Previous installments in this series can be found here. There will be spoilers. “An historian” is a perfectly acceptable Commonwealth convention, haters to the left [side of the road.]
Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was a remarkable person. The daughter of progressive intellectuals, she earned a science degree (botany and geology) from University College, London, in 1902 before becoming the first woman to take a PhD in botany from the Botanical Institute in Munich and the first woman to be appointed assistant lecturer in the same subject at Manchester University. She enjoyed a glittering academic career; when she married in 1911, she kept her own name and voiced support for women’s suffrage. That marriage, though, was something of a disaster: Stopes later claimed that she had had to educate herself on the physical realities of sex and pregnancy by studying relevant texts in the British Library, and the marriage was annulled in 1916 on the strength of Stopes’s claim that it was unconsummated. She became involved in sexology and, from there, the birth control movement.
In 1918, Stopes published the huge bestseller Married Love; she also married the book’s financial backer and fellow contraception advocate, Humphrey Verdon Roe, and became pregnant for the first time. Stopes believed that sexual intercourse within marriage was not solely for the procreation of children. She hoped that, in Married Love, “average healthy mating creatures will find the key to happiness which should be the portion of each.” She also believed that birth control helped parents to have “healthy, happy, desired, babies,” a goal she linked, in common with many of her contemporaries, with the eugenicist goal of improving the human stock through careful breeding. Stopes became the most famous birth control and sexual education advocate in Britain, opening clinics and publishing and lecturing widely over the following decades.
The specter of unwanted pregnancy loomed over three characters in last night’s episode. Anna is confronted with the possibility that she might have gotten pregnant when Green raped her. Lady Edith is lectured on the dangers of pre-marital sex by Aunt Rosamund. And Edna presses Tom for a promise to marry her if it turns out she’s pregnant after their dubious encounter (the details of which are left rather murky). In the dénouement of this sordid narrative arc, Mrs. Hughes bluffs, telling Edna that she has confiscated Married Love from her room and knows she’s practicing contraception, threatening, too, to have a doctor forcibly examine her for signs of pregnancy. The bluff works and Edna flees in disgrace, leaving the viewer to wonder what, exactly, is in the slim volume that Mrs. Hughes hands back so disdainfully.
Happily for the curious viewer, Married Love and its much more contraception-focused sequel, Wise Parenthood, are both freely available in full on the internet. One can only imagine the sharp-nosed Edna settling down to learn how to prevent pregnancy and being confronted with over 150 pages of prose and chapter titles such “The Heart’s Desire” and “The Fundamental Pulse.” Page after page explore the various ways in which married couples might struggle to achieve sexual happiness together: this is, at its heart, a handbook about how to have a companionate marriage, a marriage that is not a contract for procreation and running a household but a physical and emotional union. Married Love is a vanguard for the very ideals of marital harmony and mutual fulfillment that animate our advice columns and couples therapists to this day. It is also a passionate endorsement of female sexuality—an ode of feminist sex positivity couched in the slightly hilarious language of early twentieth century progressives:
Both law and custom have strengthened the view that [the husband] has the right to approach his wife [sexually] whenever he wishes, and that she has no wishes and no fundamental needs in the matter at all. That woman has a rhythmic sex tide which, if its indications were obeyed, would ensure not only her enjoyment and an accession of health and vitality … seems not to be suspected. We have studied the wave-lengths of water, of sound, of light; but when will the sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide in woman and learn the laws of her Periodicity of Recurrence of desire?
What, then, of birth control? Stopes discusses early withdrawal and alludes to its potential to prevent pregnancy, but deprecates it as leaving “the woman in ‘mid-air’ as it were; to leave her stimulated and unsatisfied.” Prevention of pregnancy, she writes, “may be done either by shutting the sperms away from the opening of the womb, or by securing the death of all … of the two to six hundred million sperms which enter the woman,” adding: “Their minute and uncovered bodies are plasmolised in weak acid, such as vinegar and water, or by a solution of quinine, or by many other substances.”
Edna would have found more detailed information in Wise Parenthood, though Stopes is clear, here, that her advice is intended for married couples wishing to limit their family size. She endorses “a small rubber cap, made on a firm rubber ring, which is accurately fixed round the dome-like end of the womb” and secured by suction, perhaps used in conjunction with quinine or soap as a spermicide. The problem for Edna, of course, would be obtaining an appropriate version of such a device as an unmarried woman. Stopes also discusses condoms, or “sheaths under various names, formed either from rubber, skin, or treated silk,” but argues that they disrupt the physical intimacy of sex. Finally, she condemns a range of the methods that would have been most accessible to a lady’s maid in Yorkshire in 1922, particularly douching with lysol, carbolic acid, vinegar, or salt.
Rudimentary as all these methods sound to modern ears, it is the case that a small family had become a social norm by the 1920s and 1930s, indicating widespread use of methods of fertility control. Stopes was not the first the publicize these methods; handbills and pamphlets had been increasingly available from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Her innovation, rather, was to make them increasingly respectable. A woman like Mrs. Hughes was disgusted at the idea of Edna using birth control; she might not have been so disturbed at the idea of Anna and Mr. Bates taking similar steps to plan their family. Similarly, the worldly Aunt Rosamund might have had more practical advice on preventing pregnancy were Lady Edith already married. The use of such methods was endorsed by people such as Marie Stopes not as a mode of individual sexual liberation (as would be the case with the Pill in the 1960s) but a way to enrich married and family life and to produce fewer, healthier, and more secure children. And yet, as Married Love shows, it is impossible to disentangle those goals from personal sexual agency and fulfillment; technologies developed in the service of one aim are inevitably redeployed to other ends.
***
Sources
Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Lesley A. Hall, “Stopes, Marie Charlotte Carmichael (1880-1958),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, online edition, May 2008), at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36323 (subscription site).
Marie Stopes, Married Love (1918)
Marie Stopes, Wise Parenthood (1918)
Image of stem pessary IUD courtesy of Science Museum London.
Tags: downton abbey, history, mo moulton, television, watching downton abbey with an historian
“God’s teeth,” said Mrs. Mebane. “What is it? Tell me quickly. Is it a school? No. Or is it…? For Lord’s sakes. It is!”
“It is what?” asked Dad.
“It’s your family. Don’t try to deny it. They’re the spit and image of you, and your wife, too.”
“I was about to introduce you,” said Dad. “Mrs. Mebane, let me introduce you to the family — or most of it. Seems to me like there should be some more of them around here someplace.”
“God help us all.”
“How many head of children do we have now, Lillie, would you say offhand?”
“Last time I counted, seems to me there was an even dozen of them,” said Mother. “I might have missed one or two of them, but not many.”
“I’d say twelve would be a pretty fair guess,” Dad said.
“Shame on you! And within eighteen miles of national headquarters.”
That book as a kid made me want eleven siblings before I realized what TWELVE CHILDREN would entail. That’s a lot of kids.
And the saddest part of the story was that there was never a point of time when all 12 Gilbreths were alive at once. Mary, the second child, died of diphtheria when she was 5, long before the last children were born.
The book mentions this only in a *footnote,* which is incredible.
(Also: Anne, Mary, Ernestine, Martha, Frank, Bill, Lill, Fred, Dan, Jack, Bob, Jane. Can still name ’em all without looking.)
The part about Mary always bothered me, too.
Whenever I hear news segments about preventing obesity by incorporating more movement into everyday life, I think of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth rolling in their graves.
Rolling? Don’t you mean efficiently turning only the exact amount necessary?
Love this! As usual.
I remember hearing something in one of my women’s studies classes in college about how many women douched with lysol or other chemicals and did that whole, well if a little bit is good a lot must be better thing and then got terrible chemical burns. So…yeah, probably not recommended.
I’m so glad you covered this! I was curious after that episode.
I am glad for this post. It definitely makes up for the unpleasant “Confess, you wicked temptress Jezebel with your wicked temptress Magically Contraceptive books! Or we will sexually humiliate you into confessing, which is no more than you deserve you vile slut!” vibe of that scene. I mean, qua individual character, Edna is a nasty piece of work (although kind of unmotivated? Like, based on how totally not into her TB is, what exactly was her deal? How did she think this was going to work? What exactly did she want out of this?), but the bigger picture in which the world is full of scheming Potiphar’s Lady’s Maids trying to lure innocent young men into bed and entrap them is just a bit problematic, don’t you think?
(It’s almost as if they had to balance the rape plotline with a plotline that would reassure viewers that “Don’t worry: most of the time when women claim they were taken advantage of by more powerful men, they’re lying.”)
One as a young undergraduate, I was regaled by a harrowing tale from my professor about how he was researching early condom sales in the archives, like you do, and he reached his hand into the box to take out the next document and… pulled out an early twentieth-century condom.
And was promptly converged upon by archivists, who were horrified that the rubber was in there with the paper because apparently rubber needs to be preserved under different conditions than paper.
One as a young undergraduate, I was regaled by a harrowing tale from my professor about how he was researching early condom sales in the archives, like you do, and he reached his hand into the box to take out the next document and… pulled out an early twentieth-century condom.
And was promptly converged upon by archivists, who were horrified that the rubber was in there with the paper because apparently rubber needs to be preserved under different conditions than paper.
And the saddest part of the story was that there was never a point of time when all 12 Gilbreths were alive at once. Mary, the second child, died of diphtheria when she was 5, long before the last children were born.
The book mentions this only in a *footnote,* which is incredible.
(Also: Anne, Mary, Ernestine, Martha, Frank, Bill, Lill, Fred, Dan, Jack, Bob, Jane. Can still name 'em all without looking.)
When I studied ancient history, I did research on early methods of birth control. I got an A on the project, but the Professor noted that he was surprised that a “nice” girl like me was interested in “this sordid stuff.”
Does anyone else think that what happened between Edna and Branson was rape? I mean, if the genders were swapped and he gave her alcohol and then snuck in her bedroom to have his way with her, everyone would have been yelling about last week being the episode with two rapes. But because it’s a dude that was taken advantage of, it seems to have been brushed aside. It makes me feel kind of squicky inside that I haven’t seen anyone more outraged what she did to him.
I was not totally clear on what was happening with Tom last week until the confrontation this week, while Anna’s sexual assault was much more overt. Someone mentioned this last week in one of the comments, and I was like, “Wait, that happened?” and had to go back and rewatch the end of the episode.
Yeah, I watched the series a month or so ago via “magical internet ways” and so I’ve been mulling this one over for a while. The more I thought on it the more I was disgusted with what she did.
Unfortunately, Julian Fellowes strikes me as the sort of person who only sees rape as a physically violent crime, like what we saw with Anna. But people have been wondering if Mary was raped back in S1, when Pemuk more or less emotionally blackmailed her into letting him stay, using her desire from earlier to confuse her, even though she was quite adamant at the time for him to leave her room, and only allowed him to stay when she thought she had no other choice (historically accurate? Perhaps, but it’s still shady). I believe Tom was raped (like you said, if the situation were reversed, it would be no question), but again, sadly because he was male and his attacker was female, this is sometimes harder for people to accept. And like with Mary’s case in S1, Fellowes never really goes and says that Tom was fully taken advantage of by someone else, even though he wasn’t sober and knew what was happening, while Edna was and was fully aware of what she was doing. This is a perfect example of date rape, but it’s brushed aside as “oh he just got drunk and had sex with her”–but it was more than that; yeah, Tom got drunk, but he didn’t stumble into his room *with* her–he went to bed, unassuming she was going to come in, and she did. What’s really disgusting if you think about it, was that she probably used his emotional vulnerabilities about Sybil against him, perhaps even making him *think* she was Sybil 🙁
Womb veils for everyone!
I always wonder when I hear how the ‘conception is preventable’ campaigns were hand in hand with ‘women can orgasm’ campaigns – is this basically because women were mainly ‘sure, I could use your methods to prevent conception but, um, why exactly? I mean, just so he gets to poke me more often? Because that’s not super appealing, know what I’m saying?’
I would like to see a discussion of the options for unmarried pregnant aristocrats. In the Episode 6, which I just watched in the U.S., Edith says she doesn’t want to end up a social outcast, a “funny woman” who lives in “Maida Vale” whom nobody talks about. What kind of district was Maida Vale in the 1920s?
So I’m still wondering what was in the little box that Anna purchased for Lady Mary? Was it an IUD or condom?
It looked to be a cervical cap attached to a long string. There was a glimpse of it in the episode where Bates went looking for Anna’s button box and found it.
I wonder WHY Anna was ashamed to purchase the item… I tough she used something to avoid pregnancy as well – but I am not sure what. She was NOT worried that her rapist could get her pregnant. I tough the scene was funny, but it didn’t fit Anna’s character and experience. 🙁