Wednesday, August 25, 2010
The secret life of Dr Marie Stopes
Marie Stopes (1880-1958) shook the world. She wrote a best-selling sex-manual for women and was a controversial birth control pioneer. On a darker note, she also corresponded with Hitler and believed in the creation of a super race.
When Stopes set up her first birth control clinic in 1921, everyone assumed that she had trained in medicine.
Yet, bizarrely, she was an expert on fossil plants and coal.
So how did this young palaeontologist come to transform Western society and become one of the most infamous women in history?
The making of Marie Stopes
Looking back, Marie Stopes must have felt an ironic inevitability to the way that her bipolar career unfolded. Her father, Henry, was a leading archaeologist and avid collector of Stone Age artefacts. Her mother, Charlotte, was a Shakespearian scholar and suffragette.
The impact that these two strong personalities had on Stopes became evident even from a young age. While still a teenager, she declared her intention to divide her career between science and humanitarian endeavours. Her prophecy came true.
That she was bound for extraordinary things was first signalled during her student years. In 1900, aged 20, she enrolled at "the Godless University on Gower Street" (University College London), so-called because its students didn't have to sign up to the 39 articles of Anglican religion.
After graduating from UCL in only two years, winning the Gold Medal for biology, and fighting off more than one marriage proposal, Stopes got her first break as a wannabe scientist.
It just so happened that one of her professors, Francis Oliver, was on the verge of a massive breakthrough in plant evolution. He was about to discover a crucial "missing link" between ferns and advanced plants. As his research assistant, Stopes was to play a pivotal role in the work.
With her passion for scientific research ignited, Stopes went to Munich, Germany, to conduct a PhD on the sexual habits of certain primitive plants called cycads.
Source Published by great site : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11040319
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