Every Heart Desires A Mate
STOPES, Marie Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties. London: Fifield.1919.
8vo. Original maroon cloth with gilt lettering to spine and emblem in blind to front board; original dust jacket, the date “1919” in pencil to front panel; pp. [xv], 124, [2]; minor toning and foxing to text block and some rubbing to extremities, fore-and lower edges untrimmed, a number of pages remain uncut; minor loss to upper spine and corners, short closed tears to upper edge of front panel; a very good copy.
”In this little book, Dr. Marie Stopes deals with subjects which are generally regarded as too sacred for an entirely frank treatment …” (from the preface by Miss Jessie Murray).
Inscribed by Marie Stopes to the front free endpaper to her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, “Returned to Humphles, on his first wedding anniversary. 16 May 1919 from a wife who still loves him”. A notably poignant association copy, inscribed early in the couple’s married life, while Stopes was pregnant with their first child, stillborn two months later.
Marie Stopes was born in Edinburgh in 1880 and remembered as a prominent women’s rights pioneer, as well as the first female member the science faculty at the University of Manchester where she was a palaeobotanist. Married Love was her own debut and one of the first books to be open about birth control. Facing fierce condemnation from both medical and religious authorities, it went through six printings within weeks of publication and was banned by US customs for over two decades.
Stopes’ text was intended to instruct married couples on how to cultivate a successful marital relationship through the promotion of a fulfilling sexual life.
Married Love launched the author’s career; in 1921, Stopes went on to set up the United Kingdom's first family planning clinic in Holloway, North London. The clinic promised to deliver free contraceptive service to married women while collecting data on the uses of contraception.
In 2020, Marie Stopes International (MSI) abbreviated its initials and was renamed MSI Reproductive Services, in an attempt to distance itself from Stopes’ association with eugenics.
Provenance: The inscription is to Stopes’ second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, early in the couple’s marriage. Roe played a crucial part in the publication of Married Love, contributing £100 to the project, enough to persuade the minor publisher A. C. Fifield to issue the book.
This sixth edition was the final one issued by Fifield before Putnam's assumed the rights, the smaller publisher no longer able to cope with demand for the book.
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