Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution

Marie Stopes (1880-1958), a successful British botanist, was also a pioneer of birth control and sexual freedom. Rose (Modigliani), who obtained access to her subject's private papers, has written an objective and readable study of the life of the woman who, with the assistance of her second husband, Humphrey B. Roe, opened Great Britain's first birth control clinic in London in 1921. The sexual frustration Stopes had experienced during her first marriage inspired her to write and publish, after great difficulty, Married Love (1918), an explicit guide to sexual intercourse and, in the same year, Wise Parenthood, which clearly described available methods of contraception. Although her autocratic nature enabled Stopes to surmount opposition to her emancipated ideas and the controversies they provoked, as Rose observes, it sometimes estranged her from her family and friends. This is an important contribution to women's studies. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Oct.)