ACADEMIC LIFE.
In other Universities women were beginning to obtain posts hitherto
given only to men, but Manchester had not before had a woman on the
science staff, though a lecturer in English literature had been in
office for some years. Biological classes were attended by large
numbers of the young medical students, who with the engineers are
generally the rowdy element in any University, and the authorities
of the College were in some trepidation as to the result of their
experiment in appointing a young girl to the Staff. With Dr. Marie
Stopes however no untoward events occurred, and the junior classes were
indeed quieter when she lectured or demonstrated to them than they
were in a good many other departments. The staff of Professors and
Lecturers, mostly men from Oxford, Cambridge, and other Universities,
formed a very friendly circle and became truly colleagues to the junior
lady lecturer. Indeed in after years, when Dr. Stopes was appointed
to the staff of her own college in London, she felt the contrast,
for there the Professors’ Common Room was barred to women, whereas
in Manchester she was immediately made a member of the Professors’
Common Room and always cordially welcomed and made to feel at home
whenever she used it. Her immediate chief and those members of the
staff associated with her work made things very easy and pleasant,
and outside the University, too, she made many friends, notably old
Mr. R. D. Darbishire, the philanthropist and founder of the Whitworth
Galleries, who with Miss Dymes, his secretary and companion, made his
home in Victoria Park ever open with a warm welcome for the girl, who
learnt both to reverence and love the fine autocratic old gentleman.
Professor, now Sir Arthur, and Lady Schuster, also in Victoria Park,
were friendly, and the social life in Manchester was an attractive
feature and much more real and cordial than life in London. After the
plentiful dancing and opera of Munich, Dr. Marie Stopes missed dancing
very greatly and, in addition to private dances, took the then rather
audacious social step of giving a dance herself, and cajoled the
elderly Professors to come to it in fancy dress. Out of that sprang a
little dancing club among the members of the staff, which survived for
a good many years after Dr. Stopes left Manchester. The young lecturer,
feeling that she was very inadequately trained in the art of lecturing,
went to hear a number of the Professors and lecturers in the University
deliver their lectures to their students. Mostly, it seems, she learnt
what to avoid in lecturing; she observed a good many little points
which explained the reputed rowdiness of the junior classes. On one
occasion she was present at the back of the room when a distinguished
Professor of world-wide fame faced his class of 200 juniors, and with
a quivering hand took a piece of chalk, drawing a wriggly thing which
might have been a triangle or a hexagon, and commenced his lecture by
saying, “Let us suppose that a circle is a circle”; and he could not
understand the roars, and the cloud of dust from the stamping feet,
with which this opening was greeted. Dr. Marie Stopes was amused to see
how well her own students behaved when they were given the chance.
In addition to the teaching work in the biological classes, time was
available for the young lecturer to follow up her own researches; and
the great interest in fossil plants which must always associate itself
with Manchester University where Williamson’s original work was done,
combined with the fact that the coal mining districts lay so close
all round the town, led her to penetrate to a number of collieries
in search of fossils, as well as to follow out some research on the
structure and deposition of the coal seams. In this connection she
came into personal contact with a number of mine owners, who always
met her with warm cordiality and helpfulness, and among whom a Mr.
Sutcliffe should be particularly remembered. He purchased an extensive
series of microscopic sections of a rare new fossil which had been
discovered, and presented them to the University to be placed at
the service of Dr. Marie Stopes, who undertook the work of their
scientific investigation and description. The fossil proved to be a
species unique in the British Isles, which she named _Tubicaulis
sutcliffii_, and was the subject of the first paper that she read to
the Manchester Philosophical and Literary Society. The work on the
collieries and coal mining industry which began with this connection
in Manchester was persisted in and is still actively continued by
Dr. Stopes to the present time, and has led her to a large number of
scientific discoveries and to the contribution of publications in the
Royal Society and elsewhere (see Appendix B, p. 216). Among the many
interesting people that this collegiate life gave her the opportunity
of meeting, Captain Scott, the Antarctic explorer, was one who most
impressed the girl. She was invited by Lady Schuster to meet him at a
luncheon and, fired by her intense enthusiasm for the palæontological
history of coal, she begged Captain Scott to take her with him on his
then projected Antarctic Expedition. They met again at a dancing party
in the evening. She found him the most “divine waltzer and reverser”
she had ever met, and he promised to take both her and Lady Scott with
him if that was possible, or failing that he undertook to bring her
back the fossil she wanted from the Antarctic. He came down to the
University before leaving Manchester and spent an hour or two with her
studying the external appearance of the fossils, so as to bring back
with him exactly what she desired. The tragedy of this expedition is
known to the world, and it is also known that he was found dead with
a few fragments of fossil plants by him. These however, although so
obviously collected for her, were not given to Dr. Marie Stopes to
describe; and she was glad of it, for unfortunately they were not those
she had longed for from the Antarctic regions.
In all this busy, happy life in Manchester there was however one secret
trial, and that was that after a very few weeks there Dr. Stopes,
whose vitality and general health were quite exceptional, developed
acute neuralgia. This neuralgia vanished immediately vacations came
and she could leave Manchester, but always returned within three days
of sleeping in Manchester. In spite of this her intense vitality
kept her going in many directions, and lectures to the students were
followed by an attempt to organise a seminar on similar lines to those
she had had experience of in Germany, excursions, plant collecting
and fossil collecting up on the moors and, in addition, evening
lecturing to the very poor in the slums at Ancoats; where the Ancoats
Settlement had organised classes of factory hands and others anxious
for intellectual work. There for a time she came in touch with some of
the worst conditions of city life, and she only gave up these lectures
when neuralgia and the acute pain of seeing human beings under such
appalling conditions were undermining her strength to such an extent
that it was impossible to go on. Among her treasured possessions is a
glowing testimonial spontaneously given to her by her poor students at
the Settlement.
By no means exclusively serious, Dr. Stopes, in a skittish mood,
instituted the first, and I believe the only, international comic
scientific journal. She called it _The Sportophyte_, and in it made
fun of a good many of the great biologists, and lampooned the style
of more than one publication. It achieved not a little success, and
one learned Professor said to her: “Oh, of course it is very funny,
but you cannot possibly do it again.” “Why not?” said Dr. Stopes.
“You must not be allowed to do it again; think what _power_ it gives
you.” This was hardly the way to stop the activities of an independent
and enterprising young woman, and _The Sportophyte_ lived until the
international calamity of the war killed the spirit of international
jocularity.
The suffrage movement naturally attracted Dr. Stopes’s interest, and
without becoming an aggressive extremist she put a good deal of time
into quiet work for the suffrage, joining the Tax Resistance League
and lecturing from time to time, as well as joining in processions and
deputations. Fired by a sense of the injustice of obliging women either
to forego marriage or to forego a career, she ardently supported the
efforts to stop the restrictions on married women’s work, and in that
connection met Miss Margaret Ashton, who was then a Councillor and one
of the most active of women’s champions in the north. Her attention
also was drawn to the yet deeper problems of married women by an
incident which occurred to one of her own students, who happened to
be a woman older than herself and who had been assisting a doctor in
dealing with out-patients at a hospital, when a woman had brought in a
miserable little baby which wailed all the time and which, the mother
explained, would not put on any flesh or grow into a nice, healthy baby
whatever she did with it. The mother, with tears in her eyes, made an
intensely earnest appeal to the doctor to tell her what was, to her,
unaccountably wrong with the infant. She said this was her fourth, and
the others had all died when they were very little. The doctor put her
off with some soothing platitudes, but the woman, driven to despair,
said: “I believe there’s something wrong with my man. If there’s
something wrong with my man I won’t have babies no more--it’s just
cruel to see them miserable like this and have them dying one after
the other. Won’t you, for God’s sake, tell me whether there’s anything
wrong with my man or not?” This appeal was met by the assurance that
there was nothing wrong, and she should do her duty by her husband
and go on having babies. The medical woman student said that it was
glaringly obvious that the baby was syphilitic.
That not only such ill-fated mothers, but that _all_ mothers, should be
freed from the appalling slavery of unwilling and undesired motherhood
became a conviction so intense as to necessitate action. Dr. Stopes
realized with the astonishment that youth always feels towards the
cruelty of its elders, that although the knowledge of birth control has
been freely circulating in our country for very many years, it has been
available chiefly for the educated and the well-to-do.
While Dr. Stopes studied more and more deeply the work on the coal
mines, she was following up several branches of research in connection
not only with fossils and their deposition but with their mode of
origin, and in connection with the petrifaction of the internal
tissues which is so wonderful a feature of some structurally preserved
specimens, she was led to the belief that, given certain conditions
in the surrounding horizons, the existence of the type of fossil for
which she was searching could be more or less predicted. Combining
this with an intense desire to discover the origin of the angiosperms,
which was one of the desiderata then, as it still is, of biological
science, she considered the horizons in any and every country in the
world from which she could get the necessary data, and came to the
conclusion that in an horizon in the northern mountainous Island of
Hokkaido petrified specimens of angiosperms, such as she sought, should
be found; and she applied to the Royal Society for financial assistance
to go there and investigate the matter, at the same time having a
sample specimen sent over from Japan, from the rocks _in situ_, and
she had the thrilling experience of seeing her scientific prediction
fulfilled, and finding in the very first cut a beautiful petrified
angiosperm. This strengthened her application to the Royal Society,
which was still under consideration, and though they had never before
sent a young woman out of the country on any such work, her application
was so well backed that an exception was made in her favour, and she
finally went to Japan alone, with a grant from the Royal Society, and
with the assistance of the Japanese Government, through the Imperial
University at Tokio. There she went up country and collected large
quantities of unique and hitherto unknown fossils which, on her return
to Tokio, she cut with the assistance and collaboration of Professor
Fujii, who together with her wrote a memoir, subsequently published
by the Royal Society in its Transactions, containing an account of
a number of plants new to science, and containing also the first
petrifaction of the flower, and the only one yet discovered. In Japan,
as in Manchester, she found the Professorial staff cordial and kindly,
and Baron Hamao, the President of the Imperial University, made her
an honorary member of the Professors’ Luncheon Club, where she met
the personnel of the various faculties, and thus saw the true life of
Japanese intellectual circles in a way seldom permitted to a foreigner.
A room and research facilities were allotted to her in the Institute of
the Imperial University, and in exchange for all this courtesy she gave
a short course of lectures on plant palæontology to the students and to
others of the staff who cared to attend. A fairly full account of her
manifold interests and experiences in Japan was published by Blackie in
her book entitled _A Journal from Japan_. She returned _via_ America,
and a fresh post in Manchester University was offered to her: the
first lectureship in palæobotany in this country. It was exactly the
post for which her researches fitted her and which her heart desired,
and she was happy to get back to her many friends in Manchester; but
it was no good, for the neuralgia, which had not touched her all the
time she was away, returned after a week in Manchester as violently as
before and became intolerable, so that at the end of the first year of
this new post she had to leave it and finally settle in London, which
all along had been her home.
[Illustration: The first portrait in her robes as Doctor of Science of
London.]
After obtaining the degree of Ph.D. in Munich she had, on returning to
England, followed up her B.Sc. in London by obtaining the Doctorate
of Science, London, when she became, I believe, the youngest Doctor
of Science in England, and shortly afterwards she was made a Fellow
of University College, London. She was invited by the Geological
Department of the British Museum to prepare a special memoir for them
on the Cretaceous Flora of the World, a memoir that took several years
to complete, and which was published ultimately in two volumes by
the Trustees of the British Museum. The Royal Society published in
their Transactions some of the results of the Japanese Expedition and
she was invited to exhibit her specimens from Japan at the ladies’
soirée, where she met Count Solms-Laubach, the veteran palæontologist
of Germany, whose classic treatise had been her original text-book.
He, though a woman hater and extremely reserved, showed the kindliest
appreciation of her new species. The advantage of meeting such men,
which all men of any note in the scientific world can do by attending
the Royal Society’s meetings, was a rare privilege to this young
woman. When some of her later discoveries were made she was invited
by representatives of the Royal Society to send her specimens for
exhibition, but not on ladies’ night. She said she could not send them
without being there herself to demonstrate and guard them, and was told
that she could send any of her own men-students, or even her butler,
but could not be admitted herself. With natural indignation she refused
to exhibit. It seems strange that to this day, however brilliant a
woman’s scientific work may be, her sex precludes her from equality
of treatment in the senior Society of Science in the world, and she
can never hope to be made an F.R.S. The Royal Society of Literature,
however, early recognised her, and on the proposal of old Lord Halsbury
she was elected a Fellow.
In the course of her travels for palæontological research Dr. Stopes
was once again in the United States, and took the opportunity of
attending the American Association of Science at St. Louis, where
she met Dr. Gates. He, like many others before him, immediately fell
passionately in love, and proposed marriage within a few days of making
her acquaintance. He was a botanist and in many respects apparently a
suitable husband, and Dr. Stopes and he were married before her return
to England a few months later.
Dating from her earliest childhood, and strengthened by her interest
in the suffrage, Dr. Marie Stopes has always very keenly felt the
rightness of the old Scottish and Norwegian customs, whereby a married
woman retains her patronymic after marriage, and she arranged with Dr.
Gates that she should retain her own name. In English law--though
many people are unaware of it--provision is made for such cases, and
to retain her own name legally, all a married woman has to do is
to announce at the time of her marriage that she intends to do so,
and to use it systematically for legal documents and transactions.
The effect of loss of personality arising from change of name has
undoubtedly had a psychological influence on women, and such a change
is most unreasonable when one has made such a name for herself as Dr.
Stopes had; a name which was then already recorded in thousands of
card-indexes and catalogues in Universities all over the world. A good
deal of press interest was shown in her revival of this old custom of
keeping her own name, and a number of women have followed the example
since, though old-fashioned people try to make things difficult for
a woman who thus desires to preserve her identity, and Dr. Stopes on
more than one occasion has had to threaten to take legal action against
scientific committees and other persons who endeavoured arbitrarily to
decide for her what her name is to be.
This marriage seems to have been arranged by destiny to give Dr.
Stopes the almost unique experience which completed her fitness to
undertake the work on sex-reform by which she is now best known. On her
marriage she was still, in spite of her zoological training and her
travel and experience of men of many countries, amazingly innocent,
and she was quite happy for six months or more. After that she began
to feel instinctively that something was lacking in her marriage.
Although she was living within a stone’s throw of her mother and of
her family doctor, they neither of them detected what was amiss or
offered any help or solution of the problems which confronted her.
Finally her life became quite intolerable, and I heard her say one
day: “I should go mad if it were not that I say to myself, ‘Why have
I a scientific brain and all my scientific knowledge, if it is not
to find out things that seem to puzzle everybody?’” and, in a very
impersonal manner, she took up her own case as a piece of scientific
research. She went to the British Museum and read pretty nearly every
book on sex in English, French, or German, just as she would read
every book on palæontology before publishing on her own subject. She
also read Lord Halsbury’s Laws of England, and then returned to her
family doctor and family lawyer, and when matters were made thoroughly
clear to them, it became a comparatively easy matter to put through
a nullity suit, in which she sued as _virgo intacta_ for the legal
annulment of her marriage, which her husband’s abnormality had never
allowed him to consummate. Dr. Gates was a passionate lover but an
incomplete husband, and as a result, after years of marriage, was not
only leaving his wife a virgin, but had developed an absurd jealousy
and attempted a domination which rendered life intolerable. At that
time I was frequently a witness of ridiculous little scenes, one, for
instance, in which he “forbade” this independent and high-spirited
young woman even to purchase a paper which she had been reading for
years. As was natural perhaps, Dr. Gates made things as difficult
and in some respects as scandalous for her as he could, but the war
was on before the legal case was finally settled, and shortly after
its outbreak he left England and sought refuge in America, returning
however before hostilities were over. Meanwhile, throughout all her
heartbreaking difficulties, Dr. Marie Stopes remained outwardly very
calm, and continued her palæontological work at the British Museum
and at University College, where, following on her Manchester work, a
palæobotanical lectureship was founded for her in London University.
This attracted much interest and attention at the time and her first
lecture was widely attended and published, and there is little doubt
that but for the war, which swept away her classes of young men, it
would have led to the founding of a regular school of palæobotany.
Meanwhile however the war diverted all who were able to do anything
of practical utility, and the more abstruse and academical aspects
of palæobotany were left on one side, and Dr. Stopes concentrated
on what seemed immediately useful, namely, the application of her
knowledge to the problems of fuel, and of coal in particular. The
Scientific and Industrial Research Department of the Government, under
Sir Frank Heath, actively supported her work, and she collaborated
with Dr. R. V. Wheeler of the Home Office Experimental Station in the
preparation of what _Nature_ described as a “classic”--a Monograph on
the Structure, Chemical and Palæontological, of Coal. (See Appendix B,
p. 216.) Following on this, Dr. Stopes continued researches, both in
collaboration with Professor Wheeler and independently; and the Royal
Society, in 1919, published her short paper on the four ingredients of
coal, in which she originated the now well-known words, clarain, durain
and vitrain.
Professor Wheeler and his students and collaborators, and many others
now doing research on fuel, have followed up the initial research of
Dr. Stopes on the ingredients of coal; for her work made possible for
the first time a discrimination in the analysis of different zones
in the same coal, which is leading to a knowledge of its intimate
structure and potential uses of a much more accurate kind than was
previously possible.
In the course of her scientific researches Dr. Stopes has made a great
number of original discoveries, and has published the results in a
number of learned _Transactions_ and journals, a more or less complete
list of which is given in Appendix B.
Among so many additions to scientific knowledge it is difficult to
say in a few words which are her most important contributions, but,
in the main, they deal with three themes: (_a_) the structure of
the reproductive organs both in living and extinct forms; (_b_) the
composition and structure of coal; and (_c_) the structure of the
vegetable inhabitants of the Cretaceous epoch.
Her discoveries of fossils in Japan, which were published jointly with
Professor Fujii in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society (Appendix
B, p. 219), brought to light a flora of the existence of which nothing
was known, and which was of interest and importance as including the
only petrified flower hitherto discovered in any part of the world. The
public perhaps do not realize that the vegetation which is conspicuous
to-day in the landscape, and which alone provides all our agricultural
plants and food, did not come into existence until the early Cretaceous
epoch.
The earliest known angiosperms in the world were also discovered by
Dr. Stopes and described in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society
(Appendix B, p. 218), and further facts about them are embodied in her
big volume published by the Trustees of the British Museum. Of this Dr.
(now Sir A.) Smith Woodward said: “There is so much that is new in it.
No one would have believed it possible to get so much out of the Lower
Greensand; it is quite wonderful.”
As regards coal, when she was first appointed as a junior lecturer in
Manchester, a centre of one of England’s coal mining districts, she
enthusiastically investigated the local mines. She read an important
paper on the subject before the British Association. It was the first
time she had done so, and the then Director of the Geological Survey,
Sir Jethro Teall, attended the lecture. The discussion proved most
interesting and cleared up a number of points hitherto obscure, and Sir
Jethro (then Dr.) Teall said that he was “astonished at the quality and
quantity of the detail given. I went to encourage a young girl, and I
remained to learn from a master.”
Her short paper on the composition of coal before the Royal Society
(Appendix B., p. 216) has led to an enormous change in the attitude
both of palæontologists and chemists towards coal structure, and
the terminology instituted by Dr. Stopes is now not only almost
universally followed, but the ideas in that short paper of hers have
proved fruitful in many directions--see, for instance the work of Dr.
Lessing on coking, of Dr. Ivan Graham, the Assistant Director of Mining
Research at Birmingham, and the many papers in the technical journals
arising from the inspiration in her original paper.
Although the outer public did not know her as a lecturer until
recently, in the course of her academic career Dr. Stopes lectured
regularly in Manchester and London Universities, and had given
brief courses or single lectures in the University of Tokio, in the
Parliament House in Hokkaido, in Chicago University, in Toronto
University, and in many other institutes and halls in various parts of
the British Isles and other countries, and her palæontological work was
utilized by various Government Departments in addition to the British
Museum and the Home Office. The Canadian Government, for instance,
sent for her to settle a problem which had been in dispute for over
40 years, about the age of certain potential coal-bearing deposits in
Eastern Canada, and the results of her investigations were published
by the Geological Survey of Canada in a large Memoir. (See Appendix
B, p. 217.) Amidst this life of manifold activities her relation to
her students was such that she always brought to every lecture some
fresh idea of vital interest. No doubt had she taken up some popular
subject instead of so remote and academic a field as she pursued, her
name would have become a household word among us years sooner than was
actually the case. Her personality was bound to make its impression on
our national life even had she never touched so burning a subject as
that with which she has been recently associated.
In addition to her many scientific associates, Dr. Stopes has had
warm friendships and interesting literary associations with many
distinguished literary men. For instance, with Maurice Hewlett, the
novelist and poet, who was so retiring and _difficile_, a warm
friendship started long before she was known to the world. Hewlett
wrote to her:--
“Yes, the writer of the ‘Letters to Sanchia’ is Senhouse. I can’t say
that he is a portrait of anybody in particular, though it does so
happen that I have known a man who lived, and still lives, much the
same life. But the two have nothing else in common, and I think my
man is more what I should like to believe myself to be than anything
more definite. _Video meliora._ He is one of the better things I see.
I won’t go nearer than that as yet.
“But if you, who have travelled far and been quit (for a time, at
all events) of our horrible trammel of circumstance, find truth and
reason in the substance of what I have imagined, I feel enormously
encouraged to go on. It was really kind of you to tell me so.”
And soon after he wrote:--
“Senhouse will feel that he has done something when such a letter as
yours is communicated to him. You evidently haven’t read his third
volume, ‘Rest Harrow’--which I beg leave to send you herewith.
Therein you will discover how he and Mrs. Germain parted company, and
in what unearthly manner he and his Sanchia found each other--the
where and when as well as the how. I personally am unable to
distinguish the fairy tale from the other tales, or the dream from
the daylight reflection. I don’t know whether I write truth or lies.
To me they are truth--to a large proportion of mankind foolishness:
but I write for myself because I have to, and am lucky to have such
readers as you.”
Israel Zangwill, the author-dramatist, and his wife, the novelist, were
both cordial friends much interested in her literary work before she
became well known through “Married Love,” and it was Edward Carpenter
who first encouraged her to publish “Married Love.”
Both before and after she was well known she has had some friendly and
amusing little encounters with Bernard Shaw, and I may quote a postcard
which he sent to the C.B.C. regretting his inability to attend the
Annual Dinner in November, 1923:--
“I shall not be able to come as I shall not be in London. If it could
possibly be made an M.S. (Marie Stopes) dinner without being a B.C.
one, I should greatly regret this. As it is, it is rather convenient
for me, because I cannot find a satisfactory public position about
B.C. If I went into the movement merely to fight the Malthusians
I should do more harm than good; and I really could not sit quiet
in it and seem to acquiesce with them. I am sure M.’s (Marie’s)
psycho-physiology is right; but neither of us can prove it.
“G. B. SHAW.”
Her poems brought her many warm and interesting letters from literary
men whom she had never met personally. For instance, about these poems
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote:--
“First let me thank you for the little book that brought me such
jolly discoveries as ‘Marjorie’ and ‘Tokio Snow’--and such fine ones
as ‘The Beaters’ and ‘The Brother’ (this last the sort of thing that
walks straight and takes a seat in memory for the rest of one’s
days).”