Marie Stopes’s "Contraception," First Edition, in Dust Jacket: 1923

Marie Stopes Contraception

First Edition

Marie Stopes’s professional birth control manual from 1923, published two years after she and Humphrey Verdon Roe opened Britain’s first birth control clinic and while litigation over the clinic and its contraceptive program was proceeding through the British courts. This early jacketed second impression of Stopes’s attempt to establish contraception within professional medical and legal discourse while her clinic, methods, and eugenic program were under public and judicial scrutiny.Addressed explicitly to “The Medical and Legal Professions,” Contraception moved beyond the marital and popular readership of Stopes’s earlier books to organize contraceptive practice as a professional subject, with chapters on “Indications for Contraception,” contraceptives in use, objections to contraception, and the nineteenth and twentieth century history of family limitation. Its first printing appeared on June 27, 1923, four months after the opening of Stopes v. Sutherland and less than a month before the Court of Appeal reversed the initial judgment against Stopes; this December impression followed within six months.
Stopes, Marie Carmichael. Contraception (Birth Control): Its Theory, History and Practice. A Manual for the Medical and Legal Professions. London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Limited, 1923. First Edition, Second impression, same year as the first 1923. 5.5 x 9 inches (8vo). The title page expands the work’s intended audience with the line “A Manual for The Medical and Legal Professions,” credits an introduction by Prof. Sir William Bayliss, and names Sir James Barr, Dr. C. Rolleston, Dr. Jane Hawthorne, and “Obscurus” as contributors of introductory notes. The printing statement records “First published . . . June 27th, 1923” and “Reprinted . . . December, 1923.” Eleven chapters proceed from “The Problem Today” and “Theoretical Desiderata — Satisfactory Contraceptives” through indications for contraception, contraceptives classified and described, methods for special cases, objections to contraception, and three historical sections, “Early History of Family Limitation,” “Contraception in the Nineteenth Century,” and “Contraception in the Twentieth Century.” The publisher’s jacket advertises the work as “The first manual on the subject”; the rear panel advertises John Bale’s contemporary medical list, including works on syphilis, gonorrhea, urethritis, venereal clinics, sexual disease, conjugal happiness, and male sexual health.

Stopes and Roe opened the Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, on March 17, 1921, providing married women with contraceptive instruction and reproductive health advice; Stopes subsequently organized the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. University of London Her campaign joined expanded access to contraception with explicitly eugenic arguments characteristic of part of the interwar birth control movement. In a November 1923 Nature letter, published the same year as this volume, Stopes described sections of the population as “physiologically inferior” and presented “constructive birth control” as both a means of spacing pregnancies and an instrument of racial policy. Nature The professional authority claimed by Contraception was also being contested in court: Halliday Sutherland’s published attack on Stopes and her clinic produced a libel action heard in February 1923, an appellate victory for Stopes that July, and an eventual House of Lords decision for Sutherland in 1924. Dust jacket with light edge wear, small chips and creasing at corners and spine ends, and mild surface rubbing; text leaves lightly toned. Overall very good condition.

Item #23969

Price: $350.00