1880-1958

British Social Reformer, Botanist, and Writer

In 1921 Marie Stopes opened the first birth control clinic in Great Britain. She is best known for her crusade to gain reproductive freedom for women, but that was only a third of her career. Until about 1914 she was a scientist, until the late 1930s a social reformer, and for the rest of her life a poet.

Stopes was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of feminist Charlotte Carmichael, one of the first women to attend university in Scotland, and geologist Henry Stopes. She won a science scholarship to University College London. In 1902 she was graduated B.Sc. with a double first in botany and geology. Specializing in paleobotany, she received her Ph.D. in 1904 from the University of Munich with a dissertation on fossil plants. The same year she became the first woman scientist hired by...