This book examines the life, work and contraversial achievements of Marie Stopes, author and pioneer of the birth control movement in the interwar period. As the centenary of the ground-breaking publication of Married Love approaches, this study traces and reassesses Marie's remarkable achievements, considering the literary, scientific and political themes of her life's work. Clare Debenham analyses how Stope's personal life led her to turn away from palaeobotany to concentrate on transforming the country's sexual relationships by writing Married Love. Utilising extensive unpublished archive research, biographies, letters, and interviews with her friends and relatives, Debenham demonstrates that Stopes's work on sexual relationships has overshadowed her considerable achievements including her scientific career as a paleaobotantist, her literary success in the interwar period, and her work, with help from suffragists, in establishing the first British birth control clinic.

After the granting of the vote to women in 1918, the struggle for women's rights intensified with a nationwide campaign for the right to birth control. This campaign was met with a great deal of hostility; it threatened to overturn Victorian ideas about female sexuality, female empowerment and the traditional roles within the family. The most well known of the campaigners, scientist and early feminist Marie Stopes, opened clinics across England which fitted 'contraception caps' to women for free. The first history of this grassroots social movement, "Birth Control and the Rights of Women" offers a window into the social and cultural history of the period, and features new archival material in the forms of memoirs, personal papers and press cuttings. This is an essential contribution to the influential field of women's history and a vital addition to the history of feminism.

After the granting of the vote to women in 1918, the struggle for women's rights intensified with a nationwide campaign for the right to birth control. This campaign was met with a great deal of hostility; it threatened to overturn Victorian ideas about female sexuality, female empowerment and the traditional roles within the family. The most well known of the campaigners, scientist and early feminist Marie Stopes, opened clinics across England which fitted 'contraception caps' to women for free. The first history of this grassroots social movement, After the Suffragettes offers a window into the social and cultural history of the period, and features new archival material in the forms of memoirs, personal papers and press cuttings. This is an essential contribution to the influential field of women's history and a vital addition to the history of feminism.