After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Her first husband, Reginald Ruggles Gates, as late as 24 April 1962, bothered to write down: ‘She got annulment 1915 or 1916 by swearing I was impotent. On my solicitor’s advice I was examined by Sir Alfred Tripp and given a certificate of perfect normality. This stopped the slander for a time but it was destroyed by bombing in London in 1940. Recently, through a forgotten record, it is proved that I was fully fertile in 1947 at the age of 64.’5 In 1938, when Marie was fifty-eight, her second marriage broke down. She made her then husband, a well-known aeroplane designer called Humphrey Roe, sign a paper which read:

  Five years ago, I told you I wanted no more sex union and that I should not object if you decided to have a lover to replace my deficiency. I wish to put it on record that, if you did, it would not alter our existing relations, and I should never reproach you or take any steps about it, as I have long considered a wife whose husband is incapable of coitus has every right to supplement his deficiency without breaking up the home.6

  Marie was obsessed by the failure of her first marriage, and by the thought that her enemies, or posterity, would mock her. It was intolerable that the author of Married Love should have had not one, but two failed marriages, and she was as anxious to defend herself against charges of incompetence as any adolescent after an inadequate fumble had turned to mutual recrimination.7 The first husband’s testimony has a tragifarcical plausibility. ‘She says she endured misery, humiliation and frustration. Why – a man can not love an angry woman. Other men told me they could not have loved her.’ Although bad temper turns some men on, in a great many cases it has the opposite effect, and poor Marie had the bad luck to have chosen two men as husbands who found her tantrums unappealing. Her character, which led to many a litigation, many a misogynistic newspaper headline, and many a family row, is subordinate to her achievement. That is, that on 17 March 1921 Marie Stopes founded the first Pioneer Birth Control Clinic. The patrons were Sir James Barr, Arnold Bennett, Dame Clara Butt, Aylmer Maude Esq., Miss Maude Royden and Admiral Sir Percy Scott.

  ‘I loathe prudes and parsons: and the parsons are the worse because they make the prudes,’ she wrote to one of her friends.8 Perhaps this was what prompted one of her boldest pieces of socio-sexual research. In November 1920, Marie Stopes initiated what is probably the first statistical survey of human sexual habits. She sent a questionnaire to two thousand Church of England clergymen, chosen at random from Crockford’s Clerical Directory, asking them about their married life, the number of children born, the dates and intervals between births and miscarriages, and whether any form of birth control was used. She listed:

  (a) Total abstinence

  (b) Safe period

  (c) Use of withdrawal – coitus interruptus

  (d) Use of quinine or other pessary

  (e) Use of rubber cap or occlusive pessary

  (f) Use of sheath

  (g) Other means

  Few of the replies were as prurient as that of the Yorkshire parson who described his method as ‘rubbing out “stuff” out of erect penis by hand – self – wife – and middle-aged cook in absence of wife’; but there is no reason to suppose that this reply was fictitious. Some were answered by the wives – ‘My husband’, wrote a vicar’s widow from Bath, ‘would have considered all these suggestions absolutely criminal. He religiously confined himself to once-a-week unions but was quite rampant during the month of abstention during childbirth and I always thought, inclined to be “off his head” – I never felt any “orgasm” but he didn’t seem to notice that.’9

  Marie had opened a secret door into human life. Once her books became bestsellers, it was not merely the clergy who wrote to her. From all over the world, correspondents shared with her their most intimate sexual problems, fears and worries. When she died, she bequeathed her papers to the British Museum. They outnumber even the Gladstone papers, that is the archive of the most prolix and retentive of all Victorian statesmen. It took days and days for the removal vans to store all these letters in the National Library. For every correspondent who wrote ‘disgusted with the filth’, there were ten who felt deep gratitude to Marie for – to quote one correspondent – ‘putting into words so beautifully the great message of help and hope to us poor mortals who strive to make married life a success and to place love in its right position’.10

  Orgasms, happiness, tenderness, all the things D. H. Lawrence was writing about in The Rainbow, including the belief that the world might become a better place if men and women regarded one another a little more tenderly.

  Women after the war looked different. They dressed differently. Ready-made frocks became cheaply available. Ankle-length skirts had risen to the calf by the end of the war and to the knee by the time of the fall of Lloyd George. Hair could be cut short. Veils had vanished. Young women no longer forced themselves into bone corsets. ‘The freedom you have got with regard to dress is worth the vote a hundred times over,’ said Sir Alfred Hopkinson, addressing the young women of Cheltenham Ladies College, among them my mother, in the early 1920s. Whatever their class, they were never going to go back to the lives of their heavily corseted mothers and grandmothers. By 1923 there were four thousand women serving as magistrates, mayors, councillors and guardians. In 1919 they were admitted to the legal profession, and Oxford University allowed them to take degrees. (Cambridge did not follow suit until after the Second World War.) Many middle-class women took jobs, and would wear light, simple clothes to the office. ‘English women’, said the couturier Norman Hartnell at the end of the 1920s, ‘are dressing better each season; their preference is for simple, well-cut and well-made dresses; they avoid the bizarre and the conspicuous.’11

  The washing-machine had been invented, though it was still cumbrous and big, and few could afford one. Vacuum cleaners were invented in 1901.

  The first number of Good Housekeeping magazine, published in London in March 1924, said:

  Any keen observer of the times cannot have failed to notice that we are on the threshold of a great feminine awakening. Apathy and levity are giving place to a wholesome and intelligent interest in the affairs of life, and above all in the home. There should be no drudgery in the house … the house-proud woman in these days of servant shortage does not always know the best way to lessen her own burdens … The time spent on housework can be enormously reduced in every home without any loss of comfort, and often with a great increase in its wellbeing and its air of personal care and attention.12

  And having watched the world being more than half destroyed by males, and macho politics, women were in many cases faced with the actual responsibility for rebuilding families, businesses, farms, institutions, in the absence of ‘able-bodied’ men. The intimate, biological facts of life could no longer be hidden away as something never to be spoken about, even though, for generations, in many individual families, this was precisely what people did continue to do, or try to do. As late as the 1940s, Mass Observation surveys showed that ‘ordinary men and women have not even the vocabulary with which to frame enquiries and express their puzzlement. Husbands and wives are hampered in a discussion with one another. Parents, nowadays at least, are generally well-meaning, but are themselves too ignorant and inhibited to give reliable information to their children.’13 Betty Tucker, a Stoke-on-Trent railwayman’s daughter, recollected: ‘My dear old dad told me nothing but in the taxi going to the church he gave me a tin of Vaseline because he said I might be a bit sore that night.’ She did not tell him that she had already lost her virginity.14

  Although such matters were still occasions of shyness in the 1920s, and presumably still are for many people in the twenty-first century, Marie Stopes’s Married Love did alter the climate. And it could do so partly because so many stark physical facts confronted women in the years after the First World War. There was the fact that women still died in childbirth at a rate which by modern standards was ‘Third World’. In the 1920s, around 39,000 women died in childbirth in England and Wales.15 There was the fact that so many m
en had been killed in the war that for many women there would not be a chance of marriage. There was the fact of venereal disease.

  Marie Stopes saw her birth-control mission as addressed to all, but much of her pioneer work had been done in poor districts of London. Margaret Sanger, American socialist and pioneer of birth control, was viewed by Stopes as a rival, and indeed Marie would enjoy one of her ridiculous public feuds with Sanger. But, like Stopes, Sanger had been radicalized, both as a socialist and as a pioneer of sexual revolution, in the poor districts of American cities. William Sanger, her husband, was imprisoned in the United States for sending her pamphlet Family Limitation by post, something which infringed the Comstock Obscenity Laws. And the pamphlet was impounded by the British police in 1922.

  The poverty, degradation and disease to be encountered less than a hundred years ago in the slums of Europe and America is of a kind difficult for twenty-first century Western readers to envisage. Its scale was so vast that it is not surprising that it suggested desperate remedies to the minds which confronted it.

  It is here that we enter the strange territory of eugenics, the notion that by breeding, and limitation of birth, the social problems caused by poverty and overpopulation could be eliminated.

  Marie Stopes was early attracted to the Eugenics Society, which had been founded in 1908. Its first president was Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, and its aim was the specifically Darwinian one of eliminating the ‘unfit’ from future generations of the human race. Its founder’s purpose was to give ‘the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’.16 The Eugenics Society bore kinship to the much older Malthusian League, which Marie Stopes also supported. Charles Darwin had developed his idea of Evolution by Natural Selection after reading the economic theories of Thomas Malthus. It is obvious how the social Darwinists and the Malthusians should feed off one another’s ideas. They both saw the fundamental problem of society as being overpopulation, with the further refinement on behalf of the eugenicists that it should now be possible to eliminate those strains from the human species which in Galton’s word were ‘unsuitable’.

  The problem arises, for those who find, or place, themselves in a position where such social experimentation becomes possible: how do you define ‘suitability’? Obviously, on one level this is a simple question. One of the phenomena which helped Darwin become sure of his evolutionary theory was pigeon-breeding. It would surely be possible to breed out undesirable physical defects from the human race in the same way that pigeon-fanciers mate healthier specimens to get faster, sleeker birds? When in the late 1940s her son Harry fell in love with the daughter of Barnes Wallis, the aeronautical genius, Marie saw it as a disaster, since not only was Mary Wallis ‘plain and socially dreary’: she wore specs. Harry Roe, Marie’s son, was ‘exceptionally fine and should marry his peer in looks, inheritance and health’. For him to marry Mary Wallis was to ‘make a mock of our lives’ work for Eugenic breeding and the race’. It was also a crime against ‘his children (and posterity) … it is cruel to burden children with defective sight and the handicap of goggles’. A footnote in the biography of Marie Stopes by Ruth Hall points out that of the four children born of Mary and Harry Stopes-Roe’s marriage, two had slightly defective eyesight but all were useful and altruistic individuals. In other words, Marie’s fears were exaggerated.17

  Her belief in eugenics, however, was not some strange fad of her own. Although in the 1940s it became a discredited creed, because it was adopted with such enthusiasm by the German government, in the 1920s in England, nearly all bien pensant figures believed in it, and this from both left and right of the political spectrum. It was clear to the socialist Shaw as it was to the High Tory Dean Inge that eugenics was the Way Forward.

  Some socialists, however, smelt a rat in the eugenicists’ agenda. Stella Browne was not alone in finding a ‘class-bias and sex-bias’ in the eugenics programme. What Dean Inge candidly wanted was for the educated classes to breed, and the criminal and lower orders to be eliminated by Malthusian means. Great Britain would become an island populated by well-read, happy, well-behaved people who would not have swarms of proles threatening their stability. In 1922 the newspaper The Communist saw birth control as a capitalist quack remedy for unemployment which arose because ‘the unemployed today are beginning dimly to be class-conscious’.18 The controversy among the communists led to what one correspondent said was ‘a timely reminder that we should be Marxians first and Malthusian after’.

  Many women did not wish to be either. They merely wanted to live lives of less risk, and less circumscribed, wearying awfulness, than their mothers had done, which is why, in the 1920s, we see British families being so noticeably reduced in size. Following the opening of Marie Stopes’s first clinic, birth-control clinics opened in various parts of London. They were followed in 1925 by one in Wolverhampton, in 1926 by clinics in Manchester, Salford, East London, Glasgow, Oxford and Aberdeen. Then came Birmingham in 1927, Rotherham in 1928, Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929, Exeter, Nottingham and Pontypridd in 1930 and Bristol and Ashington in Northumberland in 1931.19 Women wanted and needed small families. Instinct, and the desire for a better life and for self-preservation, not theory, led them to it. In the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign, less than 20 per cent of all families in Britain had fewer than four children. By the 1930s, small families had become the norm, with only 19 per cent of families having more than three children.20

  This is the demographic fact, showing that, by whatever means, women had made a quiet revolution, which no huffing and puffing by public moralists would ever change. Although they did it because they wanted to do it, and because they had to, much of the credit must go to noisy, exhibitionistic Marie Stopes, who tirelessly went on campaigning. Her poet’s soul was never so carried away by romantic fancy that she shied away from the detail, prosaic as these often were. For example, the sale of the big Boots chemist empire – ‘the only firm known to poor people’ – to an American company allowed her to hope ‘this will remove Lady Boot’s influence, which was, in my opinion, the main factor in preventing them stocking any contraceptives’.21 That was in October 1921. The matter of how contraceptives were sold, and indeed, whether they should be sold at all, went on being keenly debated in a manner which even at the time must have seemed bizarre.

  Lord Dawson of Penn, the king’s physician, saw it as his duty in 1934 to bring a Bill before the House of Lords which attempted to limit the sale of contraceptives. ‘I venture to say,’ he told Their Lordships, ‘that no impartial observer of the events of today can doubt that birth control is here to stay and is part and parcel of our social fabric. I put it as a question of fact irrespective of whether we regret it or accept it. At the same time there is good cause for protecting young children and young persons from having contraceptives pushed at them by means of automatic machines in the public streets or by lurid displays in shops.’22 Lord Banbury of Southam questioned the logic of Dawson’s position. If it was right to have contraception, why restrict their sale? The answer was apparently supplied by the lord Bishop of London, whose imagination was inflamed by the use to which these objects were being put, not merely by the married but by the ‘loose living among the unmarried’. ‘I came back in my car late at night. Anybody who is doing that consistently, winter and summer, autumn and spring, and very often on by-roads and roads coming out of London, will know perfectly well what is going on in motor-cars held up at any hour of the evening or the night.’23 ‘Forgive me, my lords,’ went on the bishop, ‘if I speak hotly about it.’ He did indeed speak hotly, and his speech showed how clearly class and race are always in people’s minds when they discuss the matter of birth control.

  ‘I regret greatly the passing of those old Victorian families. I am one of such a family and proud of the fact, and when I look round the British Empire, I should love to see far more of our British children filling up the empty spaces. I should like to see Briti
sh families spread over the earth, multiplying abundantly.’ (Dean Inge took the trouble to look up the forty diocesan bishops in Who’s Who and found that one had five children, two had four each and the remaining thirty-seven had a mere twenty-eight children between them.)24 The Bishop of London then wound up to a splendid peroration, asking whether ‘it is really possible to think that there is no harm in these filthy things being sent as they are to every engaged couple in the country … I look upon the whole thing as downgrade. When I hear of 400,000 being manufactured every week, I would like to make a bonfire of them and dance round it.’25 This must rank as one of the strangest speeches – and this is saying something – ever uttered in the House of Lords.

  Not that the Lords had a monopoly of strange ideas when sex was being considered. In August 1928, a slightly sentimental novel by Radclyffe Hall called The Well of Loneliness was published, and the editor of the Sunday Express, James Douglas, published an article under the headline ‘A Book That Must Be Suppressed’. The book was a celebration, in the chastest language imaginable, of love between women. ‘I say deliberately,’ wrote Douglas, ‘that this novel is not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library.’ He believed that it would encourage the growth of ‘perversion’, of which there was already far too much evidence. ‘I have seen the plague stalking shamelessly through great social assemblies. I have heard it whispered about by young men and young women who do not and cannot grasp its unutterable putrefaction. Both aspects of it are thrust upon healthy and innocent minds. The contagion cannot be escaped. It pervades our social life.’