Stranger Than We Can Imagine (25 page)

Married Love
was followed by an even more controversial book,
Wise Parenthood: A Book for Married People
(1918), which dealt with contraception. While sexual intimacy between spouses had value in itself, it could lead to women having a child a year for much of their adult life, whether they wanted to or not. For many women, this amounted to a form of physical and emotional slavery. The answer, as now seems obvious, was birth control. But this was at the time a highly contentious position. While
Married Love
had been attacked on the grounds that unmarried people might read it and be corrupted,
Wise Parenthood
faced a far greater range of enemies.

Promoting contraception wasn’t officially illegal in Britain, but it risked prosecution under obscenity laws. At the time, Holland was the only country in the world where birth control was approved by the state. The first Dutch birth control clinic had opened in 1882. In contrast, the American nurse Margaret Sanger opened the first American birth control clinic in New York in 1916 and was promptly arrested. She was charged with distributing contraceptives and ‘running a public nuisance’.

The average UK family had 2.8 children in 1911, compared to 1.7 in 2011. Large families were considered admirable. In the twenty-first century, tabloid newspapers routinely condemn large working-class families, but in 1921 the
Daily Express
ran a competition to find Britain’s biggest family. It offered a £25 prize for the winner. Politicians, doctors and members of the public – particularly women – spoke out loudly against birth control. Doctors made a good deal of money from attending pregnant women, which the widespread adoption of contraception threatened. It was socially safer to adhere to the established cultural position, namely that sex was allowable for the purposes of procreation within marriage but was otherwise obscene. A person departing from that script risked the implication
that they themselves found pleasure in sexual intimacy, and hence were some form of deviant.

The wave of opposition that faced Marie Stopes and other birth control pioneers reminds us how much our understanding of our place in the world changed in the early twentieth century. In an age of individualism the idea that women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies appears self-evident, but in the imperial world it was the social hierarchy which dictated what should happen. And as the state religion is a mirror of existing social structures, it should be no surprise that the greatest opposition to Stopes’s work came from the Christian Church.

Contraception was condemned by most Christian sects. In 1920, the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops called for the removal of ‘such incentives to vice as indecent literature, suggestive plays and films, the open or secret sale of contraceptives, and the continued existence of brothels’. The strongest condemnation came from Catholicism. P.J. Hayes, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, claimed in 1921 that contraceptives were worse than abortion. ‘To take life after its inception is a horrible crime,’ he argued, ‘but to prevent human life that the Creator is about to bring into being is Satanic.’

The controversy came to a head when Stopes sued Halliday Sutherland, a Catholic doctor, for defamation, following criticism in Sutherland’s 1922 book
Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians
. Sutherland’s defence was financially supported by the Church, so the case was widely seen as a fight between one woman and the Catholic Church.

Here Stopes’s conservative nature came into play. Her appearances in court showed that she was clearly not the major threat to public decency that her opponents made her out to be. She was opposed to abortion and sex outside of marriage. She was charming and graceful, and her mode of dress was discussed in the press at length, to much approval. She avoided criticism that she was unladylike or a radical, so there was nothing to distract from her argument that women had the right to control their own reproduction. When she
later gave a talk organised by a railway worker in Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall, that worker afterwards wrote to say that ‘I would not like to meet you too often or I should fall in love with you – even if you are a Tory – because I admired your voice, your pluck and the way you handled your audience … Permit me too to compliment you upon your eloquence and the timbre, I mean sweetness, of your voice; it carries with it all that the word “feminine” ought to mean.’

The press interest in the case achieved what she had previously failed to do. It brought her crusade for birth control to the attention of the working class. Her books had sold well, but it was only the middle classes and above who could afford to buy books. When Stopes opened her first birth control clinic in 1921, it was significantly situated in Holloway, a working-class area of North London, and she wrote pamphlets specifically aimed at the poor as they, she felt, were the section of society who most needed to adopt contraception. Part of Stopes’s argument was that middle-class doctors, clergy and journalists who opposed her were hypocrites: birth rates for the middle class were lower than for the working class, indicating that they had knowledge of birth control which they were denying to the poorer sections of society. It was thanks to press interest in her trial that Stopes’s name and mission became widespread among the poorer section of society. It was even immortalised in a playground rhyme, ‘Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes / Read a book by Marie Stopes / Now, to judge by her condition / She must have read the wrong edition.’

The result of the trial was messy. The judge awarded the case to Sutherland, in seeming opposition to the wishes of the jury. This was overturned by the Court of Appeal, which was in turn overruled following an appeal to the House of Lords. Three of five Law Lords involved in the case were over eighty years of age and their decision was ‘scandalous’, in the opinion of George Bernard Shaw. Nevertheless, in the wider world of public opinion, it was clear that Stopes’s argument had triumphed. Birth control was discovered, and accepted, by the general population.

The trial would be the high point of Stopes’s fame. Afterwards,
she became increasingly vocal about her more reactionary beliefs. Birth control was a racial matter, she insisted. Inferior types were breeding faster than their betters, which was a situation that had to be reversed for the long-term survival of the white race. Mixed-race children should be sterilised at birth, as should all mothers unfit for parenthood. On the subject of eugenics Marie Stopes was as far right as Hitler, who began a programme of compulsory sterilisation of ‘undesirables’ in 1934. The forcefulness of her personality was accompanied by both an inability to admit mistakes and a need for praise. She made enemies easily, and it soon became impossible for her to work within the growing birth control movement.

Stopes’s personality had touches of later radicals such as the psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary or the computer-hacker turned whistleblower Julian Assange. All three managed to place previously unthinkable ideas right in the heart of public debate. They were all, briefly, lionised for their efforts. Yet the single-minded, messianic nature of their personalities turned the public from them and made their names toxic. Others would gain applause for work in the territory that they staked out, but it took a rare psychological character to introduce the world to that new territory in the first place.

For all that the name Marie Stopes has become tarnished over the years, she brought the concept of birth control to a wider public than anyone had previously managed. The value of sex, without intent of procreation, was finally admitted.

This was one factor in a larger revolution. Individualism required women to redefine both their sense of themselves and their position in society. The possible roles for middle-class women, beyond the traditional wife, mother and housekeeper, had been extremely limited in the patriarchal imperial world. In her 1929 essay
A Room of One’s Own
, the modernist English writer Virginia Woolf recalled that ‘I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kindergarten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918.’

Woolf’s essay examined the topic of women and fiction, and
questioned why history had produced no female writers on a par with Shakespeare. She asked what would have happened to an imaginary sister of Shakespeare with the same innate talent as her brother. Shakespeare’s sister, she concluded, would have been stifled at every turn by women’s historical lack of financial independence and privacy, and the fixed expectations of hierarchical society. Female genius, Woolf believed, could not emerge until women were in a position to have a room of their own, where they could lock the door and remain undisturbed, and a personal income of £500 a year (just over £27,000 in 2015).

As both men and women gained freedom from what was expected of them at birth, the competition for rewarding and worthwhile careers increased. For men, that competition was lessened when women were encouraged to remain in their previous positions. Woolf noted this unwillingness to accept women as equals in historically male professions. ‘The suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame,’ she wrote. ‘It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self assertion … When one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively.’ For Woolf, the belief that the female half of the world was inferior gave men a valuable boost of self-confidence, and allowed them to go forth and achieve great things.

The pressure for women to remain in their historic roles became increasingly problematic as individualism grew. The American writer and activist Betty Friedan, who felt forced out of her career as a journalist when marriage and children turned her into a homemaker, wrote about the gnawing sense of undefined dissatisfaction that marked the lives of many housewives in post-Second World War America. This was the subject of her book
The Feminine Mystique
(1963), which examined how women could find personal fulfilment outside of traditional roles. ‘American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the
need to grow and to realise one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror,’ she wrote. As individuals, women needed a sense of purpose that was based around themselves, and not their husband or family.

For Friedan, feminism was about ‘freeing both women and men from the burdens of their roles’. She went on to co-found the National Organisation for Women, and the success of her book triggered a new wave of feminist thought and activism. The acceptance of female sexuality, in post-Friedan feminist thought, was just one section of a broader conversation about the role of women in the age of individuals.

The English poet Philip Larkin dated the arrival of an acceptance of sex in British culture to a very specific point. Prior to this moment, he wrote in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, sex existed only as ‘A shame that started at sixteen / And spread to everything’. The moment when everything changed was ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And The Beatles’ first LP’. This was the early Sixties, a time when press coverage of the Profumo scandal, when a government minister was revealed to have the same mistress as a Soviet naval attaché, reflected an increased sexual openness in the British public. Larkin, then in his forties, wrote that ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me).’

D.H. Lawrence was not a writer who was accepted or admired by critics in his own lifetime. His novel
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, which was written in 1928, a couple of years before his death, had to wait decades before it was openly praised. It was initially only published privately, or in heavily abridged versions, due to its sexual explicitness and taboo language. To many people, these seemed all the more shocking because they were delivered in the broad rural Nottinghamshire dialect of Mellors, the Chatterleys’ gamekeeper. ‘Let me be,’ he says to Lady Chatterley after sex, ‘I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman’s a lovely thing when ’er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an’ th’ shape on thee, an’ th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv thee
wi’ my bas an’ wi’ my heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma’e me say nowt.’

Later attempts to publish the complete text led to obscenity trials in countries including India, Canada and Japan. In the United States, the Mormon Senator Reed Smoot threatened to read passages from it aloud in the Senate.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was, he declared in 1930, ‘Most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!’

The 1960 British prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act that Larkin referenced in his poem followed an attempt by Penguin Books to publish the unabridged text. During the trial the chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked the jury, ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ This recalled the questioning during Marie Stopes’s 1923 libel trial, where the expert medical witness Sir James Barr was asked if he thought the book could be ‘read by your young servants, or, indeed, [would you] give it to your own female relatives?’ This comment was unremarkable at the time, but the country had changed between 1923 and 1960 and Griffith-Jones’s question came to symbolise how out of touch the British establishment had now become. Penguin were acquitted of obscenity and the publishing industry has had the freedom to print explicit material ever since.

The fact that Griffith-Jones’s out-of-touch remark about servants came to represent the trial is, in many ways, entirely fitting for
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. The novel tells the story of Constance Chatterley, the young bride of the aristocratic Lord Clifford Chatterley. Lord Chatterley was seriously wounded in the First World War and returned impotent and paralysed from the waist down. He was the last of his line. His inability to produce an heir and continue his dynasty weighed heavily on him, because he understood the world through the pre-First World War hierarchical model. As he tells his wife, ‘I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the function determines the individual.’ For Clifford, a person’s position was more important than who they were or what they did.
‘Aristocracy is a function,’ he said, ‘a part of fate. And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters.’