Obnoxious Stopes

tHe account of birth control pioneer Marie Stopes (Mail) did not mention that the driving force behind her setting up family planning clinics was her fear the working classes were breeding too fast.

She believed this would ‘dilute’ the finer breeding elements of the British nation. She was also a fervent supporter of eugenics and Hitler; she sent him a book of her poems with the inscription: ‘Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these (poems) that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?’

Stopes was a rabid racist. One of her poems read: ‘Catholics and Prussians, the Jews and the Russians/all are a curse, or something worse.’

She favoured child labour and wanted to free the ‘ better classes’ from the burden of supporting hospitals filled by ‘inferior stock’. She wanted laws to ‘ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased’ and achieve in the British Isles ‘a new and irradiated race’.

Stopes talked of the ‘puny and utterly unsatisfactory’ children of the poor. She condemned blind people who chose to have children, was hostile to marriages between different racial groups and praised the ‘pristine purity of a girl of our northern race’.

She opposed anything beyond basic education for the working classes. as she did not approve of the racial purity of her son’s wife, she cut him out of her life and left him nothing in her will.

Stopes was one of the most obnoxious women of the 20th century. RAYMOND NORMAN, Hemingstone, Suffolk.