In March 1921, exactly one hundred years ago, Marie Stopes and her husband Humphrey Verdon Roe founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Mothers' Clinic for Constructive Birth Control as it was called, was established at 61 Marlborough Road in Holloway, a working-class area in North London. The opening of the clinic had a huge impact on the twentieth century, may we only remind of the perception of the 'necessary evil' that prevailed in Victorian age around sex and God-forbid the enjoyment of the erotic act, even in a marriage. The clinic marked the start of a new era in which married women and couples, for the first time, could reliably and openly be educated on reproductive health and birth control methods, take control over their fertility and all of these without a charge. On the first day that it opened, there was a queue of women waiting outside, attracted by posters announcing the event.
The Mothers' Clinics were carefully constructed spaces, private sanctuaries away from the public. Painted a blue shade, with furnishings resembling comfortable domestic sitting rooms, they radiated a sense of respectability and responsibility. Highly qualified midwives, wives and mothers themselves, dispensed advice to the vast majority of patients. Birth control as taught in the Mothers' Clinics was necessary to marital fulfillment and good health. In 1925 the clinic moved to Whitfield Street in Bloomsbury and Marie Stopes wrote the first official report of the Mothers' Clinic, entitled The First Five Thousand in which she claimed astonishing success. She alleged that only less than one percent of her patients became pregnant while following her clinics’ recommended birth control devices and four years later, ten thousand women had received contraceptive advice.
To regulate her own fertility in this way, a woman often had to overcome the stigma that birth control held in many working-class communities. Sex was taboo in most circles, and even feminists avoided the subject of birth control until long after World War I. Many women were brought up to believe that contraception was shameful and, for some, merely visiting a clinic was a subversive act. In her clinics, Stopes advocated three types of reproductive planning: preventing unwanted births, spacing children in a family, and helping couples who were infertile to conceive. She was opposed to abortions and instructed her midwives to educate women about the use of contraceptive technologies. Her preferred contraceptive device was the Pro-Race cervical cap, which The London Rubber Company made to her specifications and packaged together with Stopes’ Letter to Working Mothers.
But Marie Stopes was not the only pioneer figure. During her life, she met with her American equal: Margaret Sanger.
(Source: "Women's History Month: The Centenary of Britain's First Birth Control Clinic", University of London: Senate House Library.)
