Female Sexuality

Abstract

When I was first invited to give this year's Marie Stopes Memorial Lecture I had to express my reservations, as my ignorance of Marie Stopes' work was, I'm afraid, profound. I was assured that the talk could simply be on any area relevant or only indirectly related to Marie Stopes' work. I assumed from this that the reason for my invitation was to associate Marie Stopes' achievements with the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. Since those days of pristine ignorance two things have happened to me. First, I have now read a certain amount on and by Marie Stopes, and second, I have read the lecture that Laurie Taylor gave here last year entitled ‘Marie Stopes—The Unfinished Sexual Revolution—but also extremely annoying. Here was a man extraordinarily sensitive to the facile male chauvinism of his predecessors: those biographers who had let a stuffy nervousness about Marie Stopes' stress on her own life-long sexual needs mar their tale, often turning an adventurous and unconventional woman into a disturbed and frustrated eccentric: someone who was not a ‘fuffilled’ woman. In his talk Laurie Taylor more than righted the balance for he not only corrected the priggish sexism of others, and was himself unusually free from it, but, moreover, he managed to place Stopes' work in a context of serious theories of sexual revolution. In other words, on reading last year's lecture I found my task already done. It is a rare and pleasant occasion when one can defer to the anti-male chauvinism of a male critic, and I do so with great satisfaction. In fact I wish to do more than to defer to it; I wish to take advantage of it. For I want today to use Marie Stopes merely as a jumping-off point, only vaguely relating her preoccupations to those of the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. I am afraid I even want to be critical of aspects of her great achievement in spreading birth control and gynaecological health in a way for which, goodness knows, we are all most grateful today. For an active member of the Women's Liberation Movement to come and speak in honour of one of the women who in this century has done so much for women and ignore that honour or even turn it to criticism, is, I'm afraid, a dishonourable act. I feel I've been asked here in double trust and I am, in a way, going to abuse both.