Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Marie Stopes: Birth Control & Eugenics

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Why would someone disown their son over a pair of glasses? How could an unmarried woman in 1918 have published a book about sexual pleasure? And what is an appropriate gift for a newlywed prince and princess? Today, we’re looking at the complicated woman who was Marie Stopes - family planning pioneer on one hand, very problematic eugenicist on the other.Kate is joined once again by Deborah Cohen to explore Stopes’ life and influence.*WARNING there are discussions of eugenics, adult words and themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Sophie Gee.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.Email us with your subject ideas at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely bit twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, everybody. This is an adult podcast discussing adult things in an adulty way. Actually, we are discussing some pretty troubling things today because we are talking about Mary Stopes.

So not only we would be talking about contraception and abortion, we'll also be talking about eugenics and, well, mass-mertering fuckheads. and of course the odd swear word. So if you want to stay with us and listen to all of that, you are more than welcome but you can't get angry with us because fair do's, you have been warned. Mary Stope's book Married Love was so popular that it was republished seven times in its first year.

Given her immense popularity, why would it be that the charity which she started has changed its name to distance itself from her? What makes this woman so divisive? How can we measure Mary Stope's revolutionary work in family planning against a wildly eugenicist rhetoric? Today, betwixt the sheets, we are going to try and find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society. With me, Kay Lister. If you've ever looked into the history of contraception, you've probably heard a lot about animal gut condoms or alligator dung pesseries,

and definitely a lot about the withdrawal method. But you've probably also heard of Mary Stopes, author of the 1918 Self-Help book Married Love. and the person who started Britain's first family planning clinic. Today I am joined by the amazing Deborah Cohen from Northwestern University to find out more about Mary Stopes, a person who on one hand gave us family planning and birth control that we know today. But on the other was a proponent of some of the most vile ideas

that human beings have ever come up with. Are you intrigued? Well, I certainly am. Let's do it. So, and welcome to Deborah Cohen. How are you? I am very well and so happy to be talking to you. I'm so excited to be talking to you. And this is one of my favorite controversial subjects that we're talking about today. The legendary, all we over a lot, but oh, it's a bit complicated.

Mary Stopes. Perfectly put. Separating out the orgasms from the eugenics. That's what we're doing. That's what we're going to do. I love it. I love it. Oh, yes.

How did you come to be interested? You know, I came to be interested in her through her birth control work. So she opens up the first birth control clinics in Britain and some of the earliest birth control clinics in the world. And actually, it's only really going back and thinking about her in the light of these controversies and going back and rereading married love, her smash 1918 hit, that I've actually thought seriously, actually, about the sexual pleasure part of it, which was so important for her. We'll get to the eugenics because we can't duck around it.

But the way she was writing about the importance of sexual pleasure is something that's often overlooked in what she does. She did amazing stuff around birth control clinics, and you can't say that she didn't, she did. But sexual pleasure was really important to her, wasn't it? Exactly. So it's really at the heart of her endeavor. And so it stoops, just to back up a little,

but Stopes was a trained paleobotanist. So she works on ancient fossils. And she goes, she is unusually well educated for a woman at the turn of the 20th century. She does a doctorate in Germany in Munich. I mean, she's in a way, she's a complete unicorn figure. And she's working on this scientific stuff. And yet when she marries another scientist, what she realizes, after the marriage is not going well. Early in the 20th century, she realizes she actually doesn't know how sex works. That's wild, isn't it?

Like, how did that happen? How does she not know what sex is? Well, that is such a good question. So I think there are two questions. One of them is, what does an average upper middle class woman know about sex, right? And then the second question is, what does Mary Stopes know? And they're pretty different because there's some reason to imagine

that the story that she was telling, in front of the divorce court wasn't the complete story. Yeah, so what does the average upper middle class woman know? I mean, we have a lot of information now about the kind of intentional silences that cloak sex and the really amazing work by the historian Kate Fisher from oral history interviews where, you know, there's almost a kind of deliberate silence that is much, much broader than the practices themselves, meaning that what people do in bed is much more creative and much more kind of recognizable to us, probably, than the way in which they talk about it. And the way in which

they talk about it is really restrained, constrained especially by women, by the idea this is naughty or this is nasty or this is not appropriate for me to talk about. So it's perfectly plausible. We know from other women of Stopes's generation and of her upbringing to go in. to marriage completely surprised by what you're going to find on your wedding night. And that would be a surprise, wouldn't it? A nightmare, actually, at some level, right? Because here you are, there's been some kind of canoodling, but actually for someone likes Stoops, to go into her marriage, she meets her husband, Reginald, he's a Canadian,

Reginald Ruggles Gates. She meets him in 1911. She decides to keep her name. And then by 1914, she's separated from him. him. And so her story is that she didn't know what was wrong with the marriage. She had a sense that something was wrong sexually, but she didn't really know what it was. So she comes into the divorce court during the First World War. Reginald chooses not to come back. He's left her. He's gone to the United States. He chooses not to come back to testify in front of the divorce court.

But there is Mary Stopes, noted paleobotanist, first woman to have her PhD in the subject from Munich. And what she says is, I didn't know what was wrong. And so I had to go to the restricted cupboard, the infamous restricted cupboard at the British Museum and consult the top secret manuals in order to figure out what was going on. And essentially the story she told was that he was impotent and that the marriage was never consummated. And she actually gets a divorce on the grounds of non-consumation from him in 1916. So yeah, just an extraordinary story. Now, many, many, many years later, Reginald Ruggles Gates'

wife, second wife, deposits a memoir by him saying it's not true at all that she didn't know anything about sex. Shocker. Rather, she was a, quote-unquote, nymphomaniac, and she had affairs, and she knew everything that she was talking about.

So who knows what actually happened between the two of them? Did he contest the divorce at all? Because presumably he was told, it's being sought on grounds of non-consummation. Did he contest that? Yeah, he does at first make a show of contesting it. And so she goes into the divorce court where the judge, she begins to give these graphic details about what's happened to the judge.

But that's quite enough of that. We don't need to know anymore. And the fact that Reginald didn't actually come back does, of course, not weigh in his favor. So she does get her divorce in the end on the grounds of non-consumation. But that whole experience, so she takes out of that whole experience, the idea that women need to understand about sexual pleasure. And so she writes this book, and she's got it mostly written by 1915,

and she's sending it around to publishers, many of whom say, I'm not interested in this. This is not a fit subject. To which she responds, I will send you a copy of the book when it's published. I mean, the balls of this woman. The balls, exactly, absolutely fearless. So what does she write? So she writes that women have a sex instinct the same as men, that they have a sex drive.

She writes about orgasms. She writes about the way to turn on your wife if you're a man. So it's a book that's equally written to men as to women. She writes about the orgasm for both parties. I mean, it's a really, really significant book. And what's funny about it is it's this kind of weird combination between the spiritual and the graphic. So she's writing about lubrication, about erection, but then she's also writing about nature, the spirit, really highfalutin kind of high-flown stuff. And so the readers who write to her, because of course instantly this book is a huge success.

It's bankrolled, by the way, by her second husband, who is a pilot who meets her right before he's about to go back to the war, Humphrey, Verdon Rowe. and he's always been interested in sexology and in birth control, and so he advances the money to the publisher essentially to pay for this book. Also, if your wife got divorced because she wasn't being shagged properly in the first marriage, and now she's having so much sex she needs to write a book about it, I'd bankroll that as well. Well, totally, but the hilarious thing is that he banks rolls it before they're married, and actually she's written, of course, the draft of this book,

And this goes back to the, you know, here is someone who is not limited by their experience. She writes this book before, presumably, she has had any, quote, unquote, married, love at all. Now that's interesting. She's had other kinds of love, clearly, whether she had affairs before, after the first marriage, and indefinitely she has had some kind of personal experience that she's drawing on. Do you think that she did have affairs? Or do you think that was the first husband, Ruggles, just going like, no, no. I heard biographers seem to lean to the idea that certainly she had some kind of a deep flirtation with a guy named Alma Maud around the time of the marriage.

And that was one of the things that sets ruggles off. And he's presumably referring to this man who was actually living with them for a time. So she writes this book before she has quote-unquote married love. And then she writes another book called Wise Parenthood before she has a child. So she's that sort of a person. She takes on the mantle of advice giver and she is on a mission. She thinks that unless couples know this, that the very future of the race is in peril. And that brings us to the eugenics point.

It does. But before we leap into that, because it's such a shame you have to go there, but you do. Writing about sexual pleasure at this time in the way that she does, it's hard to understate quite how revolutionary that was. It's not that nothing had been written. It's not, we have this idea that the Victorians just didn't have sex. They did. They knew what sex was.

The pornography at the time is testament to that. But if you're looking for like a manual on how to have sex, especially if you're a woman, she's got to be one of the first, doesn't she? Yeah, there's just practically nothing. I mean, even the medical literature, the treatises on physiology have incredibly little to nothing about the reproductive system. and that kind of explicit medicalized language, you know, really biological,

this goes into this, this is how it happens. I mean, it's like how to do it, assuming that the person, really that your reader knows nothing, that really doesn't exist. And as you say, there's pornography,

but what Stopes is doing and what she's trying to do is to make this kind of advice respectable. Yeah. So it's something that it's going to be, when it's sold in 1918, it's in a brown paper, parcel. But by the time that Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip Mary, she sends it to them and the palace actually accepts the gift.

So, you know, it's something that really does become, you know, an American group of academics by the 30s ranks it as one of the most influential books published in the 20th century. And that list includes Mind Kampf and Economic Consequences of the Peace. And it ranks above those, by the way. So, I mean, it really lands like a bombshell. And it must do, right? Yeah. Because like even if there was pornography and things like that, you have to know where to get it, first of all. You have to be able to access it to see that stuff.

And it makes you wonder how many people were getting married and going to their wedding nights with just absolutely no clue what was going to happen at all. Yeah. And I think it's not, there's some who had no clue. And then the point that Kate Fisher makes, I think really persuasively, is that there's also a kind of cloak of ignorance. So even if you know what happens, eventually, within the marriage, relationship, you're still going to pretend if you're a woman that you don't. You don't talk about

those kinds of things. They're hidden behind all sorts of words. And Peter Gay made this point a very long time ago about Victorian sexuality, which is the range of practices was much wider than the means of describing them or talking about them. And what Stopes does is she brings those into alignment, right? And in fact, you can argue that she represents a narrowing of the range of practices because she's got an idea of what's proper marital love. And like many people who set out to reform sex, she also is narrowing the definition of what appropriate sex is. I suppose she is, isn't she? Because if you're reading this book, like, this is how you do it, then anything outside of that or experiments or we thought we'd just give this bit ago, that kind of, yeah, oh, that's interesting.

Or the kind of secret language of husband and wife that's actually unacknowledged, that's not spoken of. That's something that like we don't talk about but we do it, the mandate to talk about it, of course, brings up new kinds of arguments within marriages. That doesn't it? But actually more than that, I mean, Stopes is also, you know, she's vitriolic about perversity. So where sexology we think about is dealing a lot about, you know, Havlock Ellis and all the range of human experience. Stopes is, you know, though she has flirtations herself and maybe even love affairs as a young woman with a teacher, she's militant about anti-lesbian and, you know, I cannot advise you about this. This is not a proper thing to do

this kind of stuff. She sort of falls into that thing that a lot of people who study sex throughout history do, which is that in order to make their subject accessible, they become oddly moralistic and puritanical about it. And that's kind of what she's doing. It's like, this is proper sex and it's okay to talk about proper sex. But that kind of sex, no, no, no, no. Like she wasn't a fan of condoms, was she? No, no, she hates condoms. I mean, but there she's probably just echoing, you know, a lot of what men said, right? The men who are recorded, there are just some hilarious descriptions of the condom about being muzzled and all sorts of things.

So she's echoing that. And fundamentally also, she thinks that women are going to get stuck with this responsibility. And so they should know how to, quote, unquote, protect themselves in order to be able to enjoy sex. Again, here the invaluable Kate Fisher research, though, comes in, which is, what is the most common form of birth control? What was it? Undoubtedly, coitus interrupt us. The pulling out. Withdrawal.

Yep. That is it. And Stopes, again, she believes that this is disastrous psychologically, both for man and for women. But mostly for men, right? No, she thinks it's terrible for women, too, because who knows? They might be right on the verge of the climax, and then the man is gone. and not great for either of them. So she's got a particular stance.

But as Kate Fisher's interviewees again and again tell her, what the women liked about that method was it was the man's responsibility. They weren't really thinking about it as totally reliable form of birth control. But it was a way to space out children. Because if he withdraws reliably, mostly you're going to be able to avoid pregnancy. I think I've read somewhere that it's about 70% effective, the pulling out method. I told my students that last week

we were talking about the history of birth control and honestly there was just a look around the room of like, well that's not so bad. I'm like, no. No, that is not the message. That's not the message.

Jesus Christ. How many babies are going to be named Kate though? That is the question. Just an email in nine months' time. You, witch. I'll be back with Deborah after this short break.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this month on not just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass to investigate some of history's most notorious murders and brutal crimes. Was it a quarrel, or was the brilliant playwright Christopher Marl actually murdered in that Deptford Inn? Was Amy Dudley, wife of Elizabeth I first favourite Robert, pushed down a flight of stairs to her death? Were the Geese, that great French family, actually bloodthirsty murderers, who secured their power through ruthlessness and violence.

And what's the truth about the Hungarian noblewoman who allegedly killed hundreds of young women? Join me, but not on an empty stomach, for not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, she's not a fan of withdrawal. She's not a fun of condoms. So what was the method of birth control

that Mary Stopes was advocating for? So the delectably named pro-race cap. Dda-da-da-da. otherwise known as the racial cap. So what it was is a cervical cap. So she wasn't a fan of diaphragms either. Right. Because she thought that there was a possibility of stretching the vagina.

So that was screwed out for her. So what she advocated was the cervical cap, the pro-race cap, which was manufactured to her specifications. And most of the patients who come into her birth control clinics are fitted with them. I mean, the problem with the cervical cap is that it's actually pretty tricky to use, trickier to use than the diaphragm and certainly trickier to use than a condom. So what that meant is that if you came into one of Mary Stopes's clinics, her mother's clinics, as they were known, again, the language of respectability to cloak this pioneering effort. Not for you, sluts, just mothers here, thank you very much.

Yes, yeah, exactly. And of course, you put a ring on your finger and you go into the mother's clinics. Deborah, you devious little monkey. I wouldn't have even thought of that. Plenty of people did. I bet they did. And she, what it means that cervical cap advocacy is that women go backwards and forwards to try to get it right. What is it?

Like, how would you describe this thing? It's not a diaphragm. It's like, what is it? Yeah. So it's unlike a diaphragm, which is sort of flatter and larger, the cervical cap is small and it's much more rounded. And the idea is that it fits directly over the cervix. So it has to go quite far in and it has to be fitted right. And so the poor midwives who are running the mother's clinics have these women backwards and forwards.

And some of them just can't get it and they have to prescribe a diaphragm in that case. People struggle enough with moon cups, don't they? Just like balancing that thing, let alone this chunk of rubber they have to try and pivot on their cervix. Yeah, exactly. It really, I think, not easy to do. And what were her views on abortion, just out of curiosity? Again, militantly anti. And this is at a moment when many women don't really make a distinction.

between birth control and abortion. I mean, both of them are means of trying to prevent a pregnancy in every paper, in leaflets, you know, all over every city are being sold female remedies. Women are passing information about how to procure an abortion backwards and forwards in their circles. And Stoops herself says, actually, that a huge number of people come to the mother's clinics are looking for abortions. Wow. And she, like other birth controllers, like Margaret Sanger in the U.S., are desperate to wall their

proper subject birth control off from abortion. So I think we've given her a pretty fair hearing as to the stuff that she did that we can say, thank you, Mary. Thanks for that bit. But we can't ignore the fact that she was also a bit of a shit, wasn't she? Like calling your cervical cap pro-race. It's like, it's a racist form of contraception. Yeah. So she is a lifelong and enthusiastic eugenic, meaning that she supports the idea. from the late 19th century, that we need a selective management of births in order, in the language of the time,

to increase the A1 population, which is basically upper middle class, and reduce the C3 population, meaning the poor. And you can find innumerable examples of Mary Stopes' racist and eugenic rhetoric. So she's constantly banging on about the need to eliminate the dirty vermin

population of the cities. I mean, every bad thing that you would accuse eugenesis of, in terms of their rhetoric, you can find in her. So in terms of what she says, undoubtedly through and through eugenesis with conviction. On the other hand, what does she do when she opens up these birth control clinics? Because, of course, eugenics is not just a rhetoric. It's also a practice. So the birth control clinics, she opens the first mother's clinic, in part with her second

husband's money in 1921. And by the 30s, she's got five other clinics operating throughout Britain and Northern Ireland. She's got a Belfast clinic as well. These clinics are staffed by mostly working class and lower middle class midwives. Stopes knows that women feel more comfortable with midwives than they do with doctors. And they're explicitly from married women. And they're supposed to be doing two things. One of them is they're supposed to be offering birth control advice. And the second thing they're doing is actually offering fertility advice. because Stopes's understanding of the lack of knowledge of sex is so pervasive that she thinks people don't know how to stop babies from coming,

but they don't really know how to have babies either. Okay. And so the walls of the mother's clinic are full of pictures of successful conceptions, the sort of racial babies of the future. So then it really puts the question. So we have this person who uses all of this strident, strong eugenicist language to talk about her endeavor. So what does she actually do?

Or what put better to the midwives of this birth? Central Clinic do. When they're confronted with women whose births are not going to be eugenic, like what happens, for instance, one day in Cardiff, a white woman married to a black man comes into the Cardiff Clinic in order to find out how to actually get pregnant. Does the midwife turn her way? No, she doesn't. She instructs her on how to conceive. And actually, she writes Stopes. This is just part of her regular old report to her boss, the midwife of the Cardiff Clinic, writes Stopes and says, and then we had Mrs. So-and-so in, and she needed advice as to how to conceive and explains the nature of the family, and I gave it to her. And Mary Stopes does not write back

and say, what? What are you doing? That's not on the plan. And similarly, when middle class women come into the clinic and ask for birth control advice, she does not say, no, go away and have babies. We need more A1 population. Okay. So I think there's a really important caveat to the image of Stopes as a eugenicist. And that is that when it all came right down to it in those mother's clinics, the question that she was asking is, what is best for the individual health and happiness of this woman? And those are the grounds.

She did send Hitler a copy of her book, though, didn't she? Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, she's rhetorically, no, there's no doubt about the sincerity of reugenics convictions. But they were buying with another thing. she also really cared about, and this goes back to our discussion of sexual pleasure, she really does care about the ability of individual women to control their conception and to have sexual pleasure. And that for her means that she's allowing advice to be given that is not strictly eugenicist.

Do you think that, and I don't let her off the hook here, because the things that she said and the things that she wrote, and she started the society for race control or awful stuff, Yeah. Is there any chance that she was using some of this to try and make what she was doing with birth control more acceptable? Because eugenics was a big thing at the time, wasn't it? Or am I just being far too generous with her? No, no, no, no, all sorts of people are eugenicists.

I mean, people on the left are eugenicists, social democrats are eugenicists, is not a right-wing movement at all. No, the idea was that you want to improve the health of the population. And the idea is a healthy population. and people are really interested in the collective health of the population too, not just individuals. And eugenics was absolutely a persuasive argument on behalf of birth control. And not just Mary Stopes, but also other birth controllers adopt it. I mean, I think that Mary Stopes International, so the legacy organization, it makes sense that they'd changed their name in 2020 to MSI instead.

Yeah. Because the rhetorical record and the sincerely held beliefs of Stopes are odious. and rightly so to us today. On the other hand, like all things, there's the complexity of the practice, and the practice really matters because we don't understand her legacy unless we see what is happening

in those clinics from the perspective of the midwives who are serving the poor women and the women themselves who are coming. That's true. I mean, eugenics, it's, when you find out how many people would kind of thought this was a great idea, it's quite difficult to get your head around,

but I suppose it's easy when you said it like that to think, oh, that sounds like a good thing. We want to make people healthy and we want to make the world a better place, but there's some hefty small print to it, isn't there? Yeah, and of course all of this looks completely different in the aftermath of the 30s and the rise of national socialism, the Holocaust, right, it's very difficult for us to put ourselves back into the mindset of the time. But all of that said, even on the spectrum of eugenics beliefs, I mean, Mary Stopes is an extremist. I mean, so... She was a hardcore. Yeah, when her beloved

son marries a woman who wears eyeglasses, she disowns him. Holy shit. What? And he was such a lovely man, so I met him. I did this research now quite a long time ago in the records of the mother's clinic. And he came to something that I did, Harry Rowe, and

he's now died, I think, relatively recently. But he said, you know, now I think about it, and, you know, it's, there's something that's comical about it. How sincerely held those beliefs were and how thoroughgoing they were. But of course, she didn't want him to marry probably at all. You know, like many mothers with their sons to let go of your beloved only son, who you have raised carefully in all of the proper beliefs.

Do you think she was just like picking on something? She was just like, but still, what a twatty thing. Oh, terrible. I mean, genuinely terrible. Yes. So, I mean, on other hand, there is a legacy. So by the Second World War, the mother's clinics had treated over 46,000 women. Which is incredible.

Massive racism as well. It is, oh, one of the things I'm always curious about when people are researching very, what we might politely call, controversial figures from history, like Mary Stokes definitely is, do you like her? If she was around today and, like, you met her in the pub or something, would you want to talk to her? Or do you think you would just go, no, you're a massive dick? No, no, no. I have a huge tolerance for human idiosyncrasies. So, of course, I would love to talk to her. And I doubt that I would like her.

But I think I would find her, I mean, her record, her boldness, her refusal to be stopped, her headlong nature. Those things are, in a way, they're semi-miraculous in a woman of her era. And so one does have to ask, right, what propels her? I mean, she had herself a very powerful. an overbearing mother, who was also educated, was a Shakespearean scholar, interested in a bunch of other stuff. When Mary was born, legendarily, her mother said, is it a girl? Oh, thank God. So she really wanted a girl. So she was certainly one of these children who was pushed early on, you know,

like Mill or like Ruskin, genius identified very early in her and pushed. We've got to think about what her legacy is, is it's very complicated. but we owe her a great deal. We just do. What do you think her legacy is? How do we reappraise this? Can we separate the orgasm from the eugenics at all? Or is, do we just have to just go, I don't know, it's so complicated. What do you think? I don't think that we can or should even want to separate the orgasm from the eugenics. I mean, I think we want to say is that eugenics was a hugely powerful, rhetorically influential group of ideas. And some of those ideas actually were necessarily racist and classist.

And some of it was about the improvement of the collective health of the population at a time when people actually imagined that those things, you know, that they weren't mutually exclusive in the way in which we see them now. She wasn't, even at the time she was controversial, wasn't she? It wasn't like she came up with this stuff and people were going, great idea. Mary, how was she received at the time? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. She was controversial at the time.

So, for instance, one of her opponents, who was also an anti-ugenicist, was a Catholic doctor named Halliday Sutherland. And he actually writes very critically of Stopes in a book after the mother's clinics have opened. And what he says about her is that she's doing incredible damage to working class women in these clinics. And he is himself an advocate for the poor Halliday Sutherland had done pioneering work on tuberculosis and accuses her of victimizing the poor women in her clinic. So what does she do? She sues him for liable in the courts. Oh, that's balzy. And essentially she's been very successful

in the divorce court in getting herself free from this marriage. And I think she assumes that she's actually going to be successful here too. But now she runs up against a judge who is unremittingly hostile to her. And Halliday Sutherland himself doesn't like her eugenics ideas, which shows you even the ways in which, you know, in the British establishment, there are plenty of people who are anti-Eugenics. And Stopes does stand on one end even there. And essentially what happens is that the jury recommends damages for Stopes, but the judge finds for Sutherland. So decides that Sutherland has the better case. And that verdict is eventually confirmed at the House of Lords. George Bernard Shaw writes Stopes to say, this decision is absolutely scandalous,

but you're going to sell a lot more books, which indeed she does. So when we're assessing her legacy, I think also we do have to reckon with the staunch advocacy on behalf of the actual women who came to the clinics and her bankrolling of this entire exercise, her desire for individual women's health and happiness to actually triumph over her eugenics principles. We can see there's a choice there, and she makes a choice that is non-eastern, eugenic. And then finally, the advocacy, as I said, of women's sexual desire, which is a very unpopular, shocking, and minority position. And thank God she did actually advocate for it. Yeah, thank God. Oh, right. My final question to you about Mary Stopes, although I could ask you

a million, is if you did meet her in the pub today, apart from Mary Stopes, what the hell are you doing here? What question would you want to ask her? That is a really good one. I think that, I would want to ask her whether I'm right, actually, whether she did, I'm saying as a historian based upon the files and the letters that midwives write to Stopes about the patients they're seeing and the advice they're dispensing, that she was saying fine for fertility advice for poor, very, very poor women and that she was advocating for birth control to be given to women who, you know, eugenicists, orthodox, eugenesis would have said, like, they need to get out there and have some babies.

But it's possible she would say, oh, I never knew about it, that I never read the letters from the midwives. I mean, she just comment on the letters from the midwives, and she certainly takes them to task if they're doing something she doesn't like. So I think I'm on historians' firm ground, but it would be really interesting to ask her

about this contradiction between her practice and her rhetoric. Wouldn't it? Debra, you have just been amazing to talk to. Thank you so much. And thank you for coming to talk to me about this very complex. person. Well, it's a complete pleasure to talk to you. So thank you for having me on. Anytime.

Thank you for listening. And thank you to Deborah for joining me to talk about this really challenging and troubling topic. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you have something that you want us to cover, or if you just want to say hello, you can email us at betwixt at at history hit.com. Join me again, Betwix the Sheets, the History of Sex, The Candling Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.