Marie Stopes's Birth Control Clinic, 1920s

Marie Stopes's Birth Control Clinic, 1920s

Marie Stopes's birth control clinic, Whitfield Street, London, late 1920's. Born in Edinburgh, Marie Stopes (1880-1958) 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. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes was also a Nazi sympathizer and eugenicist. The Mother's Clinic was established in 1921 to further eugenic aims and it dispensed the so-called "Pro-Race" cervical cap. In Stopes's book, Radiant Motherhood, she advocated the sterilization of those "totally unfit for parenthood," including "the inferior, the depraved, and the feeble-minded."

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