STOPES, Marie. Wise Parenthood: A Sequel to “Married Love”- A Book for Married People. London: A.C. Fifield.1919.
8vo. Brown paper-covered boards with white title-label to front board lettered in red, semi-transparent dust jacket with printed price of “two shillings and sixpence” and edition statement to front panel; pp. [viii], 33, [1 (publisher’s ads to rear endpaper)]; glassine dust jacket in particularly nice condition with only a little wear to edges, a little spotting to top and fore-edges (with a little spotting to edges of pages); a very good copy; authorial inscription in ink to front free endpaper (see below).
Fourth edition, this copy inscribed by Marie Stopes to her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe: “Complimentary copy to | H. Verdon Roe Esq. | from his friend | The Author. | 21 May 1919”.
Wise Parenthood was swiftly published after Married Love. It served as a sequel, but also as a textbook to married couples. For Stopes, the publication of Married Love proved what she had long feared: the general public were ignorant about sex.
Wise Parenthood explicitly discusses the use of contraception, which Married Love had only alluded to. On 17 March 1921, along with Roe, Stopes opened the first birth control clinic in the British Empire. It opened in London, Holloway, and it was very small, and plainly furnished. Stopes did this with the idea that this would serve as a model for rolling out across the rest of the country.
The inscription from Marie becomes particularly poignant here considering she was four months pregnant, and the couple were still enjoying the earlier, happy stages of their marriage. Unfortunately, their relationship would break down towards the end of the 1930s.
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: 2122368