Marie Stopes – Liberator of women, or racially motivated eugenicist? I

Marie Stopes – Liberator of women, or racially motivated eugenicist?

The word ‘eugenics’, one that we will consider extensively in this presentation, was coined by a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, in 1883. I don’t think that it is entirely an accident that it was a relation of the great champion of ‘natural selection’ that sought to harness this idea and turn it to practical ends. If nothing else it is a characteristically English response to ‘theory’. Such was the interest, however, in this application of evolutionism that by the early part of the twentieth century ‘eugenics’ (by then a household word) was an eminently fashionable opinion, propagandised not only by great writers such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, but also by industrialists and politicians as well as scientists, including the early organic farmer and vegetarian John Harvey Kellogg of Corn Flakes fame (more on this later), John Maynard Keynes, Sidney Webb, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood of America and the American Birth Control League (the same Sanger accused of planning the elimination of Black Americans through coercive abortion in the infamous Negro Project).[1] Marie Stopes was among these pioneering spirits, inflamed by the utopian ideal of human perfection and beauty that could be planned into existence by genetic science in much the same way as the communists thought they could engineer human souls through socialist planning. Indeed there is an air both of revolutionary militancy and pseudoscience about the whole subject.

What, then, is ‘eugenics’? Sir Francis Galton himself defined it in 1883 as ‘the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations’.[2] The list of its proponents above give some other clues as to the import of this new ‘science’: that human beings are considered primarily in this ‘study’ as ‘racial’ materials; that selective breeding for ‘quality’, on the analogy with crops and farm animals, is the goal of eugenic practice, and consequently anticipates the moral aim of human life; that it is the ‘control’ of birth, primarily, that will serve this aim, and hence the need to alter our understanding of the nature and use of marriage. Despite the left-leaning positions of many of these thinkers, it also becomes patently obvious that it is the poor, the sick, the destitute, and the alien of whatever sort, who are the primary objects of this tender solicitude.

Indeed, one would think, judging by the image she has in the liberal press, that Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was some kind of secular saint, struggling valiantly against procrustean and backward patriarchal oppression in favour of the liberation of women, wrestling sex and marriage from the prurience of the church, and, by today’s standards, pioneering that last great challenge, to save the world from climate change by helping to reduce population growth. Stopes, born in Scotland in 1880, studied botany and geology at University College London, and went on to make a name for herself as a paleobotanist. She was, consequently, very much an evolutionist, and her understanding of humanity, emanating as it does from this philosophy, is very much at the foundation of her work in both birth control and eugenic ‘science’. And of course the University of Manchester is happy to present her on a blue plaque as a great scientist and progressive, not to speak of the commemorative stamp bearing her image issued in 2008. The truth of the matter is a little harder to stomach, however, even if the power of the so-called pro-choice lobby is such that the reality of Marie Stopes’s views and ideas is hardly ever heard. As a matter of fact there was little to separate her in outlook, and even scientific practice, from Dr. Josef Mengele. She was, to put it quite simply, an aggressive racist, and a campaigner for the most breathtakingly punitive forms of eugenic practice. One need only select a few choice quotations from her writings to put the case admirably. So, for example, in a work published in 1920 in The Control of Parenthood, edited by James Marchant, Marie Stopes says of the possibility of leading the human race into a promised ‘utopia’, that:

Those who are grown up in the present active generations, the matured and hardened, with all their weaknesses and flaws, cannot do very much, though they may do something with themselves. They can, however, study the conditions under which they came into being, discover where lie the chief sources of defect, and eliminate those sources of defect from the coming generation so as to remove from those who are still to be born the needless burdens the race has carried.[3]

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[1] If this is usually cited as a conspiracy theory, we shouldn’t necessarily be so dismissive. It is perfectly possible for ‘well-intentioned’ liberal ideas to end up with this kind of policy, without ever being anything less than ‘reasonable’. Take a hypothetical scenario in which one racial minority group is on average less intelligent than the racial majority group. It is more likely that the racial minority group will be submitted to a eugenics program rather than the least intelligent members of the whole population. It’s simply an easier choice for policy makers. See, for example, Richard Lynn, Genetics: A Reassessment (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001).

[2] Cited in Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls and Eight Windows, 2004), p. 18.

[3] Marie C. Stopes, "Racial and Imperial Aspects, (section) II" in The Control of Parenthood, ed. by James Marchant (London: Putnam & Sons, 1920), pp. 208-209 (207-222).