Marie Stopes

Who was Marie Stopes?

Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist, academic, eugenicist, campaigner for women's rights, and pioneer in the field of birth control. Her contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification were significant, and she was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband Humphrey Verdon Roe she 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 was controversial and influential: it brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. She was never in favour of abortion, arguing that preventing conception was all that was needed.