Marie Stopes & G. Greer: Father-Daughter-Mother Dynamics

How did the personal lives of Marie Stopes and Germaine Greer affect their writing? And was the black pessimism of the second sexual prophet of our age caused by the manic optimism of the first? Both Marie and Germaine were oldest daughters. Both were deeply involved with their fathers and virtually at war with their mothers. Through childhood, each operated in a troika situation, an unholy competitive trinity of father, daughter and mother. Stopes won her battle for paternal attention, hence her unshakeable confidence in the ideal mate. Judging by what she says in Daddy, Greer seems to think she lost hers. Hence, perhaps, her deep-rooted distrust of such a notion.

If your love life is good, declared forty-eight-year-old Marie Stopes in 1928, you can differ from your partner in almost every way imaginable. Conversely, though you may be compatible in every other way, if sex is unsatisfactory, happiness will be hard to come by and divorce unsurprising. Few people realize that the woman whose name became synonymous with birth control was also the person who set the agenda for today’s high expectations of sustained sexual activity in marriage. She even coined a new term for the new age of which she was the self-appointed high priestess: ‘erogamy’, by which she meant erotic love in marriage. In adopting it, she added, with what some might feel is unresolved ambivalence, we can ‘leave the ugly, slimy-sounding word “sexual” to those who still roll in the filth and who delight in the unclean echoes of the centuries’.

Before I delved into her extraordinary career, I imagined Marie Stopes as a motherly pragmatist. Contraception has connotations of carefulness and forethought—family planning indeed. While writing a history of childcare theories, I had read her two babycare manuals, and recalled her elaborating on the importance of natural food, fresh air and exercise, and instructing mothers to have no truck with what she called the ‘aberrant mind of Freud’. Hardly a new woman. But when I turned to Married Love, her best-selling and most famous book, I soon realized that it was far from being the practical guide to contraception that I had assumed. Only two or three pages refer to the subject, and then only in the vaguest of terms. As its original title They Twain suggests, Married Love was in fact an astonishingly explicit, if rosily romantic, vindication of the sexual rights of women. Dedicated to ‘young husbands and all those who are betrothed’, it described in detail how to give their loved ones the greatest possible erotic satisfaction.

Wise Parenthood, a guide to contraceptive practice, followed swiftly. Its opening line declares that, ‘A family of healthy and happy children should be the joy of every pair of married lovers.’ Note the last two words. Stopes believed that passion between twin souls, true hearts, soulmates, need never end if you got the technique right. Many of her readers found otherwise. ‘After the poetry of your book what has actually happened?’ wrote a Newark vicar. ‘We go to rest, my wife always lies with her back towards me, I make a “tender advance” and suggest that she turn round so that we may chat and cuddle–the end of the poetry is “I do not like your breath in my face!’’’ Stopes took note. In later marital manuals she made the point that people’s sex drive was as likely to be as variable as their appetite for food. Some couples made love only once in two years, some seven times a day. She added provocatively that the chance of finding a sexually compatible mate was considerably slimmer than finding someone who shared your taste in food. She estimated in Enduring Passion that 30% of men wanted more sexual action than their partner. But, she added with considerable originality, 30% of women also felt themselves inadequately served. Only 15–20% of couples were well matched erogamously. Around 20-25% did without sex altogether.

The trouble with guesstimates like these is that most people like to think of themselves as on the passionate rather than the puddingy end of the erotic scale. The long-term effect of Married Love was undoubtedly to put more emphasis on the importance of enduring sexual satisfaction in marriage, and to legitimate the idea of ending a marriage because of sexual incompatibility. Stopes herself was evidently among the 30% of unsatisfied Messalinas.

Intensely feminine in her frills and furbelows and proud of her ‘buoyantly physical nature’, Stopes relished her struggle against a highly disapproving establishment. In 1920 she sent her own privately printed New Gospel to each of the 267 bishops attending the Lambeth Conference of Bishops. ‘Paul spoke to Christ nineteen hundred years ago. God spoke to me today,’ it began. His message through His new medium, imparted as she was sitting under a yew tree, was very different from Paul’s killjoy ‘marry lest ye burn’ stuff. The gospel according to Stopes was that ‘no act of union fulfils the Law of God unless the two not only pulse together to the highest climax but also remain thereafter in a long brooding embrace without severance from each other’. The bishops doggedly stuck to St Paul; the Catholic Church was predictably even more outraged. Undaunted, Stopes continued a high-profile media guerrilla war to promote birth control. Her unorthodox methods of furthering the cause included passing round Dutch caps at dinner parties and creeping into Westminster Cathedral with a Press Association photographer in tow to chain her critical pamphlet Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control to the altar rail.

Fifty-three years after Married Love was first published, another outrageous woman’s name was on everyone’s lips and another seminal twentieth-century sexual classic was the most discussed book of the day. Sales of The Female Eunuch began slowly in 1970, but by the end of 1971 the striking latex torso of the paperback edition seemed to be on every station bookstall in the country. The book’s purpose was to call for sexual liberation by delivering a coruscating attack on the way in which women held themselves in thrall to what they thought men wanted. Its author, a 31-year-old Australian, was every bit as outrageously outspoken and passionately body-conscious as her predecessor in what one might call the Virtual Chair of Radiant Womanhood—and just as bonny a fighter.

Where did Germaine Greer come from intellectually? Born in 1939, she escaped as soon as she could from her family home in Melbourne, and went to Sydney University to write an MA on Lord Byron and enjoy a wild life with the free-living, free-loving counter-culture group known as Push. In 1964 she went to the Leavisite Cambridge Faculty of English to do a PhD on Love and Marriage in Shakespeare. From the point of view of myself and my cocoa-sipping friends in Newnham, she and Clive James between them were the swinging 60s. She pranced around the stage of the Footlights dressed only in a Union Jack, she became co-editor of the pornographic magazine Suck; she boasted not just of jettisoning her bra but of wearing no panties. Six years later, as a lecturer at Warwick University, she produced The Female Eunuch, a book as remarkable for its range of literary, philosophical and political reference as for its sexual politics. Within two years her name was synonymous with Women’s Liberation.

Since then, Greer has confounded her supporters and delighted her critics by repeatedly reneging on the cause she once epitomized. Having roused women to live a man’s life in The Female Eunuch, reinforcing her message with erudition and style in the dreadful warnings of The Obstacle Race (1981), the story of Mozart’s lost sister and other female geniuses domesticated into extinction, she went sour, disagreeing with everybody. In Sex and Destiny (1984), she remapped Western womanhood and modern contraception methods as a disaster area and glorified Third-World-style extended families. In Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1990) she explored her thwarted desire for her father’s approval and inability to get on with her mother in painfully personal terms.

In The Change (1991) she announced that sex was overrated, and claimed that she got more joy in the tiny compass of seeing a chrysalis transformed into a butterfly than she ever had in bed with a man. In Slipshod Sibyls (1995) she dismissed all women poets before 1800 as second-rate. Now sixty, she has just published The Whole Woman (1999), a pessimistic diatribe constructed from media horror stories that bears as much resemblance to the average family’s experience as Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of Hell. Its bent is profoundly reactionary. The Sunday Telegraph headlined its appraisal of it as ‘The Female Enoch [Powell]’. But was Greer ever a genuine revolutionary? ‘I am a woman of the 50s, I wait to be asked,’ she said in an interview in You magazine in 1989. Yes, 1989. ‘I have an unusual amount of emotional insecurity. There have been complaints that I very seldom make advances, even in a relationship. Men have to court me and make the running. I have never rung a man up in my life. I realise how absurd that is.’

Marie Stopes, on the other hand, was quick to take the initiative and constantly insisted that the men in her life danced to her tune. She even offered to write a letter for her proposed second husband Humphrey Roe, breaking off his earlier engagement to another girl. In her fifties, deprived of sexual fulfilment by Roe’s latter-day impotence, she dictated an agreement for him to sign, which condoned the lovers she intended to enjoy from then on. It has to be said that Stopes did not publicize details such as these in the way that Germaine has done. But both might fairly be described as obsessed with sexuality, very definitely men’s women. Both expressed their admiration of splendid male physiques and were often derogatory about other women. Both dressed with dashing eccentricity. Both women remained remarkably attractive as they grew older, and succeeded in maintaining lifelong friendships with some of their former lovers. But there is a highly significant difference between them. Greer, rarely without an obscenity on her lips, talks of sex with a disgust worthy of Mrs Grundy. Stopes’s writing, radiantly euphemistic, holds it transcendentally joyful. Greer is a Snow Queen, her vision forever marred by some internal splinter of glass that makes the world seem implacably hostile. Stopes is Cinderella’s fairy god-mother, egging Western girlhood on to trust themselves to the rapturous embrace of their Prince Charmings.

Both daughters felt their mothers to be as dominant as the mythic witch Baba-Yaga. Marie’s mother, Charlotte Carmichael, born in 1841, had to earn her own living as a governess after the death of her father when she was thirteen. Undaunted and self-directed, she was the first woman in Scotland to get the certificates of education to MA standard. Her intellectual interests ranged from Shakespeare to experimental physics—she met Henry Stopes at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1876. She was then thirty-five, a fundamentalist Protestant of ancient Scottish lineage. He was twenty-four, thoughtful, intense, and hiding his youth behind a luxuriant beard and moustache. A Quaker from a wealthy brewing family, he was a keen amateur archaeologist and paleontologist. Maybe their shared disapproval of the potentially atheistic implications of Darwin’s theories brought them together, maybe Henry’s money spelt security for the fatherless Charlotte.

Two years later, on 29 January 1939, Germaine was born. Three years later again, Reg went to war along with thousands of other more or less willing Commonwealth volunteers. He was old enough at thirty-seven not to have been sent overseas but he elected to go (‘Did he run away from a difficult marriage and a trying three-year-old?’ asks Germaine with wistful anguish in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You). He found his way to what should have been a cushy bum-shiner job in ciphers. But months spent 80 feet underground in GHQ Malta shattered his nerves and sent him to the military hospital at Deovlali (from which the slang ‘doolally’ comes). He was discharged as suffering from anxiety syndrome. Germaine remembers going to the station with her mother in 1944, both dolled up to the nines, to meet him. Neither of them recognized the toothless wreck they found there.

When she was older and stronger she came to blows with her ‘mad dog’ of a mother in the kitchen while her father shut himself away next door muttering, ‘It takes two to make a quarrel.’ Was she avenging her bruised childhood self or unconsciously defending her father’s lost honour? Did twin beds arrive from the Melbourne branch of Maples? History does not relate what measures Harry Stopes and Peggy Greer took to satisfy what seem likely to have been buoyant sexual temperaments, but it is tempting to ask how deeply their parents’ perceived behaviour affected Marie and Germaine, both of whom became flamboyant sexual spokeswomen for their generations.

It is easier to idealize a father if he doesn’t hang about too long. Marie Stopes’s adored father became seriously ill while she was doing her finals at University College, London. She was given her (excellent) results early so that he could know them; he died a week after seeing them. She spent as little time as possible at home with her mother and sister after this, and went to Munich to study. There she began to realize how much she had been deprived of a sense of the importance of femininity by her mother. She learned to dress more dashingly, adopting furs and short skirts. ‘There is hardly anything in the world so gloriously beautiful as a woman’s body,’ runs a passage she wrote in an unpublished autobiographical novel. ‘And while I am one, and a young one, I think it would be wickedness not to enjoy the loveliness of it.’

She went to the theatre to watch Isadora Duncan wowing spellbound Munich audiences. When she went home, she wrapped herself in flimsy voiles and imitated Isadora’s highly erotic dancing. But at this time she went no further. Most of her relationships were with older men, professors to whom she could relate in a filial way. She was, she wrote of herself later, ‘a child in a woman’s body’. But her father’s early death had allowed her to write her own script. She could abandon his strait-laced family code and enjoy her intense physicality without losing the evergreen memory of his admiration.

At the same sort of age, Germaine’s relationship with her father was very different. He was all too real: adored but in her eyes infuriatingly unresponsive. In a violent reaction, she decided not to act as the sort of woman he would have admired but as a female version of the brilliant, aggressively masculine man she thought he ought to be. It was all too evident on the rare times they met that he simply did not know what to make of her; was in fact intensely nervous of her. When he died in 1983, she was chilled that he had chosen not to mention her in his will. It was to cope with her sense of being rejected by him that, attracted by the romantic hints of noble ancestry he used to throw out, she decided to dig into the past to find early family faces to whom she could perhaps relate better. It was a disillusioning experience. It emerged that Reg was in fact the illegitimate son of a housemaid seduced by a local businessman. His real name was not even Greer, but Greeney. Daddy is full of intense longing for kinship, but Greer does not seem to perceive its implications: perhaps only her looks are her father’s; her energy and moral dynamism, her inclination towards Mediterranean-style extended families must all come from her much despised mother’s healthily mongrel ancestry: part Italian, part Irish and part Danish.

So much for the genesis of our heroines’ obsessions. How did they learn to universalize them so tellingly? Both women were ambitious, outstandingly intelligent and intensely moral girls. Religion had a high profile in their upbringings: regular attendance at Presbyterian and Quaker services for Marie; a convent education from the age of four for Germaine. Although both disengaged themselves from conventional religious observances rapidly, each retained a habit of morality coupled with a deep sense of mission. Marie’s mother, a committed early feminist, sent her to North London Collegiate, the most forward-looking girls’ school in the country. Marie outdid her mother’s scholastic achievement by becoming the first woman to read science at University College, taking her honours degree—with distinction—in only two years instead of three.

But Sex and Destiny was a very different kind of book from either Wise Parenthood or Stopes’s follow-up history, Contraception: Its Theory, History and Practice (1923). Its condemnation of sexploitation reflected Greer’s realization of the damage her gynecological history had dealt her chance of having the child that she had jauntily announced she was ready to create at the age of thirty-seven. A panoramic sweep across the history and anthropology of contraception, it concludes that chemical and mechanical means of contraception are mixed blessings if not unmitigated evils. She also idealized Third World extended families in terms reminiscent of Margaret Mead’s thoroughly misleading Coming of Age in Samoa, and argued that the idea of population explosion was a fantasy and that Western contraceptive methods were unnecessary. She actually ended up recommending several of the same methods for achieving sexual satisfaction short of full intercourse as Stopes. Liberated women’s jaws dropped in horror at such retrograde ideas. But arguably, there is a sense of the wheel turning full circle, of Stopes’s erotically ambitious social experiment having been tried and found wanting by a stern, though no longer young, Antipodean judge. The book may also owe something to Greer’s Catholic upbringing.

In mid-life, both women pursued successful academic careers in subjects quite separate from the field for which they became most famous. Stopes was a paleobotanist with a special interest in the nature of coal who had lectureships set up for her in what was then a little-explored field. Greer’s field is English literature; she has held academic posts at Tulsa, Oklahoma and at Newnham College, Cambridge. Stopes wrote to the papers frequently on all sorts of matters. She asked Lloyd George if she could lead an armed force against the striking miners. She also wrote second-rate novels and very derivative poetry. Greer’s pungent tirades on every issue imaginable are sought-after media properties. Both took to celebrity status like ducks to water. Stopes suggested to Kipling that ‘If’ should be rewritten to deal with women and invited Thomas Hardy to her Portland Bill lighthouse holiday home. Greer’s presence guarantees the success of literary parties.

Maritally, both had low boredom thresholds, though Stopes’s marriage to the always adoring and extremely long-suffering Humphrey Roe lasted in name until his death, aged seventy, in 1949. Despite the early memories of that cosy four-poster (and perhaps her own place in it), she insisted on separate bedrooms for husbands and lovers alike. Greer too has said that she prefers to sleep on her own. She has had one very short marriage, and numerous proudly flaunted affairs. Both women proclaimed the joys of maternity but found them hard to experience personally, although that did not stop them expressing very definite ideas on the upbringing of children to both their friends and the world at large. Greer has put on record her profound regret at not having a child of her own. But she has some seventeen godchildren and numerous cats. These favoured pets, together with her books, her love of and talent for teaching, her personal connections with many Third World women and children, and a succession of human and animal waifs and strays who come and go at her well-tended small-holding near Saffron Walden, all testify to her abundant maternal instinct.

Stopes had one son when she was forty-four, and named him after her father. She fostered a series of boys in a search for a companion for this second adored Harry; all were ruthlessly disciplined, found wanting and returned. But when he grew up, Harry proved to be one of the few men his mother could not dominate. She was so unpleasant about his chosen wife that after marriage Harry removed himself from her orbit almost completely, and she left him only her Oxford English Dictionary in her will.

Germaine Greer took a distinctly maverick line when she in turn surfed the crest of the wave of the 1960s Women’s Liberation movement. Many of the more serious-minded feminists condemned The Female Eunuch as (literally) sleeping with the enemy. But millions of women now in their fifties still give that shocking but unforgettable book the credit for shaking them out of a rut. It is impossible as yet to define the legacy for which Greer will be most famed—she’s surprised us before and no doubt will again. She is certainly growing old gracefully. She could yet single-handedly revive the tradition of respect for the sagacity of wise old women; from all accounts she could also write a better book about home-making than Constance Spry or Martha Stewart. As to her past, it is now more often pointed to as a warning than as an inspiration. Despite the current vogue for a superficial laddishness, her maverick exploration of the frontiers of sexuality discouraged more women than it converted, not least because, by her own admission, it has proved a far from fruitful experiment. The latest Hollywood heroines once again extol the value of virginity, of ‘saving yourself’ for Mr Right.

But arguably the life Greer lived as a young woman was also a brave and a necessary experiment; its outcome proof positive of the hollowness of Marie Stopes’s promise of never-ending ecstasy. Women today are the wiser for both women’s high-profile experiments. More independent, more tolerant, and better friends with each other, they enjoy far more stimulating and balanced relationships with men both in the workplace and the bedroom than they have in any previous century. Between the Scylla of Stopes and the Charybdis of Greer, they are slowly but surely constructing a middle way.