Author: Ruth E. Hall

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13:

In 1935 a panel of American academics compiled a list of the world's most influential modern books, and among the names of well-known authors -- Marx, Lenin, Einstein, Freud -- was one less well-remembered: Dr. Marie C. Stopes. Who was Marie Stopes? At a time when public discussion of sexual matters was tantamount to an admission of private depravity, Marie Stopes (a paleobotanist by training) wrote Married Love, published in 1918, a sexual manifesto that scandalized and awakened twentieth century consciousness with its precise physiological descriptions and its unblushing declaration of married women's rights to full sexual enjoyment; At a time when the guardians of public morality decreed that sex was something women should stoically bear in ignorance, Marie Stopes decreed that the one thing women should not have to bear was unwanted children; and Marie Stopes devoted her life to lecturing, instrucing women and their husbands, establishing birth control clinics, attacking the religious, social and political institutions that denied women's rights, and winning the support of liberal thinkers and spokesmen, among whom were George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett; In contrast to her cooly brilliant scientific writings and the relentless logic displayed in her books about sex and marriage, Marie Stopes was driven in her middle years to express publicly her own personal and sexual disappointments in excessively romantic, sometimes erotic verse and autobiographical plays; Marie Stopes, despite all her scientific knowledge, was a sexual innocent until her mid-thirties. This ignorance coupled with her obsession with "ideal" love resulted in a first marriage that remained unconsummated after five years. Marie Stopes: an extraordinary woman, an eccentric woman, a contradictory woman, a twentieth century Joan of Arc. A woman who transformed her own personal struggles into a movement that came to be known as a revolution just a decade after her death in 1958. Passionate Crusader is an intimate, inspired biography, written with grace and wit, as readable as any novel. Readers will come to know the fascinating story of Marie Stopes as well as they know the lives of Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary or Ibsen's Nora.