Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, the Mothers' Clinics and the Practice of Contraception

Abstract

Neither the British birth-control movement nor the personage of Doctor Marie Stopes has suffered from lack of historical attention. Numerous books and articles have documented the internecine squabbling and strategic ineptitude that characterized the British campaign for contraception, while four biographers have tackled the life of Stopes. Nevertheless, despite the profusion of secondary material, historians have not yet addressed a central issue of the birth-control movement: how it affected working-class women's lives. The Mothers' Clinics founded by Marie Stopes in the interwar years allow us to examine birth control in practice. In 1921, Stopes and her husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, opened the first English birth-control clinic in Holloway, a working-class district in north London. By 1929, the London Mothers' Clinic had advised ten thousand patients.2 During the 1930s, Stopes established five regional clinics throughout the United Kingdom: Leeds in April, 1934; Aberdeen in October, 1934; Belfast in October, 1936; Cardiff in October, 1937, and Swansea in January, 1943. In addition, the