THE world’s FIRST SEX agony aunt

100 years ago pioneering British scientist Marie Stopes wrote a VERY candid manual for married couples. The response? Some reached for the smelling salts — but thousands more wrote thanking her for bringing joy into their bedrooms

The early 20th century was a time of repression and widespread ignorance about sex — and all too often misery and tragedy were the result. Three thousand mothers died in childbirth each year, while desperate women would swig gin or quinine to trigger a miscarriage or, even worse, resort to perilous backstreet abortions.

Many young wives were terrified of the ‘marital act’ and the repeated pregnancies that might follow, while decent men struggled to satisfy their own desires in a way that acknowledged the ‘suffering’ of their submissive partners.

So when, 100 years ago, British scientist Marie Stopes published her sex guide, Married Love, she caused a sensation. Until then, intercourse was widely considered part of women’s wifely duties, often against their will and certainly with no expectation of pleasure for them.

Yet here was Stopes, a respected paleobotanist and the youngest recipient of a doctorate of science from an english university, suggesting in 1918 that sex should be enjoyable to both husband and wife — and without the fear of pregnancy.

‘It should be realised that a man does not woo and win a woman once for all when he marries her,’ she wrote. ‘he must woo her before every separate act of coitus.’

The book sold 2,000 copies in two weeks and within a year six further editions had been published. Not everyone was enthusiastic — it was banned in the U.S. until 1931 for being ‘obscene’, by which time it had sold 750,000 copies in the UK.

Stopes revolutionised the way people understood desire, sexuality, sexual health and contraception, striking a chord after World War I.

Abortion was illegal and divorce scandalous and expensive, but women were entering the workforce and gaining the vote. They wanted to take control of their bodies, too.

Stopes had been granted an annulment from her first husband, Reginald Ruggles Gates, on grounds of non-consummation of the marriage.

Writing the introduction to her book, aged 37, she said: ‘I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowledge gained at such cost should be placed at the service of humanity.’

her follow-up, Wise Parenthood: A Book For Married People, focused on birth control. In 1921, with her second husband, philanthropist humphrey Roe (with whom she had son harry and another stillborn son), she opened the Mothers’ Clinic in London, offering practical advice and support.

Stopes did not believe in abortion, arguing that knowing how to prevent conception was all couples needed. The clinic was the forerunner for Marie Stopes International, which was founded in 1976 to provide contraception and abortion services worldwide.

Stopes, whose father was a brewer and archaeologist and mother a Shakespearean scholar and women’s rights campaigner, was a feminist champion whose motives were complicated by an interest in eugenics. She wanted to encourage birth control among the working class, not the ‘thrifty, wise, well- contented and the generally sound’.

her views were in keeping with many intellectuals of the time, including the economist John Maynard Keynes and the author George Bernard Shaw.

however, she caused consternation among her peers when, in August 1939, she sent a book of love poems she’d written to hitler — another proponent of eugenics — urging him to share them with young Germans because ‘love is the greatest thing there is’.

But for many women, and men, her interests and motives were irrelevant.

For them, Married Love was a revelation, a book that could transform lives, and they wanted to find out more.

So they wrote to Stopes — the world’s first sex agony aunt — in their thousands, often anonymously.

They wrote in desperation, begging for advice, confided in her, lamenting their sex lives or occasionally boasting about them, sharing their most explicit thoughts and even wrote poems praising her.

One woman wrote: ‘ My husband used to tell me I was abnormal.’ Another asked: ‘Is it wrong and illegal to have sexual intercourse — by your methods — although not married?’

By the time her clinic opened, Stopes — who is the subject of a new opera, Dear Marie Stopes, by Alex Mills — claimed to be receiving 1,000 letters a week from all over the world.

More than 10,000 of them are held by the Wellcome Collection ( wellcomelibrary.org) and the British Library.

They form an extraordinary snapshot of everyday hopes, fears and desires from a bygone era — many of which still feel relevant today.

here are extracts from just a few of those letters...