Charlotte Carmichael Stopes
Charlotte Brown Carmichael Stopes, also known as C. C. Stopes, was a British scholar, author, and campaigner for women's rights. She also published several books relating to the life and work of William Shakespeare. Her most successful publication was British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege, a book which influenced and inspired the early twentieth century British women's suffrage movement. She married Henry Stopes, a palaeontologist, brewer and engineer. They produced two daughters, the eldest of whom was Marie Stopes, known for her advocacy of birth control.
Grave of Charlotte Carmichael Stokes in Highgate Cemetery (east side)
CCStopesDedication
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes publicly opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed, though her actions in private were at odds with her public pronouncements.
Stopes in 1918
Stopes in her laboratory, 1904
Cover of Marie Stopes's bestseller, Married Love
A 1930 cartoon by David Low showing in the Irish Free State in 1931 a man arrested for having possession of Marie Stopes literature on birth control-followed by his wife and many children