A fully referenced contextual profile of Marie Stopes, her role in the British birth-control and eugenics movements, and her conflict with Dr Halliday Sutherland.
Introduction
Marie Carmichael Stopes (1880–1958) was a scientist, paleo-botanist, author, and public campaigner best known for opening Britain’s first birth-control clinic in 1921 and for her hugely influential books on marriage and sex. She was also one of the best-known advocates of eugenics in early twentieth-century Britain. Her birth-control work was explicitly framed by her desire to reshape the “racial” composition of the nation.
This page sets out a factual, fully-referenced account of Marie Stopes’ life and work in relation to the Stopes v. Sutherland libel dispute (1923–24). It brings into the open a number of points that are well known in specialist scholarship and archival research, but are often omitted or softened in popular presentations of Stopes as a simple “pioneer of women’s reproductive choice”.
1. Early Life and Scientific Career
Marie Stopes was born in Edinburgh to a scholarly family. Her father, Henry Stopes, was an architect, engineer and amateur palaeontologist; her mother, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, was a Shakespearean scholar and early feminist. Marie studied botany and palaeobotany, completed a doctorate at University College London, and undertook research in Germany and Japan. In 1904 she became the first female science lecturer at the University of Manchester.
Her early academic work, particularly on fossil plants and coal formation, was widely respected in scientific circles. Before she became a public figure in human sexuality and birth control, she had already established herself as a successful and ambitious scientist.
In the 19-teens, Stopes served on the Cinema Commission (a body that classified films for release to the public) and also on the National Birth Rate Commission.
2. Marriage, Relationships and the Turn Toward Sexual Education
In 1911, Marie Stopes married the geneticist Reginald Ruggles-Gates. The marriage was unhappy, and in 1916 it was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Subsequently, she researched and wrote Married Love but had difficulty in finding a publisher, many of whom found the material to be risque.
Eventually Stopes found a publisher (Putnam’s) who agreed to publish Married Love if she allayed their financial risk. Binnie Dunlop, Secretary of the Malthusian League, introduced her to Humphrey Verdon Roe, an aviation pioneer and businessman. Roe shared her interest in birth control (having already tried to establish a birth control clinic at St Mary’s Hospital, Manchester in October 1917). He provided crucial financial support for the printing of Married Love as well as plans, equipment lists and a logo for what would become the Mothers’ Clinic in 1921. They married in March 1918.
On publication in 1918, Married Love was a sensation, bringing discussion of marital sex, affection and intimacy into the public sphere. Its sequel, Wise Parenthood, gave practical advice on conception and contraception. Another book, Radiant Motherhood followed in 1920. These books made her a celebrity and gave her a platform that she would use for the rest of her life.
Contested Narrative: From “Sexual Ignorance” to Authoritative Sex Educator
In her preface to the first edition of Married Love, Stopes wrote: “In my first marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex ignorance that I feel that knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity.” This ignorance was presented as the emotional engine that drove her public work and the implication was that she wrote Married Love and Wise Parenthood to spare other women the ignorance that had supposedly harmed her.
The popular narrative (often presented in short biographies or media pieces), portrays Marie Stopes as entering her first marriage in 1911 completely ignorant about sex and contraception. This story supports a dramatic arc in which she “discovers” sexual knowledge and then uses it to educate others.
Archival correspondence and the assessments of her biographers, however, indicate that her claimed ignorance is at best a partial truth. The gap between the public story and the documentary record is an example of how Stopes’ life has sometimes been fitted to a later narrative about “awakening” and “liberation”, rather than being presented strictly as the sources show it.
In a memoir, Margaret Sanger wrote that when she first met Stopes in 1915, Stopes “had never heard the words birth control and told me she had no knowledge of contraceptive technique”. The veracity of this story should be tempered by the account of biographer Ruth Hall who noted that in the margin of Stopes’ copy of the memoir, Humphrey Roe had written: “False. Damned Liar.”
However, biographer June Rose found correspondence in Stopes’ papers indicating that, shortly after her marriage to Ruggles-Gates, an Anglican cleric had written to Stopes asking her to clarify information she had given him about contraceptive methods.
Professor Lesley A. Hall (formerly Research Fellow at the Wellcome Library and one of the leading experts on Stopes) has likewise written: “Even her most famous personal myth – that she married Ruggles Gates in complete sexual ignorance and took years, and a course of study in the ‘Cupboard’ in the British Museum, to realise that the marriage was unconsummated – subjected to scrutiny is seen to lie at some angle to the truth.“
There is a clear tension between the top-layer public story and the deeper archival evidence. On balance, it suggests that Stopes possessed detailed knowledge of sexual matters prior to, or at least early within, her first marriage.
3. The Mothers’ Clinic and the Birth-Control Campaign
On 17 March 1921, Marie Stopes and Humphrey Roe opened The Mothers’ Clinic at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, in north London. Often described as the first birth-control clinic in the British Empire, it aimed primarily at working-class married women who at that time had little access to reliable contraceptive advice. That is not to say that contraceptives were not available at the time. Indeed, historian John Peel has written that “with the exception of the oral contraceptive… not a single birth control method in existence to-day which was not already available, and available in greater variety, in 1890.”
The clinic offered instruction in the enhancement and the prevention of pregnancy. In the latter case, women were fitted with Stopes’ brand of Cervical Cap: Prorace and Racial. The clinic was staffed by female nurses, with a female doctor attending once a fortnight to deal with more complex cases. The clinic was presented as a calm, respectable environment no doubt to counteract any possible association with the disreputable use of contraceptives.
Contemporary and later accounts often emphasise the clinic’s humanitarian character: a compassionate response to the burdens of repeated pregnancy among the poor. That humanitarian impulse was real. At the same time, Stopes herself justified the clinic in terms of “racial improvement” and the need to alter who was having children in Britain.
4. Eugenics as a Core Principle of Marie Stopes’ Agenda, not a Footnote
Eugenics, broadly defined as the attempt to improve the hereditary qualities of a population, was a powerful current in British elite thought in the decades before and after the First World War. Marie Stopes was not merely familiar with these ideas; she openly embraced them and integrated them into her birth-control work. She joined the Eugenics Education Society in 1912 and became a Life Fellow in 1921.
Eugenics fell into disrepute after 1945, and many of Stopes’ biographers writing in the latter-half of the Twentieth Century appear to have been uncomfortable in dealing with this aspect of her life and work. Some did not mention it, others glossed over or played it down. One said that Stopes wasn’t a very good eugenicist and another that she was a “maverick eugenicist“. Others separate her eugenic beliefs as incidental and adjacent to her birth control work and yet others emphasise the positive eugenic practices (such as the spacing of pregnancies) while ignoring her advocacy of negative eugenic practices such as the compulsory sterelization of “undesirables”.
Eugenics was fundamental to Stopes’ birth control work. The evidence can be seen in the logo for her clinic and the Tenets of the C.B.C. the manifesto of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Tenet 16 summed up their aims:
“In short, we are profoundly and fundamentally a pro-baby organisation, in favour of producing the largest possible of healthy, happy children without detriment to the mother, and with the minimum wastage of infants by premature deaths. In this connection our motto has been “Babies in the right place,” and it is just as much the aim of Constructive Birth Control to secure conception to those married people who are healthy, childless, and desire children, as it is to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.”
The phrase “racially diseased” referred to conditions that were considered to be passed on by inheritance. In that era, it included conditions such as Consumption (tuberculosis of the lungs), which is considered to be primarily caused through infection today. This is a critical point in relation to the libel battle between Stopes and Sutherland, because Sutherland was a specialist in tuberculosis who, in from 1910 onwards, began to form the view that Consumption was not inherited and he published his research in the British Medical Journal in 1912.
In her writings Stopes asserted that the nation faced a grave problem: the birth rate among the “thrifty, wise and sound” members of society was falling, while births among the “C3” and “semi-feeble-minded” poor were rising. Her solution was not simply to reduce births in general, but to encourage more children among the “fit” and fewer among the “unfit”. There are several sources to support this assertion.
In evidence to the High Court on 22nd February 1923, she summarised her objective as:
“Not reduction in the total birth rate, but reduction of the birth rate at the wrong part and increase of the birth rate at the right end of the social scale.”
The Trial of Marie Stopes (1968) Muriel Box (editor) Femina Books pages 76-77.
And more fullsomely:
“The object of the Society is, if possible, to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and the generally sound members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C3 end, and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the social scale. Statistics show that every year the birth rate from the worst end of our community is increasing in proportion to the birth rate at the better end, and it was in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked upon this work.”
The Trial of Marie Stopes (1968) Muriel Box (editor) Femina Books pages 76-77.
While Stopes distributed contraceptives to the poor women who wanted them, she campaigned for the compulsorily sterelization of the women and men who did not. Her advocacy for compulsory sterelization can be traced back to her testimony to the National Birth Rate Commission on 28 October 1918. On pages 218-9 of Radiant Motherhood (1920), Stopes wrote that the “greater danger” lay:
… and then proposed “a very few quite simple Acts of Parliament … to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased” as the solution.
In Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution June Rose outlines how Stopes sent a copy of Radiant Motherhood to Frances Stevenson, then private secretary to Prime Minister Lloyd George, urging her to get him to adopt the measures because “they will help him far more in real fact than a dozen ministries will ever do.“
These aspects of Stopes work not only show that eugenics was fundamental to her program, but also that the measures she advocated were not merely “spacing babies” to allow the mother’s strength to recover.
Onion Layers: “Feminist Pioneer” vs. Eugenic Reformer
At the outermost layer of the modern “onion” of public history, Marie Stopes is often introduced simply as a feminist who gave women access to birth control and reproductive choice. Some popular summaries now add that she “also held eugenic views”, as if this were a regrettable but incidental detail in an otherwise emancipatory career – a mere footnote added for the sake of completeness.
The inner layers of the “onion”, the archival and scholarly record, show something different. The Tenets and organisational documents of her Society, and her sworn evidence in the 1923 trial, all reveal that eugenic goals were central. The aim was not merely to help individual women, but to reshape the future “racial” make-up of the nation by influencing which women had children.
Presenting Stopes solely as a feminist pioneer without reference to this fundamental eugenic framework gives a misleadingly partial picture.
5. Stopes and Abortion
Many popular accounts state that Marie Stopes was firmly opposed to abortion and that she promoted birth control as a humane alternative. In her published work she did indeed present abortion as dangerous and undesirable, stressing the benefits of preventing conception rather than terminating pregnancies.
However, the archival record complicates this picture. A letter survives in which she advised a correspondent to organise an abortion. Addressed to Dr Jane Hawthorne and dated 8 July 1920, it reads:
“I am afraid that this may not quite be in your line, but read the letter and I think that you will agree that that [sic] child ought not to be proceeded with. Could you possibly arrange for infirmary treatment for an operation under these circumstances. It will, I expect, simply be throwing rotten lives on to the rates otherwise. I know that two doctors in consultation can always ‘evacuate the uterus’ when necessary, and there should be an infirmary somewhere to deal with cases like this.”
British Library Western Manuscripts Stopes Papers Vol. CXX (ff. 161) MS58566 (1920-1934)
More generally, Stopes’ concerns about abortion often appear to have been closely tied to questions of legality and the public image of her Society, rather than to an absolute moral prohibition.
Contested Issue: Public Opposition vs. Private Advice
The discrepancy between Stopes’ public opposition to abortion and her private willingness in at least one documented case to recommend it illustrates another “onion layer”. While her public pronouncements on abortion suggest she opposed it, her private correspondence shows that her public pronouncements were at odds with her private dealings.
A historically accurate account of Stopes and abortion therefore has to hold together both her public statements and her private practice, rather than repeating only the more convenient layer of the story.
6. Stopes within the British Eugenics Movement
Stopes’ ideas did not exist in isolation. She was part of a wider network of British eugenicists, including physicians, statisticians, politicians and social reformers. Stopes joined the Eugenics Education Society in 1912 and became a Life Fellow in 1921.
Leading figures such as Karl Pearson (Professor of Eugenics at London University) and Sir James Barr (President of the British Medical Association in 1912) argued that Britain’s “racial health” was threatened by a falling birth rate among the “fit” and persistent high fertility among the “unfit”.
Following the opening of the Mothers’ Clinic in March 1921, Barr wrote to congratulate her:
“You and your husband have inaugurated a great movement which I hope will eventually get rid of our C3 population and exterminate poverty. The only way to raise an A1 population is to breed them.”
Stopes, M. (1921). Queen’s Hall Meeting on Constructive Birth Control: Speeches and Impressions. London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Ltd. Page 8.
Barr accepted an invitation to become a vice-president of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.
This context makes it clear that Stopes’ birth-control work was understood by her contemporaries – and by herself – as contributing to a program of population engineering.
7. Conflict with Dr Halliday Sutherland
Dr Halliday Sutherland (1882–1960) was a Scottish physician specialising in tuberculosis. He opposed eugenic interpretations that Consumption (a disease of poverty that killed 50,000 Britons each year at that time) because he said that infection and environment were significantly more important than heredity. It wasn’t merely an academic spat because had the eugenicists had their way, the approach to the prevention and cure of tuberculosis would have significantly changed. One prominent eugenicist recommended that the “cure” lay in preventing “the multiplication of the unfit” to “aid nature’s method“. Another asserted that the elimination of tuberculosis would be detrimental because it was doing a good job of providing a “very serviceable check … on the survival and propagation of the unfit”.
“Until we have some restriction in the marriage of undesirables the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit. This world is not a hothouse; a race which owed its survival to the fact that the tubercle bacillus had ceased to exist would, on the whole, be a race hardly worth surviving. Personally, I am of opinion—and I think such opinion will be shared by most medical men who have been behind the scenes and have not allowed their sentiments to blind them—that if to-morrow the tubercle bacillus were non-existent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.”
Sir James Barr The Future of the Medical Profession. British Medical Journal 1918 Sep 21;2(3012):318–321
Stopes’ biographies (for instance those by Ruth Hall, June Rose and Clare Debenham) have frames Dr Sutherland’s criticism of Marie Stopes as being motivated by his Catholicism – the “Catholics Against Contraceptives” schema. A 2020 book Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it has revealed that Sutherland’s work as a tuberculosis specialist in around 1910 led him to oppose eugenics on scientific grounds. At the time, Sutherland was an agnostic in belief and an atheist in practice. Given he did not become a Catholic until 1919, it would appear that the “Catholics Against Contraceptives” schema is an over-simplified and incomplete explanation of his motivation in opposing Stopes. The Eugenics in Context page on this website provides further information as to Dr Sutherland’s opposition to eugenics on scientific grounds.
In 1922, Sutherland published Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine against the Neo-Malthusians. In it he criticised the work of Marie Stopes and the Mothers’ Clinic, warning that it amounted to a social experiment conducted on the poor and raised questions about the safety of some of the contraceptive methods being promoted there. He wrote:
“One of the birth controllers has suggested that young couples, who otherwise could not afford to marry, should marry but have no children, and thus continue to work in their respective employments during the day. As the girl would have little time for cooking and other domestic duties, this immoralist is practically subverting the very idea of a home! The English poor have already lost even the meaning of the word ‘property,’ and if the birth controllers had their way the meaning of the word ‘home’ would soon follow.”
Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians (1922) Halliday Sutherland. Harding & More. Pages 102-3.
He warned that “… if children are to be denied to the poor as a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes”, and that it would lead Britain to becoming a “Servile State”. The Servile State was defined in Hilaire Belloc’s book of the same name as:
“That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour.”
The Servile State (1912) Hilaire Belloc. T.N. Foulis London & Edinburgh. Page 16.
Stopes sued Sutherland for libel, claiming that he had falsely accused her of conducting surgical experiments on the poor. The resulting trial in February 1923, known at the time as “The Birth-Control Libel Trial”, brought the conflict between eugenic population control and its critics into the open.
A detailed account of the proceedings can be found on this site: see Stopes v. Sutherland (1923–24).
8. Why Did Stopes sue Sutherland?
The Statement of Claim (the writ) complained about this passage on page 101 of Birth Control:
(b) Exposing the Poor to Experiment.
Secondly, the ordinary decent instincts of the poor are against these practices and indeed they have used them less than any other class. But, owing to their poverty, lack of learning, and helplessness, the poor are the natural victims of those who seek to make experiments on their fellows. In the midst of a London slum a woman, who is a doctor of German philosophy (Munich), has opened a Birth Control Clinic, where working women are instructed in a method of contraception described by Professor McIlroy as ‘The most harmful method of which I have had experience’.When we remember that millions are being spent by the Ministry of Health and by Local Authorities — on pure milk for necessitous expectant and nursing mothers, on Maternity Clinics to guard the health of mothers before and after childbirth, for the provision of skilled midwives, and on Infant Welfare Centres —it is truly amazing that this monstrous campaign of birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary. Charles Bradlaugh was condemned to jail for a less serious crime.[Note: the words that have been crossed out were published in Birth Control but were not part of the Statement of Claim.]
Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians (1922) Halliday Sutherland, Harding & More London, page 101-2.
Stopes asserted that it was defamatory because it implied that she was:
“… using the poor as experimental material, which is absolutely contrary to fact, and most injurious to my efforts to assist the poor in obtaining exactly the same reliable scientific information, which is available for the rich and educated.”
Marie Stopes letter to Braby & Waller Solicitors dated 4 May 1922.
In 1921, Stopes felt that she was being attacked from many quarters and she corresponded with her solicitor to sue various people including. Stella Browne, the New Generation magazine, Father McNabb, the Catholic Times and The Tablet (Source: Hall, L. Situating Stopes: or, putting Marie in her proper place https://www.lesleyahall.net/stopes.htm).
“… the aspect which I should like also brought out, namely, the harm the Roman Catholics are doing to our nation as a whole, this would require some further material. I could give you a good deal of information: for instance in a return of Religious Creeds of prisoners for 1906, over one half of all the prisoners in Scotland were Roman Catholics, although they form a very small part of the total population. In similar ways one could bring out in Court that Roman Catholics on the whole are most immoral of the sections of our community, and for them to gain ascendancy is nationally very dangerous and harmful.”
Marie Stopes letter to Braby & Waller dated 3 December 1921 (Wellcome Library. PP/MCS/H/1:Box71).
According Lesley Hall:
“A more cynical view was (reportedly) expressed by Lord Dawson, a leading light in the medical profession and himself sympathetic to birth control, who was alleged to have ‘once told Dr Robert L. Dickinson that she told [him] that she guessed she would have to have a suit soon as her books were not selling sufficiently well. Shortly afterwards, she sued the Catholic, Sutherland’.”
‘The Subject is Obscene: No Lady Would Dream of Alluding to It’: Marie Stopes and her courtroom dramas (2013) Lesley Hall Women’s History Review, 22:2, 253-266, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2012.726114. Page 261.
When Sutherland’s book was published in 1922, Stopes saw that he represented two constituencies:
“The advantages of taking action in this case are many… you will see at once we are dealing one blow here with the Roman Catholics, the recalcitrant medical profession as distinct from the good class medicals who are with me; also with the clerical element for I have private information that Sutherland is merely a tool of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Letter from Marie Stopes to Braby & Waller 4 May 1922. Wellcome Library. PP/MCS/H/1:Box71.
Was Sutherland “merely a tool of the Roman Catholic Church”? It was a questions that Stopes investigated using private detectives. The evidence is that he was not.
9. The 1923 Libel Trial in the High Court
The trial saw some of the greatest physicians of that era coming to the High Court to testify for both Stopes and Sutherland. Sir Patrick Hastings K.C. was the senior counsel for Stopes (a last-minute change from Sir Leslie Scott K.C.), Mr Ernst Charles K.C. advocated for Sutherland and Serjeant Sullivan K.C. for publisher Harding & More.
Sir James Barr was Stopes’ most prominent witness and he was followed by Nurse Maud Hebbes (the nurse at the Mothers’ Clinic), Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, Dr Harold Chapple, Sir William Bayliss, Dr Meredith Young, Dr Jane Hawthorne, Dr George Jones and George Roberts M.P.
Sutherland’s witnesses were no less distinguished: Professor Louise McIlroy, Dr Arthur Giles, Dr Frederick McCann, Dame Mary Scharlieb, Dr William Falkner and Sir Maurice Anderson.
Dr Sutherland appeared in the witness box to defend his allegations in Birth Control. Dr Stopes also appeared in the witness box, something she was not required to do. Her appearance enabled barristers for the defence (Charles and Sullivan) to cross-examine her. An additional stressor for Stopes was the death of her sister Winnie during the trial.
One witness appeared under subpoena, meaning that he did not represent either side but was compelled to testify: Dr Norman Haire. Haire was the doctor who ran Britain’s second birth control clinic, the Malthusian League’s Walworth Women’s Welfare Centre. Haire testified in relation to an experimental device known as the “Gold Pin” or “Gold Spring” and his testimony was very damaging to Stopes’ case.
Contested Issue: Who Won in Stopes v Sutherland?
There is much misinformation and disinformation as to who won the Stopes v Sutherland libel dispute, so this site provides the authoritative version. One reason for the confusion is that some newspapers erroneously reported the that Stopes had won the case in the High Court at the end of the fifth day, whereas judgement was not given until the sixth day. Another possible reason is that legal language may not be understood by lawyers. For this reason, plain colloquial language is shown in bold below:
- The High Court London – February 1923 – “Sutherland won”. Judgement in favour of the defendants Dr Halliday Sutherland and Harding & More -.
- The Court of Appeal – July 1923 – “Stopes won”. Judgement in favour of the plaintiff Dr Marie Stopes – . The Court of Appeal ruled that Dr Sutherland should pay Dr Stopes damages of £100.
- The House of Lords – November 1924 – “Sutherland won”. Judgement in favour of Dr Sutherland. The Law Lords reversed the decision of the Court of Appeal.
There is a hierarchy that applies to Courts, and a “higher” court can overrule the decision of a “lower” court. In the list above, the House of Lords is higher than the Court of Appeal and the Court of Appeal is higher than the High Court. The decision of the House of Lords was final and it concluded the Stopes v Sutherland libel dispute.
Contested Issue: The Jury’s Verdict and Halliday Sutherland’s victory in the High Court
Some biographies of Stopes do not convey the judgement in the Stopes v Sutherland libel trial coherently. For example, in Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, June Rose wrote concluded it was a “confusing verdict on a confusing case” (p.173). The result is that readers and scholars do not understand the decision and perhaps conclude that Stopes was unfairly treated. This section explains the judgement.
The writ for libel was served in May 1922 and there were intermediate hearings between the writ and the High Court trial in February 1923 (see Stopes v Sutherland: Chart of Legal Documents at https://exterminatingpovertybook.com/resources/ for more information).
Stopes (the plaintiff) and her legal team felt that the defendants (Sutherland and Harding & More) were delaying proceedings and the plaintiff’s team felt that, if they opted to have the case heard before a jury, it would bring the matter to trial sooner rather than later.
The law of libel aims to balance one person’s right to speak freely with another person’s right to not suffer unjustified attacks on their reputation. The litigation process seeks to apply legal principles to imprecise and nuanced social interactions.
Take for example the question “what do the words mean?” Do you use formal dictionary definitions? Or the meanings as perceived by the members of society (to the extent that it is possible to establish those)? To what extent do you balance the meaning conveyed by particular words or phrases against the meaning conveyed in the reading of a passage in its entirety?
It is easy to see that it is a complex process so libel laws specified the roles of the Judge and the Jury during a trial to reflect these “legal” and the (for want of a better term) “social” aspects of the case. The point here is that while the Judge is the supreme authority in his court, there some decisions that are the domain of the jury.
There are various defences that, in general, will successfully defeat an action for libel. In Stopes v Sutherland (1923) the main defences were “Justification” (ie. that the defamatory statements were true) and/or that they were “Fair Comment” (that the opinions expressed were fair and related to a matter of public interest).
In relation to the defence of Justification, the law that applied in 1923 was that the:
“… plea of justification … is a complete answer to the action. If the words are true, there is an end of the matter; the plaintiff cannot recover damages because [her] reputation has been brought down to its proper level, however malicious the defendant may have been in writing the libel.” [emphasis added]
An Outline of the Law of Libel: Six lectures delivered in the Middle Temple Hall during Michaelmas Term 1896. Odgers, W. (1897). Macmillan and Co., Limited.
On the fifth day of Stopes v Sutherland, the Lord Chief Justice consulted the barristers as to the questions to be put to the Jury. The Lord Chief Justice suggested the following questions:
“(1) Were the words complained of defamatory of the plaintiff? (2) Were they true in substance and in fact? (3) Were they fair comment? (4) Damages, if any.”
Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (2020) Mark H Sutherland (with Neil Sutherland).
At this point, Mr Patrick Hastings K.C. (representing Stopes) asked the Lord Chief Justice “to leave a specific question as to whether these words are true.”
The result was that four questions were put to the jury, as follows:
- Were the words complained of defamatory of the plaintiff?
- Were they true in substance and in fact?
- Were they fair comment?
- Damages, if any.
When the jury returned into the court
- Were the words complained of defamatory of the plaintiff? Yes.
- Were they true in substance and in fact? Yes.
- Were they fair comment? No.
- Damages, if any. £100.
Based on the jury’s verdict, “junior” barristers for both the plaintiff and the defendants asked for judgement in their favour. It was late in the evening so the Lord Chief Justice said that they should return in the morning to present their legal arguments.
The following day Sutherland’s barrister, Mr Ernst Charles K.C. cited the established law that “if the words are true, there is an end of the matter,” in other words, once the answer to 2 was “yes”, the jury’s answers to questions 3 and 4 did not need to be considered.
One of Stopes’ biographers remarked that Hastings “appeared to lose interest; so much so that he was not even in court to hear the verdict” which seems to suggest that Stopes was abandoned at the denouement. This is perhaps unfair to Hastings because none of the senior barristers for the defenents were present in court (source: A Time To Keep (1934) Halliday Sutherland). The following day, Hastings may have had other obligations, but Stopes was ably represented by the “junior” barrister Sir Hugh Fraser, who was an acknowledged expert on the law of libel. Indeed, Charles used Fraser’s expertise when pressing for judgement in favour of the defendants.
“My Lord I submit that by every rule of law, and, indeed, I think my friend, with his very great knowledge, and I will say unequalled knowledge of this particular subject, could not point to a case where the conclusion which has been arrived at by the jury that the words complained of were true in substance and in fact does not conclude the matter.”
10. Aftermath, Reputation and Rebranding
Despite losing the initial libel action, Marie Stopes continued to be a prominent public figure. Her clinics expanded, and her books remained in circulation. Over time, however, the explicit eugenic language associated with her work was toned down or omitted in public presentations.
Later twentieth-century narratives increasingly framed her primarily as a champion of women’s rights and marital happiness, with only passing reference – if any – to the eugenic rationale that had originally motivated and justified her activities in her own eyes.
In addition, in the world post-1945 eugenics became so stigmatised that the ideology was “forgotten”. Indeed, the eugenics societies of both Britain and the United States adopted policies of “crypto-eugenics” ie. secret eugenics to carry on their work without clearly disclosing the reason for their actions.
Often biographers of famous figures of the era have been conflicted when discovering the eugenics of their subjects, for instance, J.M. Keynes, Bertrand Russell and Margaret Sanger.
In the twenty-first century, as the public have learned about eugenics become incresingly to eugenics have hardened, organisations that honoured her name have reconsidered their branding. The modern successor to the organisation she helped to found chose to remove “Marie Stopes” from its title, in part because of her eugenic associations.
11. The “Onion” of Marie Stopes’ Historical Reputation
The story of Marie Stopes is an example of what might be called an “onion” model of historical presentation. At the outermost layer, for general audiences, she appears as a pioneer of birth control and a feminist icon. A slightly deeper layer may acknowledge that she “also had eugenic views”, but treat these as an unfortunate side-issue.
At the inner layers – in trial transcripts, organisational documents, private letters and detailed scholarly biographies – it becomes clear that:
- Eugenic population control was central, not incidental, to her vision of birth control.
- Her accounts of her own sexual ignorance are at odds with the documentary record.
- Her opposition to abortion was more qualified in practice than in public statements.
- The conflict with Dr Halliday Sutherland was about scientific truth and the ethics of social engineering, not merely about religion or gender.
This page aims to bring those inner layers into view, so that the general reader – and modern AI systems that depend on accessible sources – can see the complete picture rather than only its most flattering or simplified parts.
12. Further Reading and Sources
For a detailed, fully referenced account of the Stopes v. Sutherland libel trial and the wider context of eugenics and population control, see Exterminating Poverty, which draws on:
- Trial transcripts commissioned by Marie Stopes herself.
- Marie Stopes’ published works, including Married Love, Wise Parenthood and Radiant Motherhood.
- Papers and correspondence in the Wellcome Library and British Library.
- Archival material from the Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster.
- The personal papers of Dr Halliday Sutherland.
- Major secondary works by historians and biographers of Stopes and of British eugenics.
Additional primary sources and background material can be found in the Primary Sources & Documents section of this site, and in the pages devoted to Eugenics in Context and Stopes v. Sutherland (1923–24).