Chapter IV: 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.

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).”