Marie Stopes: pioneel and reactionarj

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PHOTO: Laurence Sparham, IFL NUPE leader Fisher bureaucracy used the issue of "emergency cover" and their so-called "code" for pickets to withdraw support from and sell out many sections of workers.

Without making a single mention of massive army scabbing, the leadership refused to give official backing to ambulance drivers on the grounds that they had ignored the union's instructions to maintain emergency cover.

And on the nurses claim, NUPE instructed nurses that thay could take any action "short of strike action" in pursuit of their claim-thus bureaucratically isolating a potentially powerful group of workers from the whole After two months of efforts designed to kill off the strikes, the bureaucracy finally managed to sell out the claim with a series of blatant bureaucratic manoeuvres which accepted the 9% offer at a time when many sections throughout the country were still taking action.

Conferences

As the NUPE conference approaches on May 20, and the other public sector conferences during the summer, it is essential that workers realise the scale of the betrayal carried out by their leaders "left" and right alike.

Much more important than this, they must begin now to formulate the correct policies to steer them through future struggles, and prepare for a major battle with the leadership that sold them out during the low pay strikes.

The comparability study will offer no significant improvement in living standards, and whatever it does offer is likely to be tied to a form of wage bargaining in the public sector which will attempt to rule out any form of industrial action in pursuit of wage claims.

Workers must prepare now for action against the comparability findings and link this with building for action on the review date in pursuit of the claim formulated at the conference.

Public sector workers can only protect their living standards by winning a substantial wage increase, and protecting this trom erosion by inflation through cost of living clauses based on figures compiled by elected trade union committees.

If they are to win such a claim, public sector workers must fight for the policies and leadership which will mobilise their enormous strength and determination.

The WSL despite its small resources, pointed the way towards beginning this fight in the low pay strikes, and workers have only to look at the record of WSL members and sympathisers during these strikes to realise what can be achieved with fighting on a principled revolutionary programme in the trade unions.

PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report COHSE leader Spanswick In the early 1960s the Marie Stopes memorial clinic in Whitfield Street was the only place in London where an unmarried; unengaged woman could get birth control advice.

My gratitude at that has always made me view Marie Stopes through rosy specttacles.

This was the woman, !

thought, who as pioneer of birth control had saved me and thousands of others from an unwanted pregnancy.

Birth control advice and the distribution of diaphram caps was much to be prized in that period before the pill and the gradual liberalisation of the attitude among family doctors and the family planning association made everything rather easier.

Different picture

However Ruth Hall's biography published by Virago gives a very different picture from the progressive thinker I had so fondly imagined.

Indeed the reality of Marie Stopes' life reveals how complexly interwoven are progress and reaction both within one individual and within social movements.

It is necessary for us to understand that the world has never been full of the simply black and white, the good and the bad, the progressive and the reactionary. Reality is more complex than that.

Nonetheless it is important, despite the complexity, to assess the overall contribution an individual or movement makes in favour ultimately of progress or reaction.

Crazy lady Marie Stopes was, it seems, a fairly crazy lady. She was incapable of co-operating with others also fighting for the extension of birth control, Marie Stopes and blinded by an egotism and disproportionate notion of her own importance.

Nevertheless Marie Stopes' contribution to the furtherance of birth control was of significance and importance.

Hostile to workers How that contribution was shot through at every turn by her hostility to the working class is a fascinating tale. Whatever her motives in wishing to keep the working class from breeding, the historical outcome is that birth control advice is now freely available to working class women.

Marie Stopes played a role in allowing that to happen, a role of lesser significance than the struggle by the labour movement for the welfare state, but a role nonetheless.

Marie Stopes was born in 1880, the daughter of a pair of middle class radicals.

Her mother was perhaps as eccentric and domineering as Marie herself was to become, supporting such causes as Rational Dress' for women, opposing frozen meat and later supporting the suffragettes.

Sense of sin

She brought Marie up with a strong Victorian sense both of sin and of her duties to the 'lower orders' Marie was to devote her early adulthood to a scientific career as botanist, but throughout her later life the strong sense of moral fervour and the need somehow to 'deal' with the working class remained with her.

Marie Stopes' interest in birth control was initially a byproduct of her work and writing on human sexuality, for which she is now scarcely remembered.

Her work in this area sprang from the sadness and frustrations of her own sexual biography; she was determined that no other women should go through the kind experience of which total ignorance of human sexual behaviour had led her, an ignorance all too. common in Victorian England and later.

Having had few dealings with men, Marie married late, at the age of 31. This marriage was annulled in 1916 on the grounds of non-consummation because of her husband's impotence. This in itself is evidence enough of personal unhappiness; but what is more striking is that for almost two years Marie Stopes had continued, unaware that there was anything out of the ordinary about their sexual relationship.

Ignorance

So totally in ignorance were many Victorian women about the sexual act (which was commonly regarded as an unpleasant experience to be put up with that many of them must have received considerable shock on their wedding night, while others, like Marie, had only the vaguest sense that all. was not right.

The suppression and repression of . women's sexuality, the view that women did not experience sexual desire, pleasure or ecstasy is age old in Christian culture and used as one of the mechanisms keeping women in their place as mere objects for their husbands' enjoyment.

This view was not quickly altered; despite the work of Marie Stopes and others, standard pamphlets on sex education in schools as late as the 1960s and maybe still today contained no mention of female sexual desire or orgasm.

Anguish

Thus even the permissive 1960s girl experiencing sexual desire for a man for the first time could easily come to think of herself as 'perverted' or 'dirty'.

Marie Stopes must have had considerable anguish coming to terms with the realisation of her own sexuality; all this is evidenced in the many passionate poems and plays she wrote throughout her life.

As a scientist her response to the dawning realisation that her husband was impotent led her to research and she read up all the material then available on the subject of sexuality.

It was on the basis of this written material and not of personal experience that she wrote her controversial book 'Married Love' first published in 1918, with the preface my own marriage I paid. such a terrible price for sex ignorance that I feel knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity."

While writing the book she became aware of the need to include information on contraception and sought the advice of the American champion of birth control, Margaret Sanger, on whose behalf she was to write to President Wilson asking him to drop one of the many prose cutions against her.

Stopes? letter is an emotional statement of her views on why women needed birth control.

"Have you, Sir, visualised what it means to a woman whose every fibre, whose every muscle and blood capillary is subtly poisoned by the secret, evergrowing horror... of an unwanted embryo developing beneath her heart?

"While men • stand proudly and face the sun, boasting that they have quenched the wickedness of slavery. What chains of slavery are, have been, or ever could be so intimate a horror as the shackles on every limb, on every thought, on the very soul, of an unwillingly pregnant woman?"

The logic of this is of course also to support abortion. But Stopes always failed to do that.

Her commitment to birth control and to sexuality was always to be contained within marriage-"The happiness of a perfect marriage which enhances the vitality of the private life."

Stopes herselt was to remain a virgin until the age of 38, so committed was she to the barrier that only within marriage could sexual fulfilment be discovered.

Her writings on the whole nature of sexuality whilst confused by her within these limitations were part of a movement which could and did later transcend her own narrow bourgeois thought.

Similarly her work on birth control had later to be transcended by those in support of both abortion and birth control outside marriage.

It was not merely in this restriction that Stopes' views were however reactionary.

Her views on eugenicspatterns of breeding-were enough to put any socialist quite off family planning.

Having herself married and had one still-born child, she set up a birth control clinic in a working class district of North London.

She thought that "Class Also afraid of being swamped -Thatcher children: "Are these puny-faced, gaunt, blotchy, ill-balanced, feeble, ungainly, withered children the young of an imperial race?... "Isn't it for the leisured, the wise, to go to her [the working class woman] and tell her what are the facts of life, the meaning of what is doing and what she ought to do? «The serious truth is that not many of the leisured and the learned have bothered to think out the meaning of what she is doing.

'If they realised it, surely an outcry of dismay would be raised; for Mrs Jones iS destroying the race."

She explicitly saw birth control as a way of ridding the "English race" of:

"the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feebleminded, the very lowest and worst members of the community."

Birth control would, she hoped, prevent the danger of revolution.

She was anxous for this and in 1921 she attempted to intervene in the dispute with the miners, writing to Lloyd George:

"May I implore you on no account to yield to the threats of the miners' leaders."

Despite her anxious support for the ruling class and the "imperial race"

Stopes was herself somewhat of a threat to some of them and lived throughout her life in constant battle through various lawsuits and others with the opponents of birth control, notably the Catholic church.

Her last years were increasingly spent alternately haranguing the Catholic church and campaigning for birth control both in Britain and elsewhere-including India.

Swamped by hordes

She was terrified of being "swamped by hordes of Indians and Chinese"

By the 1950s, Stopes stood still eccentrically fighting byegone battles. But as Ruth Hall comments:

"It is important to see these ideas in their context • . . Many of Marie's ideas would not be tolerated by modern proponents of the women's liberation movement-in particular, her restriction of sexual activity to those bound in holy matrimony, and her disapproval of abortion, masturbation and lesbianism."

On the other hand, "Marie pre-echoed in 1918 the central tenet of the modern movement for women's liberation-that a woman should be allowed to exercise 'control over her own body'."

We disagree that this is the central tenet of her approach; we are deeply hostile to Stopes' view of the working class.

Yet we must recognise the contradictory contribution of this rather awful woman to the struggle against women's oppression.

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ow to fight practical solidarity action to discipline Roy Fraser, the which alone can keep the Leyland Craftsmen's leader, This means supporting £90 per week wage for the 24 hour picket, prepar- craftsmen.

A parting gift from the defeated Labour government appears to be a renewed and even more determined move by the Camden and Islington Area Health Authority to close the beleaguered Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital.

Arguing that the hospital faces a shortage of nurses, the AHA has called an emergency meeting for May 9 which is expected to endorse a plan that will:

*Stop all admissions the EGA immediately.

*Close all wards by May 14.

*Close outpatient facilities by May 28.

The closure is supposed to be a "temporary" measure in the "interests and safety" of patients.

("Temporary" closures are becoming a regular feature of management strategy-it was recently employed in the case of St. Columba's Hospitalbecause it by-passes the necessary consultation period which applies to proposed permanent closure).

Pretext

The "nursing shortage" is no more than a flimsy pretext for a crash closure programme designed to take the labour movement by surprise and speedily axe this hospital which staff and local trade unionists have stubbornly defended since 1975.

Indeed as recently as 23 April EGA doctors were KATION SIRE told AHA that:

"There will be no sudden closure of the EGA. Work at the hospital will continue as before. The situation will be discussed at the next AHA meeting on May 14"

Since then, four staff nurses have been taken on improving the situation substantially.

But the EGA, representing a national focus for the struggle against the cuts, is a thorn in the side of the AHA and of the new Tonis involved is not an argument about staffing levels but an all-out struggle in which full-scale support from other hospitals is needed to save the EGA.

When Ennals last threatened closure on July 21 last year there was an immediate response from Ennals London health workers.

The London Division of NUPE was forced to call a mass meeting of shop EGA was closed.

Strike actior

And nearby hospitals organised through the South Camden District Joint Shop Stewards Committee passed a resolution calling for indefinite strike action the moment the EGA was interfered with.

At St. Pancras Hospital, the COHSE branch endorsed this call and pledged itself to all-out indefinite action.

Backed off

Seeing the scope of this movement Ennals backed Wing ne EGA open.

le CUTS WSL members draw out the lessons of two important struggles against the cuts in which they have been centrally involved-the occupation of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in London and the occupation of the South Oxford Nursery.

Price plus

postage from WSL, 31, Dartmou th Park Hill, London VW5 HR.

off, seek a more opportune tir to press the The aftermath of the election, whatever party was returned to office, seemed to offer the best prospect. Hence the current management offensive.

The Save the EGA Campaign has called an emergency meeting to discuss this grave situation, to be held on Tuesday 15 May at 7 p.m. at the hospital.

It is essential that NUPE and other public sector union leaders are forced to turn last year's paper resolutinne of cunmart into the

ENRAL OUTİ

NO MORE ing to occupy the premises, and building the basis for supporting strike action throughout the London health services.

DUFFY'S ALL AUEW officials have just received a 20% wage increase. This will mean President Terry Duffy's wages up by £30 per week to £8,802 per year.

The hypocrisy of these trade union leaders can be seen when you remember Duffy's witch-hunting, HAIL scavving awacks ana unreats when he led a fight for a

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C" (working, class) women were producing too many PHOTO: Mark Rusher

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stewards, which threatened "rolling strike action" if the

OSPITAL CUTS How to light the cats