Marie Stopes
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain, which bore her name for much of its 100-year history. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes publicly opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed, though her actions in private were at odds with her public pronouncements.
Early life and education
Stopes was born in Edinburgh. Her father, Henry Stopes, was a brewer, engineer, architect and palaeontologist from Colchester. Her mother was Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, a Shakespearean scholar and women's rights campaigner from Edinburgh. At six weeks old, her parents took Stopes from Scotland; the family stayed briefly in Colchester then moved to London, where in 1880 her father bought 28 Cintra Park in Upper Norwood. Both of her parents were members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where they had met. At an early age, she was exposed to science and was taken to meetings where she met the famous scholars of the day. At first, she was home-schooled, but from 1892 to 1894 she attended St George's School for Girls in Edinburgh. Stopes was later sent to the North London Collegiate School, where she was a close friend of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn. One of her teachers Clotilde von Wyss was very fond of her.Stopes primarily focused on her science career in her 20s and 30s. Stopes attended the University of London in 1900, at University College London as a scholarship student, where she studied botany and geology; she graduated with a first class B.Sc. in 1902 after only two years by attending both day and night schools at Birkbeck, University of London.
Stopes's father died in 1902 leaving her family in financial ruin. Her palaeobotany professor, Francis Oliver, took her under his wing and hired her as his research assistant in early 1903. This is what sparked her interest in palaeobotany, building a platform to begin her career.
Oliver was on the verge of debatably one of the greatest finds in palaeobotany when he took Stopes on as a research assistant. Initially, it was thought that most of the fossil plants found in Carboniferous Coal Measures were ferns, Stopes was tasked to find the specimens that showed better connection with the seeds of fern fronds. It was discovered that some of the "ferns" bore seeds. "Seed ferns" became known and recognized as the missing link between ferns and conifers. They later became known as the pteridosperm. She was provided the opportunity to work with the world's leading experts in palaeobotany at the time. Within the same year she won the Gilchrist scholarship from University College London, with the help of Oliver and her geology professor, Edmund Garwood who provided incredible references.
Following this, Stopes earned a D.Sc. degree from University College London, becoming the youngest person in Britain to have done so. In 1903 she published a study of the botany of the recently dried-up Ebbsfleet River. After carrying out research on Carboniferous plants at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and at University College, London, she put the money she received from the Gilchrist Scholarship towards a year's worth of funding her study on the reproduction of living cycads at the University of Munich. There, she worked with Karl Goebel, who was a leading palaeobotanist on cycads. Stopes used this study as her doctoral dissertation, she presented her dissertation in German and received a PhD in botany in 1904. She was, in 1904, one of the first women to be elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and was appointed a demonstrator in order to teach students. She was also a fellow and occasional lecturer in palaeobotany at University College, London until 1920.
Scientific research
At age 23, Stopes secured her first job in the world of academia, holding the post of lecturer in palaeobotany at the Victoria University of Manchester from 1904 to 1910; in this capacity she became the first female academic of that university. She was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 2 May 1905, giving her details as Stopes, Marie C., B.Sc., Ph.D., Demonstrator of Botany in the University of Manchester. 11, Kensington Avenue, Victoria Park, Manchester. It was during this period that she met William Boyd-Dawkins and Frederick Ernst Weiss. Dawkins was a friend of her father and a board member at the university and advocated for her teaching position when members of the senate opposed the concept of having a woman teach young men. Stopes was known around the campus as a partier: she would socialize freely with staff, colleagues, and a few students, or 'flirt'.During Stopes's time at Manchester, she studied coal and coal balls and researched the collection of Glossopteris. This was an attempt to prove the theory of Eduard Suess concerning the existence of Gondwana or Pangaea. A chance meeting with Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott during one of his fund-raising lectures in 1904 brought a possibility of proving Suess's theory. Stopes's passion to prove Suess's theory led her to discuss the possibility of joining Scott's next expedition to Antarctica. She did not join the expedition, but Scott promised to bring back samples of fossils to provide evidence for the theory. Scott died during the 1912 Terra Nova Expedition, but fossils of plants from the Queen Maud Mountains found near Scott's and his companions' bodies provided this evidence.
Her study of Carboniferous coal balls with Francis Oliver during her time at University College London proved pivotal, and coupled with Dawkins's and Weiss's influence at Victoria University of Manchester, helped spark Stopes's intrigue in this area of research, aided, in part, by her close proximity to coal seams in the north of England. These seams held calcareous nodules that preserved the anatomical structure of the permineralized peat that formed the coal balls. Her motive behind this research was driven, in part, by the importance of coal to the British Empire as its main source of fuel. The mines for these coal balls were close to Manchester, and Stopes became distinct from other palaeobotanists by directly going to these mines and observing the coal on site.
During this period of her research, Stopes first worked with James Lomax, a manufacturer of petrographic thin sections. She and Lomax did not get along; as a result, she decided to work with David Meredith-Seares Watson, one of her undergraduate students. Together, they investigated the coal-bearing strata of northern England. Their findings led them to hypothesize that the coal balls native to the area were formed when marine water permeated carboniferous peat mires. They proved that the coal balls had formed in situ, and the nodules had not been transported, which was being claimed at the time. With the coal balls being closely associated with overlying marine bands, Stopes and Watson came to the conclusion that the carbonate in the coal balls washed into the coal swamps from adjacent seas. This was contested while showcasing at conferences, but eventually the evidence became sustainable enough that this finding became one of the greatest contributions to the field.
Continuing in the vein of coal ball research, Stopes expanded her studies to include those from the Mesozoic era. This represented an exciting new area of study for her, as little evidence of anatomically preserved Mesozoic plants had been found at that time. Seeking advice from other academics in the field, she received leads for areas of potential study in India and Japan, the latter of which would become important later on. The most promising region at that time proved to be much closer to home, and on 22 March 1907, during the middle of a massive heat wave, Stopes and Watson departed for the Jurassic coast of northeast Scotland, to the coal-mining town of Brora, on the Moray Firth.
Stopes theorized that Brora would harbor the type of Mesozoic coal balls she was in search of. This form of geological prediction, 'geoprophesy' as Stopes called it, is formally known as biostratigraphy, and was originally formulated by 17th century Danish scientist Nicholas Steno. Upon arriving in Brora, they discovered the town's coal mining operations were still in full operation, and as a result, were unable to gain access to the mines. Instead, the pair set their sights on the coastline, and despite finding some fossil specimens of interest, were unable to locate any coal balls. Despite this setback, the flora fossils they did recover were the first Middle Jurassic period specimens to be uncovered in that region, and demonstrated a biostratigraphic link between the Scottish and north east English coasts.
After returning home to Manchester in April 1907, Stopes set about processing her Brora discoveries for publication. However, a previous endeavour from the year before would come to bear fruit. During her Brora research, Stopes had been in correspondence with several high-profile geologists of the time, including John Wesley Judd and Albert Charles Seward, and these two men helped Stopes secure her first major grant, which she had applied for in 1906. The purpose of this £85 grant was to allow her to conduct her research into Mesozoic coal balls in Japan, and on 19 May 1907, it was granted by the Royal Society. In six weeks, Stopes concluded her Brora research, and made arrangements to depart for Japan on 3 July 1907. She spent eighteen months at the Imperial University, Tokyo and explored coal mines on Hokkaido for fossilized plants. As with the Brora study, Stopes failed to locate any Mesozoic coal balls in Japan either, but did manage to discover many important fossils, such as the Cretaceous angiosperm floras, which she wrote about in her 1909 article "Plant containing nodules from Japan" for the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, London. She also published her Japanese experiences as a diary, called "Journal from Japan: a daily record of life as seen by a scientist", in 1910.
In 1910, the Geological Survey of Canada commissioned Stopes to determine the age of the Fern Ledges, a geological structure at Saint John, New Brunswick. It is part of the Early Pennsylvanian epoch Lancaster Formation. Canadian scholars were divided between dating it to the Devonian period or to the Pennsylvanian. Stopes arrived in North America before Christmas to start her research. On 29 December, she met the Canadian researcher Reginald Ruggles Gates in St. Louis, Missouri; they became engaged two days later. Starting her work on the Fern Ledges in earnest in February 1911, she did geological field work and researched at geological collections in museums, and shipped specimens to England for further investigation. The couple married in March and returned to England on 1 April that year. Stopes continued her research. In mid-1912 she delivered her results, finding for the Pennsylvanian period of the Carboniferous. The Government of Canada published her results in 1914. Later that year, her marriage to Gates was annulled.
During the First World War, Stopes was engaged in studies of coal for the British government, which culminated in the writing of "Monograph on the constitution of coal" with R.V. Wheeler in 1918. The success of Stopes's work on marriage issues and birth control led her to reduce her scholarly work; her last scientific publications were in 1935. According to W. G. Chaloner, "between 1903 and 1935 she published a series of palaeobotanical papers that placed her among the leading half-dozen British palaeobotanists of her time". Stopes made major contributions to knowledge of the earliest angiosperms, the formation of coal balls and the nature of coal macerals. The classification scheme and terminology she devised for coal are still being used. Stopes also wrote a popular book on palaeobotany, "Ancient Plants", in what was called a successful pioneering effort to introduce the subject to non-scientists.