A "Gesture"
STOPES, Marie. Prevention of Venereal Disease. London: Putnam & Co. 1939.
8vo. Maroon paper covered boards, lettered in white to spine and black to front board, glassine wrapper; glassine wrapper particularly nice with only one nick to the front panel and some creasing to back panel, some spotting and toning to edges of textblock, light offsetting from jacket to endpapers; a very good copy; authorial inscription in ink to front free endpaper (see below).
Third edition, eleventh impression “thoroughly revised and enlarged”, this copy inscribed by Marie Stopes to her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe: “A Gesture | 20. Nov. 1939 | from the author to H. | M. C. S.”.
Stopes and Roe married in May 1918, and they worked together establishing the first birth control clinic in the British Empire which opened in 1921. Roe had also been instrumental in the publication of Stopes’ most well known work, Married Love.
Unfortunately, their relationship became strained after the birth of their second child, and towards the end of the 1930s, they were estranged. Stopes’ rather unfeeling inscription provides an insight into their complicated relationship, and Stopes’ use of “gesture” is a rather intriguing expression.
Prevention of Venereal Disease expanded upon her earlier work, Truth about Venereal Disease (1921). This book advocated for sexual education, proactive hygiene, and the use of contraceptive methods such as the “Pro-Race” (later “RACIAL”) cervical cap which Stopes designed.
Provenance: From the estate of Harry Verdon Stopes-Roe (1924-2014) philosopher and vice-president of the British Humanist Association, son of Marie Stopes and Humphrey Verdon Roe.
See Briant, Marie Stopes: A Biography (1962).
SKU: 2122367