There were half a dozen especially great ladies in the earlier days of modern contraceptive advance, all of them now departed this life. They were filled with indomitable zeal to enable women to escape the trammels of unwanted pregnancies and to go forth into the age of freedom, now common in the western world. Their hearts were of gold and they achieved so much for which modern women should be more consciously thankful than perhaps they are. But naturally they had their curiosities. To us in Britain Marie Stopes is of course the best remembered and I will come to her shortly.
I first mention some others, Mrs Ottersen-Jensen of Sweden, Margaret Sanger of the USA and Helena Wright of our country. They were all present in Bombay in 1952 at that first great conference at which the IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation) was founded. The Eugenics society had sent Dr C P (Pip) Blacker GC, the then General Secretary and prime motivator of the Society, really godfather of the IPPF, and myself as delegates.
It was indeed an important occasion and the start of a new impetus in demographic affairs. At last was arriving the time when the overall demographic reason was being recognised for contraceptive activities, not only the promotion of freedom for women in their own sexual interests.
The vigour and zeal of the great pioneer ladies of contraceptive practice was quickly demonstrated to me in the aircraft as we left Rome. A furious lady grappled with me as I left the toilet in the rear of the aircraft: that was Mrs Ottersen-Jensen, the Swedish pioneer whom I later came to appreciate. And what was my offence? It was that I, a man, had used the place marked ‘‘Ladies’’: but she was not to know that the thoughtful stewardess had told me to do so because someone had been sick in the one marked for my own sex.
Mrs Ottersen-Jensen had special experience in organisation and legal background, at home in Sweden, and her wisdom was of great usefulness in the birth of IPPF.
Margaret Sanger was already elderly and took little organisational part. But all admired and remembered that as recently as 1920 she had been imprisoned in New York for helping poor women to contraceptive success. In contrast Helena Wright, the only medically qualified of these ladies, was immensely knowledgeable in the technicalities of birth control, and had great influence. She was also known as a psychic.
In Bombay there was local leadership by the splendidly imperious Lady Rama Rau, a high caste Brahmin lady of both mental and physical stature. She long continued in the lead in India. Also present was Margaret Pike, that paradigm of good sense, long on the Eugenics Society Council and leader of our own Family Planning Association. She it was who, stimulated by the Eugenics Society, brought (so I believe) the FPA to appreciate the wider demographic importance of their activities.
Dr Marie Stopes, our great British pioneer, with her immense vigour and proper combativeness, was not present in that strange exciting period in Bombay. But there was present the youthful and admirable Mrs Wadia, already becoming prominent, and now the President of the Family Planning Association of India nearly forty years later.
The 1952 Bombay Conference will, I am certain, one day be recognised as of extreme importance, when the social history of these times is properly written. Lady Rama Rau, and Nehru’s sister, were prominent, and many medical people of importance from many lands, as well as the pioneer ladies referred to above. But of leading importance was the Vice-President of India who gave the opening address to the full Conference. Radakrishnan was then aged 64, a philosopher and a Fellow of All Souls, a man of true distinction and widest understanding. He explained that the great leader Gandhi, whose assassination was then in recent memory, was against contraception, for he disliked all chemicals and mechanical appliances: he had been in sympathy with the objectives, but stated that continence was the proper method of dealing with the problem.
‘‘But our great leader Gandhi confessed to me’’, said the Vice-President of India, ‘‘that it took even him 40 years to learn the art of continence. We lesser mortals must therefore welcome the chemical and the physical even if truly second best.’’
With that impressive jocularity, the three thousand Indians present were reinforced in their minds as to the contraceptive revolution upon which they were embarking.
We British visitors to the Conference were entertained by hospitable Hindu families. Strange it was, for Pip Blacker and myself, to find two of the innumerable man servants attempting to bath us like babies by hand. There too with hands, we ate to us unpleasing meals, though indubitably the best of their kind.
But back now to Marie Stopes, our own British contraceptive heroine. I had just met her pre-World War II in Cambridge and was surprised to receive thereafter a Christmas card depicting her little naked son standing at a fountain. Modern novelty in such cards had surely begun. She had long been in vigorous controversy with the Roman Catholic hierarchy on matters all too personal as well as of principle. Various biographies recount such curiosities. She was a real fighter. I was never again to meet her in life.
But twenty years later, early in my days as General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, Marie Stopes died (1880-1958) aged 78, rather than at 100 plus as she had personally determined and forecast. And determination was the foundation of her influence and her tremendous impact upon thought and contraceptive progress: her motivation was entirely one of kind sympathy for troubled women. She, of course, still lived in the time when contraception was linked solely with the rights of women to control their reproduction. She was remarkable, difficult and unpredictable: her doctorate was in palaeobotany: she was, in youth, a leader in the academic advancement of women. She had made a Will, with the aid of her solicitors and appropriate agents, after days of consultation and drafting. She took it home to get it witnessed and signed. But instead she wrote an entirely new one and formalised it, and then soon died, leaving to Alan Wyborn, as her Executor the task of unwinding and interpreting a Will with great complexities in law. The complexities sprang from the existence of certain small charitable trusts or societies, such as the Society for Constructive Birth Control, and the lack of clarity as to what was hers and what was theirs. In her new will, because of her long-term appreciation of Dr Blacker and his work with the Eugenics Society, she left a substantial property, part in stock and part in premises (a part of her pioneer clinic in Whitfield Street) to the Eugenics Society. But it was left on condition that the Clinic was maintained etc, etc. All had to be untangled.
So at her death, as soon as the contents of the novel Will were known, I had to go as General Secretary of the Eugenics Society to her house in Norbury Park near Dorking where certain of her activities still continued. I went with Mrs Hodson, so long the Editor of the Eugenics review. It was a dank November day and the grounds of the big house were shrouded with evergreen vegetation and fog. All the windows were shuttered and blinds drawn. We knocked and were admitted by Mrs Joan Windley, the deceased’s secretary, and were ushered into the big hall, dark-walled with golden patterning and a dim light. We talked standing, and were then taken through a baize door, towards the old-time servants’ quarters, descended some dark stairs and saw a chink of light around another baize door. And there, behold, was a very different scene, the den of the happy packers, where a row of middle aged women, part time employees, with merry quips and smiling faces, were busily engaged in packing contraceptives for the retail postal trade. Whether they owed allegiance to Marie Stopes herself or to one of her charitable organisations, it was not for me to know - yet.
The sorting of the tangle, eventually was achieved. Lawyers, trustees, the Eugenics Society’s Council, the Charity Commissioners, and others besides, all had to have their explanations, had to be persuaded, and the whole put into proper legal form with new Trustees, new Articles of Association, transfers of property, final responsibility and provision for ultimate winding up. Yet Alan achieved it all, and for years thereafter sat on the Boards of the two successor companies, the Marie Stopes Memorial Foundation (a subsidiary company of the Eugenics Society) and the Society for Constructive Birth Control revivified. We worked it so that the former operated the Clinic while the latter was the landlord and owner of the residual capital. For the next ten years I was Chairman of the Board of both. All profits were set aside for research, and so it continued until the final winding up in favour of the Eugenics Society after the new Health Act came into being, and made it incumbent upon Local Authorities to provide contraceptive facilities for all. In all this activity, Faith Schenk (now Mrs Cox), the long-term administrator in the Eugenics Society, also led the administration of the Foundation. So we forged ahead. With later property sales and further evolution, it thus comes about that the Galton Institute now owes much of its available research funds to Marie Stopes’ substantial benefaction.
As a tail piece, let people be assured that Marie Stopes’ extraordinary, but valuable, collection of early contraceptive devices, now hardening rubber and very curious, safely displayed in her clinic behind wire netting in a bookcase, was finally deposited with the Wellcome Institute for permanent safe keeping.
Colin Bertram