Other amazing women: Dr.
Grace Feder Thompson, Nellie Bly,
Lydia Pinkham
Historical remedies for menstrual
period pain and problems. See more remedies here.
 
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Dr. Marie Stopes: An amazing woman in the fields of birth control marriage
relations
Her book, first published in 1918:
Married Love
by Marie Carmichael Stopes, D.Sc., London; Ph.D., Munich
Fellow of University College London; Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature and of the Linnean
and Geological Societies, London. First published in 1918 and, by 1931,
translated into 10 languages.
This first American edition was published in 1931 by G.P. Putnam's Sons,
New York (The Knickerbocker Press)
"In my first marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance
that I feel that knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the
service of humanity."
from the Author's Preface to the First English Edition (1918) of Married
Love
Readers of the Guardian newspaper, in the United Kingdom,
voted Dr. Stopes "Woman of the Millennium."
The amazing Scotswoman Dr. Marie Stopes, founder of the first
birth control clinic in the British Empire (The Mothers' Clinic in
London, still running), in 1921, wrote this ground-breaking book that devoted
a chapter to the cyclic nature of women's sexual desire,
a first, part of which appears below.
In 1914 she had her never-consummated first marriage annulled after
a year and began work on this first-of-a-kind book for Britain about sex
to prevent other humiliating marriages. She later remarried, but after a
few years wrote up a contract with her husband allowing
her to take younger lovers!
Although Catholic and Anglican churches and British doctors scorned
her book - only in the year of her death, 1958, did an Anglican bishops
conference concede the necessity for birth control - the average person
in Britain loved it as it went through 19 editions and sales of almost 750,000
copies by 1931.
She loved publicity and contraception. It is said that at fancy parties
she would pass around a contraceptive diaphragm - a birth-control device.
The U. S. Customs Service banned the book as being obscene
until Judge John M. Woolsey declared it welcome on 6 April 1931 (Woolsey
would later allow James Joyce's Ulysses into
the United States).
Here's part of what Woolsey wrote:
"[Married Love] makes also some apparently justified criticisms of
the inopportune exercise, by the man in the marriage relation, of what
are often referred to as his conjugal or marital rights, and it pleads
with seriousness, and not without some eloquence, for a better understanding
by husbands of the physical and emotional side of the sex life of their
wives."
The Publishers' Foreword states, in part:
"It [the suppression of sex-education books] demonstrates once more,
and with shocking conclusiveness, that the government
agencies vested with the power of initiating suppression are grossly unfit
for the task. It emphasizes once more the truth that changing times
mean changing morals; that the pernicious methods of secrecy and prudishness
which characterized the treatment of sex for generations are things of
the past; that with our modern attitude of encouraging and satisfying wholesome
curiosity, of meeting our problems squarely and openly, we have come to
regard sex not as something vile and unmentionable, not as something to
be thrust into the background and to be smirkingly whispered about, but
as a human function of momentous importance both to the individual and
to society."
Dr. Stokes started out as a paleontologist
specializing in plants (in 1902 she took first-class honors in botany and
geology at University College London, and in 1904 the University of Munich
awarded her a doctorate for her work in paleobotany), writing several books
about the subject. But she also wrote about Japanese drama, travel, birth
control and wrote plays, stories and poetry. Her passions
were birth control, poetry and her son Harry(!). (I gleaned some of these
facts from the Marie
Stopes International Web site.) The selected bibliography in this volume
lists 21 books.
"In the years since this book was first published I have had
the pleasure of seeing its title become a phrase so interwoven into our
language that even Bishops opposing me use it themselves; and also the
great reward of finding even my opponents using my very phrases to express
with approval the ideas for which I fought and suffered."
Author's Preface to the Nineteenth English Edition (1931)
SarahAnne Hazlewood generously donated this
book to the museum.
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SEE THE CHART BELOW!
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Chart 1
[Author's caption] Curve showing the Periodicity of
Recurrence of natural desire in healthy women. Various causes make
slight irregularities in the position, size and duration of the "wave-crests,"
but the general rhythmic sequence is apparent.
[Read a discussion of this chart on the second
and third pages.]
[Chart 2 shows a low, irregular curve, demonstrating that fatigue and overwork
can disrupt the cycle of a woman's desire.]
[Note that the peaks occur about
the time of ovulation and right
before the period, a pattern that I believe is accepted today.
For producing children it's valuable that a woman's desire coincides with
ovulation. I believe that a woman's pheromones and
vaginal odor also change at this time, as do other things, such as viscosity
of the cervical mucus plug, making it easier for sperm
to reach the interior of the uterus. The opening of the cervix, which allows
sperm to enter the uterus, also widens.]
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NEXT
Second, third page,
Dr. Grace Feder Thompson's
letter appealing for patients, Nellie Bly, Lydia
Pinkham,
Radcliffe College, of Harvard University,
has probably the largest collection of material
about the Pinkham enterprise, the records of the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine
Company.
Part of the donation of SarahAnne Hazelwood to this museum, much of
it patent medicine and old medical equipment, was a very interesting biography
and study of Mrs. Pinkham's business, Female Complaints:
Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine, by Sarah Stage.
See two letters to MUM about the ingredients
of her Compound, and one about the lyrics of an English
pop song, Lily the Pink, about her.
Other amazing women: Nelli Bly,
Dr. Marie Stopes, Dr. Grace Feder Thompson
See also the patent medicine Cardui,
Dr. Grace Feder Thompson's
letter appealing for patients, Dr. Pierce's medicines,
and Orange Blossom medicine.
© 2000 Harry Finley. It is illegal to reproduce
or distribute work on this Web site in any manner or medium without written
permission of the author. Please report suspected violations to hfinley@mum.org
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