lived experience, icious proletarian arched poverty of cates at the turn of r heroine, Mary ty was a daughter is autobiographicn her life, in an conscientious objection, Israel: Uropia Marie Stopes: A Biography Andre Deutsch £5.95 have Margaret victory in the fight for equality.
the and into the more popular fieid of sex. married late for the time, book:
Zionist the large scale fundamentalist scilerblotchy.
who were destroying the race.
megalomaniac whose life she left of the mination for women. oil-producing Wing habits of the working class.
secular and "prurient In her introduction, Ruth Hall says of Marie Stopes: compared with her initial struggles, the activilies of the women's liberation movement over the last decade appear in retrospect as mere mopping-up operations after a major battle'. By such an assessment one could equally-say that Thatcher's elevation to the leadership of the Tory Party is the ultimate Ms Stopes was no revolutionary. Her actions sprang from two impulses. The first ISSN was to right the wrongs she personally had suffered, and the second was to be lamous. It was the first impulse which took her away from the academic field of coal search She already with a Tirm idea in her mind of the joys of sex which she expounded in an unpublished Many of her ideas came from reading the works of Edward Carpenter, separating his views on sexuality from his wider politics. In spite of this interest, she had been married for two years before she discovered that her husband was impotent and her marriage consummated. Appalled at her own ignorance she researched all available texts (mostly medical and encouraged people to share with ber their own sexual problems. Deciding that marital problems stemmed largely from the ignorance of men on the nature of female sexuality, in 1918 al the age of 38, while still a virgin herself. she wrote Married Love. t was an instant best Her primary interest in birth control was to limit the reproduction of the poor. In an article to the Daily Mail in 1919 she asked readers to visit the mean streets' and ask those puny, gaunt, ill-balanced, feeble, ungainly. withered children, the young of an imperial race? It was, she contended, the Mrs Jones with their numerous sickly children Ruth Hall admits to disking this has painstakingly researched. But she has done just as Stopes would have wished. She has portrayed her as a political figure of such overiding importance that her influence radically changed the position of women. In all 327 pages, Ruth Hall barcly mentions the existence of a birth control movement which was gathering mass support within the labour movement. The dialogue in the time (see Sheila Rowbotham's biography of Stella Brown) ranged between those who saw birth control as a ruling class device to breed the working class out of existence and those уввга. who saw it as a crucial means of "self-deterThe birth control campaien can only have been hampered by Stopes" arrogant tirades against the breed Certainly she was a charismatic figure and as such brought the glare of publicity to the birth control movement. But, she was so caught up in ber own need for power than she relused even to help others who were facing persecution at the same time and for the same cause as her own. When Rose and Guy Aldred were prosecuted for publishing Margaret Sanger's Family Limition on groends of obscenity, she not only refused to sapport them, she wrote to the Public Prosecutor to say that the pamphlet was Ruth Hall's biography is critical of Stopes it only of her personal style. She makes no attempi to criticise her politically Nevertheless, she writer so well that it would be a picy to dismiss the book entirels. The wealth of detail is fascinating well and the descriptions of Stopes attitudes to the miners strikes of the 1920, and che breeding of revolutionaries, her surveys of the sexuality of clergymer etc, are compelline. If sou need a pood excuse to read it think of has an allegorical story on th ANGELA PHILLIPS