Marie Stopes

Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (15 October 1880 – 2 October 1958) was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights.

Quotes

We are not much in sympathy with the typical hustling American business man, and we have often felt compunction for him, seeing him nervous and harassed, sleeplessly, anxiously hunting dollars, and all but overshadowed by his over-dressed, extravagant and idle wife, who sometimes insists that her spiritual development necessitates that she shall have no children. Such husbands and wives are also found in this country; they are a growing produce of the upper reaches of the capitalist system. Yet such wives imagine that they are upholding women’s emancipation.
- "Revolting Woman in the Novel", unattributed in The Workers' Dreadnought, vol. 5, no. 33 (9 November 1918), p. 1,110, col. 3; attributed to Stopes in David Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts: A Study in Tenacity (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pt. 2, ch. 1

At sixteen I was vain because someone praised me. My father said: "You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. If you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your own soul's doing. Then you may be proud of it and be loved for it."
- Quoted in William L. Stidger, There Are Sermons in Stories (Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1942), p. 89

London: A. C. Fifield

Each heart knows instinctively that it is only a mate who can give full comprehension of all the potential greatness in the soul, and have tender laughter for all the childlike wonder that lingers so enchantingly even in the white-haired.
- Ch. 1

In its most beautiful expression and sublimest manifestations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a world-wide love, in place of the narrower human love of home and children. Many saints and sages, reformers, and dogmatists have modeled their lives on this ideal. But such individuals cannot be taken as the standard of the race, for they are out of its main current: they are branches which may flower, but never fruit in a bodily form.
- Ch. 1

The most complete human being is he or she who consciously or unconsciously obeys the profound physical laws of our being in such a way that the spirit receives much help and as little hindrance from the body as possible.
- Ch. 1

From the body of the loved one's simple, sweetly colored flesh, which our animal instincts urge us to desire, there springs not only the wonder of a new bodily life, but also the enlargement of the horizon of human sympathy and the glow of spiritual understanding which one could never have attained alone.
- Ch. 1

An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloating.
- Ch. 5

Each coming together of man and wife, even if they have been mated for many years, should be a fresh adventure; each winning should necessitate a fresh wooing.
- Ch. 10

Marie Stopes, the great apostle of contraception in interwar Britain, was also—like many among the progressives of the time—a keen eugenicist. In 1935, she attended a Congress for Population Science in Nazi Berlin. In August 1939, she even sent Hitler a volume of her dreadful poems, accompanied by a treacly epistle about love. Yet all this has been forgotten amid continuing progressive admiration for Marie Stopes’s embrace of what are nowadays known as "reproductive rights."
- Peter Hitchens, "Hitler: The Progressive". First Things (16 September 2019)