The Glorious Unfolding
The birth control movement also gained momentum in Great Britain, dramatized by another woman eager to assert sexual self-interest, the paleobotanist Marie Stopes. Her initial involvement in the birth control movement grew out of her own sexual frustration in her first marriage, as well as her friendship with Sanger.
In 1918 she published a book entitled Married Love, marketed as a marriage manual. While it did not include details about how to avert births, it provided an exceptionally clear explanation of how conception took place, using words such as penis, erection, semen, clitoris, and vagina. Since these words were considered obscene, readers were warned that the book was “unexpurgated” and Stopes was labeled a pornographer.57 The book soon found its way to the bestseller list.Married Love urged married couples to limit births in order to improve the quality of their personal relationships. Its style was florid. The first sentence declared, ‘‘Every heart desires a mate.” The chapter titles included ‘‘The Fundamental Pulse” and ‘‘The Glorious Unfolding.” Stopes offered a scientifically accurate explanation of why many married women fail to reach orgasm and announced that it was healthy, not sinful, for women to enjoy sexual intercourse. Better sex would lead to better marriages, she argued, and better marriages would benefit society as a whole.
Stopes brilliantly reversed the traditional religious notion that sensual and spiritual love were at odds, hinting that sexual intercourse allowed men and women to transcend selfish individuality. Each partner's hormones affected the other, she argued, creating a conjugal unit far greater than the mere sum of its parts: ‘‘In union with the beloved there will be added powers of every sort which have no measure in terms of the ordinary unmated life.”58 Stopes never openly advocated extramarital sex (though she apparently indulged in it), and insisted on sexual self-control.59 She declared that husbands as well as wives should be freed of the fear of unwanted pregnancy.
By 1927, Married Love had gone through eighteen editions and been translated into twelve languages.60 A sequel, Wise Parenthood, offered a more explicit guide to contraceptive methods, so that couples could practice what had been preached.
Stopes became a famously egocentric partisan, who alienated many if not all of her colleagues. Nonetheless she poured much of her money and energy into the establishment of birth control clinics, and remained a relentless advocate of sex education and promoter of birth control technology. A cervical cap she designed was registered with the trademark “Pro-Race”.61That trademark was emblematic of the point that both she and Sanger constantly reiterated. Karl Pearson and Teddy Roosevelt were wrong. Women's pursuit of their own self-interest would strengthen the human race, not weaken it. Both women believed that birth control would reduce poverty, the primary cause of social degeneracy. Both women rejected eugenic claims that bad behavior was inherited, but tried to harness eugenic concerns about the well-being of the future labor force.62 Good motherhood, by which they meant intelligent, reasoned, planned motherhood, would lead to redemption. In the words of the socialist hymn, ‘‘Bread and Roses”, the ‘‘rising of the women is the rising of the race.”
Later advocates of birth control adopted a similar response to the eugenic challenge. It was, after all, politically easier as well as less expensive to increase the choices available to the poor than to restrict the choices of affluent women. Sanger and Stopes argued that if parents could exercise better birth control they would have fewer children. If they had fewer children, the public would be more willing to help provide education and social services for them. Both hypotheses were borne out in succeeding years.