In the previous article, I set out the evidence which showed that Marie Stopes established the Mothers’ Clinic to achieve her eugenic goals. Despite all of the evidence, you would never know it, because these aspects are frequently obfuscated. When researching Exterminating Poverty (with Neil Sutherland), we became familiar with the techniques used, and I outline a few of these below.
The omission
The omission fails to mention Stopes’ eugenic agenda at all. One example is the BBC’s History page.
“In 1921, Stopes opened a family planning clinic in Holloway, north London, the first in the country. It offered a free service to married women […] The Catholic church was Stopes’s fiercest critic. In 1923, Stopes sued Catholic doctor Halliday Sutherland for libel.”
British Broadcasting Corporation. (2018, December 28). History. Marie Stopes (1880-1958). Retrieved from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/stopes_marie_carmichael.shtml.
The flat denial
Related to the omission is the flat denial. For example, speaking in the context of August 1930, Harry Stopes-Roe wrote:
“Reaction to the growing success of the birth control movement was varied. Under the headline “The Comparative Danger to the State of Moral Defectives and Mental Defectives” the Catholic Herald made a violent attack on the supporters of birth control in general and Marie Stopes in particular. It accused them of demanding “The sterilization of the unfit” which was, of course, quite untrue.”
Page 64 “Marie Stopes and Birth Control” by Harrry Stopes-Roe and Ian Scott. Priory Press Limited, 1974.
Were the Catholic assertions “quite untrue”? In relation to “the supporters of birth control in general,” The Eugenics Society had been campaigning for sterilization for years. In 1928, the Society published the first draft of a Sterilization Bill. In 1929, it set up a Committee for Legalising Eugenic Sterilization and, in 1931, one of the committee members introduced a measure into Parliament. In relation to “Stopes in particular,” her advocacy for the sterilization of the unfit given in part one of this article.
As an aside, the example comes from Marie Stopes and Birth Control written by her son, Harry Stopes-Roe and Ian Scott (1974, Priory Press Limited). The word “eugenics” does not feature in the text and, while references are made to it, they are so oblique that you will miss them unless you have prior-knowledge of the subject. Given the book was aimed at the senior high school level, the reader is unlikely to have this knowledge and this book will not enlighten them. So on page 79, for instance, there is a photograph of Harry Stopes-Roe and family with Sir (later Lord) Russell Brain at the opening of the Marie Stopes Memorial Clinic in 1961. The context is not provided: that the Trust was established by the Eugenics Society to handle her bequest or that Sir Russell was a member of the Society.
The downplay – direct.
In an interview on BBC Radio Five Live Lesley Hall, a renowned expert on Stopes. The interviewer asked why Stopes “… was so committed to offering reproductive choices — had it anything to do with eugenics?” Hall replied:
“Very little… it was basically about enabling women to control their health and space out… to have healthy babies… she was very much about healthier babies and she saw that basically about enabling women to, you know, control their own motherhood and have space babies out and to be able to be better mothers”.
“The Emma Barnett Show” 17th November 2020. BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pg5z (accessed 18 November 2020).
While Hall does acknowledge that Stopes’ work was something to do with eugenics, it is minimised and she emphasised the least-controversial aspect. Anyone listening to the broadcast will form an impression that accusations of eugenics are overstated.
A variant of this technique was provided by Deborah Cohen [1] who suggests that Stopes she wasn’t a very good eugenicist (Cohen awards no points for effort!).
The downplay – indirect
With this technique, you make statements are made which are objectively true, but use a word that has the effect of undermining the veracity of the statement. An example of this technique occurred in Clare Debenham’s article at theconversation.com and The Independent in which she wrote:
“Stopes has fallen out of favour today […] But the underlying reason for the controversy was her alleged support for eugenics, the discredited science of racial progress.” [emphasis added]
“Jenni Murray, presenter of BBC’s Woman’s Hour, indicated that she omitted Stopes from her 2016 book on groundbreaking women because of Stopes’s supposed support for eugenics.” [emphasis added]
Of course, that something was “alleged” and “supposed” does not, of itself, indicate the veracity of the claim because something alleged or supposed might be true. In my opinion though, provides a subtext that the statement might not be true. Later in the article, Debenham wrote: “Stopes certainly used eugenic arguments when it suited her, but she was a maverick eugenicist.”
The straw man
The straw man argument — set up a weak argument so you can demolish it — is, in my experience, the most popular. Three often-repeated stories about Stopes are: she sent a book of love poems to Hitler, that she was angry that her son was marrying a woman who was short-sighted or the unpublished doggerel “Catholics, Prussians, Jews and Russians are a curse, or something worse”.
The stories are memorable which is probably why they are repeated, and they are red herrings which are easily countered. Love described the nature of the poems in the book, not poems expressing love for Hitler; her tirade against Mary Barnes-Wallace was the over-reaction of an mother-in-law over-possessive of her only son, the doggerel was unpublished. These straw men are easily destroyed!
“Roman Catholic doctor”
A version of the straw man labels Dr Halliday Sutherland as a “Roman Catholic doctor”. The description is appropriate: Sutherland was, after all, a Roman Catholic doctor. On the other hand, it is well-known that the teachings of the Catholic Church oppose the use of artificial contraceptives so it frames the Stopes v Sutherland battle in terms of “Catholics against contraceptives”. Having given Sutherland reason enough to oppose Stopes, they fail to mention that he was a specialist in tuberculosis (a disease of poverty) and that prominent eugenicists in the medical establishment viewed the disease as a rough but effective way to kill the weak. “Roman Catholic doctor” gives a motive to Dr. Sutherland and avoids raising Stopes’ eugenic agenda.
The final two labels describe the cumulative outcome of these techniques, namely “the Onion,” the “Erudite Misinformed” and the “Righteous Writer”.
The onion
When Neil Sutherland and myself were researching Exterminating Poverty we perceived a pattern which we referred to as “the onion”. The analogy refers to the layers of information that were uncovered during our research.
Of course, as you delve deeper into an issue you access details that you previously did not know about. In researching Exterminating Poverty though, the odd thing was that peeling back the layers revealed information that was not only inconsistent with, but even contradicted what we had previously understood. In terms of the analogy, it was as if peeling back the outer layers of the onion revealed an apple or an orange underneath.
The first example relates to Stopes’ attitude to abortion. The surface layer (so-to-speak) stated that she neither advocated nor supported abortion. The inner layer reveals that she advocated abortion privately. Source: Birth Control Nursing in Marie Stopes’ Mothers Clinics 1921-31 by Pauline Brand. A second example relates to the Gold Pin or Gold Spring. On the surface, Stopes never used the Gold Pin at the clinic and sent two correspondents to Dr. Norman Haire to be fitted with it. The inner layer reveals that she made an arrangement with Lambert of Dalston that women who wanted to be fitted with the Pin could be sent to the Clinic’s doctor, Jane Lorimer Hawthorne.
The Erudite Misinformed, the Righteous Writer
The result is the work of the “Erudite Misinformed” and, as we draw closer to the Centenary of the Mothers’ Clinic on 17th March 2021, their articles will no doubt increase.
These articles begin “well on the one hand… Stopes made contraceptives readily available to British women” progress to “and then on the other hand… she also believed in eugenics” before concluding in the middle “so on balance… Well, we all have faults don’t we? But everyone was a eugenicist back then. I mean, have you ever tried to make an omelet without breaking eggs?” While concluding somewhere in the middle seems to be the erudite position to take, it isn’t if the position of the “middle” was found relative to false information. The Erudite Misinformed are erudite, balanced, and wrong.
The “Righteous Writer” is younger, less well-known, and more “woke” than the “Erudite Misinformed”. They sing the praises of Stopes’ contraceptive work, they get in a dig at Dr. Sutherland for opposing it (see: “Roman Catholic doctor” above) and end with a statement deploring Stopes’ eugenic beliefs. They do not realise (or if they do, I have yet to read one) that their deploring Stopes’ eugenics aligns them with Dr. Sutherland because he too deplored Stopes’ eugenic beliefs. He did this not because he was “woke”, but because it was right. That said, deploring eugenics now is easy, whereas in Dr. Sutherland’s time it was to oppose the new, shiny, settled (capital-S) Science.
In the next article in this series, I will present some of the reasons that biographers and hagiographers take the positions that they take.
[1] See: Marie Stopes and The English Birth Control Movement being the proceedings of a Conference organised by the Galton Institute, London, 1996. Robert A Peel editor. Published by The Galton Institute.