her scientist husband overcome his impotence—and the marriage’s subsequent annulment—altered the arc of her career, leading her to write a slew of books within only a handful of years describing birth control: Married Love, Wise Parenthood, Radiant Motherhood, and The Control of Parenthood. During this time, like Sanger, she founded the first birth-control clinic in her country (in this case, in 1921).
Critics’ charges that Stopes’ writings were, like obscene works then and now, designed to arouse were probably everything she could ask for in terms of increasing her sales. Making an enemy of the Catholic Church –especially through suing a Catholic doctor for misrepresenting her views and through writing critical letters to Pope Pius XI--also didn’t hurt her “street cred” with large elements of progressive opinion.
Too bad that so many of Stopes’ views, like Sanger’s, however, need to be hidden, or, if that is intellectually impossible, then explained away. How does one go about doing this?
* By saying that her views “need to be viewed in the context of her time.”
* By putting up red herrings (e.g., H.G. Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Winston Churchill supported some form of eugenics, too).
* By ignoring the obvious (so many of her clinics were located in poor areas because she was keenly interested in ensuring minorities didn’t breed).
* By ignoring the fact that this woman of foresight in one area lacked elementary understanding in another (she believed that eugenics could solve, at a stroke, some of the most nettlesome problems of the industrialized world, but failed to note, as a scientist, that new cures and treatments could eliminate these problems in a far less draconian fashion)
Was Stopes really as "progressive" and "liberal" as her admirers--including the organization Marie Stopes International, which continues to offer advice on contraception and abortion in nearly 40 countries around the world--say? Let's see:
* The believer in women’s reproductive rights thought that some had more equal rights than others. Those who didn’t rate were women with inheritable mental or physical defects.
* This “progressive” was anti-Semitic (her stipulation for any potential baby she adopted included the provision that the child “must be completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised”).
* She warmed early on to Hitler--attending a eugenics conference sponsored by the Nazis, sent Hitler poems she had written, and only broke with him because his population surge beckoned war).
Critics’ charges that Stopes’ writings were, like obscene works then and now, designed to arouse were probably everything she could ask for in terms of increasing her sales. Making an enemy of the Catholic Church –especially through suing a Catholic doctor for misrepresenting her views and through writing critical letters to Pope Pius XI--also didn’t hurt her “street cred” with large elements of progressive opinion.
Too bad that so many of Stopes’ views, like Sanger’s, however, need to be hidden, or, if that is intellectually impossible, then explained away. How does one go about doing this?
* By saying that her views “need to be viewed in the context of her time.”
* By putting up red herrings (e.g., H.G. Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Winston Churchill supported some form of eugenics, too).
* By ignoring the obvious (so many of her clinics were located in poor areas because she was keenly interested in ensuring minorities didn’t breed).
* By ignoring the fact that this woman of foresight in one area lacked elementary understanding in another (she believed that eugenics could solve, at a stroke, some of the most nettlesome problems of the industrialized world, but failed to note, as a scientist, that new cures and treatments could eliminate these problems in a far less draconian fashion)
Was Stopes really as "progressive" and "liberal" as her admirers--including the organization Marie Stopes International, which continues to offer advice on contraception and abortion in nearly 40 countries around the world--say? Let's see:
* The believer in women’s reproductive rights thought that some had more equal rights than others. Those who didn’t rate were women with inheritable mental or physical defects.
* This “progressive” was anti-Semitic (her stipulation for any potential baby she adopted included the provision that the child “must be completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised”).
* She warmed early on to Hitler--attending a eugenics conference sponsored by the Nazis, sent Hitler poems she had written, and only broke with him because his population surge beckoned war).
* She believed that "free love" within marriage was permissible, but not "perversion"--a category that she thought included homosexuality.
This month, at the recommendation of feminist academics and historians, Great Britain’s Royal Mail is putting Stopes on a postage stamp as part of a series marking women’s achievements. This has aroused headshaking from people who have trouble with someone who not only made the occasional mistake, but who committed the major part of her life to a whole series of them.
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