Marie Stopes House, Bloomsbury, London
Dr. Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1880-1958) was initially an academic and palaeobotanist, and later a campaigner for birth control, eugenics and women’s rights.
The Marie Stopes House just off Tottenham Court Road in London was the first birth control clinic to be set up in Britain.
Marie Stopes Central London Center
Early Life of Marie Stopes
Born into a well-off middle class family, Stopes first of all excelled as an academic in her chosen field of palaeobotany and graduated from University College London (UCL) before going on to complete her PhD in Munich. She was to become the first female lecturer at the University of Manchester in 1904.
In 1907 she left for 18 months in Japan studying fossilized plants in Hokkaido. In Japan she is believed to have entered a relationship with a Japanese academic. On her return to the UK she published a diary of her time in the country entitled:
Journal from Japan: a daily record of life as seen by a scientist (www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44475)
The blue plaque reads the first birth control clinic was opened by Dr. Marie Stopes in 1921 at Holloway and removed here in 1925.
Married Love
After an unhappy and unconsummated first marriage, Stopes published her controversial book Married Love or Love in Marriage (digital.library.upenn.edu/women/stopes/married/1918.html) which also offered advice on contraception. Her book was financed by the businessman and philanthropist, Humphrey Verdon Roe, who she was later to marry. The book became a huge best seller in Britain, based on the tenet that good sex leads to a happy marriage and thus a happy family and nation. Her book, though, was banned at the time in the US.
Stopes left academia and together with Roe worked to set up birth control clinics in the UK first in London but also in Leeds, Aberdeen, Belfast, Cardiff and Swansea. Part of Stopes’s enthusiasm for birth control, on the other hand, was also her belief in eugenics and her desire for the “higher” echelons of society not to be out bred by the “lower.”
During her lifetime, Stopes was also an acquaintance of such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf.
When her clinics subsequently ran into financial difficulty in the 1970’s they were taken over by Tim Black (1937-2014) and became Marie Stopes International (“Children by choice, not chance”), now a worldwide organization dedicated to providing birth control in over 30 countries around the world.
Marie Stopes
Access – Getting There
MSI Choices Central London Treatment Centre (Marie Stopes House)
108 Whitfield St, Bloomsbury
London W1T 5BE, UK
msichoices.org.uk
Open 8 am – 4 pm; Monday – Friday
The nearest underground station to the clinic is Warren Street.
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