Births Fit and Unfit
Marie Stopes : Her Work and Play. By Aylmer 5iaude. (Peter Davies. 8s. 6d.)
The Naked Truth. By Joan Conquest. (Werner Laurie,. 3s. 6d.)
Ma. AYL7dER MAUDE has been well advised to expand into a much fuller and more up-to-date biography the short Life of Dr. Mopes, which he published nine years ago ; and com- parison of the two shows the present to be at most points a
new book. He has known her for a long time ; it was he who advised her on the publication (1918) of her first book about birth control—Married Love, which has since sold over 750,000 copies and been translated into a dozen languages. And in tracing her career he has had the advantage of her co- operation, without which the accurate details of her early days and the letters illustrating her later experiences could obviously not have been obtained.
The character studied is one of many active interests, each of which is here touched on. Among the millions who have heard Dr. Stopes's name in connexion with birth control pro- bably only a small proportion know that she has long since reached high scientific eminence in the overlapping spheres of botany and geology as a palaeobotanist and an investigator of coal-formation. She has also written and published a travel-book, a novel, plays, poems, and fairy stories. Mr. Maude somewhere compares her versatility to Da Vinci's ; and if that may seem perhaps a little excessive, there is, no doubt that she has unusually varied gifts. Nevertheless, it would be affectation not to recognize that her birth-control work is her most important achievement ; and her biographer is quite right to throw into the foreground here the motives which have inspired her in it.
The first seems, though it may sound paradoxical, love of children. Dr. Stopes (who has a very flourishing son of her
own) adores children. But she wants the world to have ideal children—not the offspring Of, exhausted mothers, over:
tasked fathers, and overcrowded homes. That is what she means to convey by her term " constructive birth control." Second comes the scientist's instinct—a strong feeling that, wherever human knowledge can be used to _overcome the
cruelty and waste. of Nature, it should be allowed to do . so.
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And, thirdly, there is an active sense of class injustice at .the denial to the poor of knowledge well circulated among the well-to-do. It appears to be untrue that (as- one sometimes hears suggested) she has " done very well out of " theinovement, Of course, her books have sold enormously. But the costs of her law-suits have also been enormous, and, together with that of maintaining her clinic, they some years ago compelled her and her well-to-do husband (formerly a partner in the Avro firm) to sell their large house and move into a smaller one. , The other book on our list might be treated partly as illus- trating the third motive principle noted above. For it is a lurid picture of slum life, in which the horrors-of excessive and involuntary parentage under the worst possible conAitions of poverty and ignorance are shdwn as obtrusively as may be. But I do not think it a good book. The adjective in its title really gives a better- idea of its contents than the nOun.
The authoress has explored the London slums as a nurse— not, one gathers, as _a regular district nurse working_an area- for years, but as a more casual visitor, whom a _temporary nurse's role enabled to penetrate the privacies of some slum homes, But her report is far more flamboyantly, disgusting- than a true picture would be. I do not mean that the incidents in it may not all have happened, or that houses cannot be found corresponding to the conditions described.: The only actual misdescription is in the conversations attributed to poor people ; whose talk is seldom well dramatized and_eommonly quite out of character. But the broad effect is naisleacling, so far as it suggests that what is extremely exceptional is of daily occurrence. Nor does it do any justice to the_ constant march of improvement, nor seem to realize how many-sided are the
evils and their remedies. - • - . .
The writer's avowed motive for it all is to add force to an anti-shun crusade. I think that shejs quite sincere, but not that literary brutalities of this kind haste 'just _that effect. During over 30 years' experience of.-the problem. 'I have noted the appearance of similar •books several -times. They sell well to a-Morbid-sort of reader, brit not to a sort that gives
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