Early Crusader

The marriage was ill-starred and the ioman Catholic wife, the former Marie Carmichael Stopes, eventually got an annulment. From years of married frustration (the church recognized her as virgo intacta), the 38-year-old doctor of science, authority on paleobotany (fossils) ind coal, drew the inspiration for a tract on what the marriage bed should be. Its title: Married Love.

Though it was clear that some of he rhapsodic writing in Married Love temmed from the author's fantasies, it ,lso contained a lot of down-to-earth ommon sense. The marriage bed, its uthor proclaimed, was for pleasure as veil as procreation. The wife can and hould be a full partner, allowed to take he initiative and to enjoy fulfillment, way with the Victorian idea that a nice" woman should be the passive, un complaining object of her husband's bestial libidinous urges.

Bans & Brickbats. It seems strange that such views, widely accepted now, should have caused an uproar. But Married Love was published in 1918. Though it soon became a runaway bestseller in Britain, it remained banned in the U.S, as obscene until 1931, when Judge John M. Woolsey cleared it. (He later did the same for James Joyce's Ulysses.) Hard on the heels of Married Love, red-haired Author Stopes turned out Wise Parenthood. The idea of using artificial contraceptives to space pregnancies was then as repugnant to the Church of England as to the Church of Rome: in both, clerics denounced the woman and her works.

In 1921, backed financially and morally by Second Husband Humphrey Verdon Roe (a wealthy airplane manufacturer), Marie Stopes founded the world's first birth-control clinic in London. At its opening, crowds yelled that she was immoral, threw brickbats. But London's women made the clinic a success. Marie Stopes founded others up and down Britain. Gradually the stone throwing and vilification stopped (though the London Times for a while slapped a ban on ads for her books and clinics, kept it in effect until 1953). Thus far, Married Love has sold more than 1,000,000 copies in a dozen languages. And sexology has marched far beyond the outposts of Marie Stopes. In later years she was more often shocked than shocking. When the late Alfred C. Kinsey brought out his "female volume" (TIME, Aug. 24, 1953), Dr. Stopes protested: "It shames American womanhood."

As the tumult and the shouting and the innumerable suits and countersuits in the law courts waned, so did Marie Stopes's sense of scientific precision. She got a few weird ideas about how the marriage bed should be placed (always in a north-south direction, "in tune with magnetic currents"). Last winter she became ill, attributed it vaguely to "radioactivity in the atmosphere." Last week, widowed since 1949, she died in Surrey.

So What? As a Harley Street admirer put it: "In these days of family planning, female emancipation, and ideas of equality in sexual pleasure, it is easy to see Dr. Stopes and say, 'So what?' We have to place her in her own age, when such things were quite beyond the pale--and that was not so long ago." The times had passed her by, but it was because she had done so much to shape them.

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