Charlotte Carmichael Stopes - Upper Norwood

Upper Norwood

After they were married on June 3, 1879, the Stopeses went on a honeymoon across Europe and the Near East, eventually visiting Egypt, before returning to Britain. Charlotte Stopes went to Edinburgh where her first daughter, Marie, was born in 1880. After reaching her husband in Colchester, his family home, they moved to London, where he had an active business. They settled in Upper Norwood on the southern outskirts of the city, where her second daughter, Winnie, was born in 1884. Henry, being very busy with business, left Charlotte alone in their new house, where she was isolated from the sorts of intellectual life she had been used to. Her response was to organize meetings and classes, including a reading group, a logic workshop and a group focused on issues relating to women's emancipation.

Stopes became keenly interested in the Victorian dress reform and the need for comfortable clothes for women. She was a member of the Rational Dress Society and her activity in 1888-1889 brought her to note as a feminist. At the British Association meeting in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1889, Stopes stunned the proceedings by organizing an impromptu session, where she introduced rational dress to a wide audience, her speech being noted in newspapers across Britain.

Stopes remained in Norwood until her husband's bankruptcy in 1892, when they were forced to sell the house. To escape the disaster, she took her daughters to Edinburgh, where she enrolled them at the newly formed girls' school, St George's School, Edinburgh. She also attempted to gain a retrospective degree, denied to her at the time of her studies, but she needed a further two courses not included in her certificate. These courses however clashed, so she could not do them in a single year and she abandoned the attempt, returning to London to take up lodgings in Torrington Square close to the British Museum, where she was able to better follow her Shakespearean research.