Personal Life
Stopes had a serious relationship mainly through correspondence with Japanese botanist Kenjiro Fujii, whom she met at the University of Munich in 1904 whilst researching her Ph.D. It was so serious that, in 1907, during her 1904-1910 tenure at Manchester University, she arranged to do research in Japan, allowing her to be with him, but the affair ended. In 1911 Stopes married Canadian geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates. Her marriage to Gates was annulled in 1916 on the grounds that the marriage was never consummated.
In 1918 she married the financial backer of her most famous work, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of the Sex Difficulties, Humphrey Verdon Roe, brother of Alliott Verdon Roe. Their son, the philosopher Harry Stopes-Roe, was born in 1924.
Stopes was very controlling as a mother. She had taken a dislike to her son's companion, Mary Eyre Wallis (the daughter of the noted engineer Barnes Wallis), and, when Harry announced their engagement in October 1947, his mother set out to sabotage the union. She found fault with everything she could about Mary, even writing to Mary's father to complain. After Harry married Mary, who was myopic, Stopes cut him out of her will, settling on the eugenics argument that prospective grandchildren might inherit the condition to justify her resentment.
Stopes died at her home in Dorking, Surrey, UK from breast cancer. In her will she left her clinic to the Eugenics Society. The bulk of her estate went to the Royal Society of Literature. To her son, Harry, who she had never forgiven for marrying Mary Eyre Wallis, she left her copy of the Greater Oxford Dictionary and other small items.
Read more about this topic: Marie Stopes
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“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
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