Marie Stopes

(October 15, 1880 – October 2, 1958)

Marie Stopes was a British author and campaigner for women's rights. She founded the first birth control clinic in the UK.

In fannish terms, she is known to have attended at least one gathering of the London Circle at The Globe, probably in early 1954. Her signature, or something that purports to be her signature, appears alongside those of Circle members on the title page of Frank Arnold's article 'Mordecai of the White Horse' in Eye 3 (Christmas 1954).

Chuck Harris described her visit in Hyphen 7 (March 1954):

When Dr. Marie Stopes, the contraception expert, came to the pub, I wasn't introduced to her. The married men carefully shielded her from us fan-bachelors and she spent most of the evening with Ego and a few others. We were all quite disappointed. Helen had a couple of books she wanted autographed, and I was hoping to ask the Doctor about a new method she was advocating for the problems of the teeming hordes of India. This involved the use of a handful of cotton waste and some salad oil. So help me, I thought that this was a far, far better argument against birth-control then, anything the Churches have yet thought of.

A peculiar type, Marie. So well-bred as to be almost indistinguishable from a racehorse, squat, distinctive, homely, old, and not in the least like the strapping Nordic maiden I’d always imagined her to be. Bert Chandler said she was probably after a sequel to the 'Aphrodite Project.' If Arthur and the BIS are conducting experiments on these lines, and can persuade their Yvonne de Carlo to volunteer, I wouldn’t mind being a martyr to science myself....

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Person

1880—1958

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