Inspired by meeting Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) in 1915, Marie Stopes began crusading for sexual freedom and birth control. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe (1878-1949), she opened the first birth control clinic in Great Britain, "The Mothers' Clinic" in Holloway, North London, on 17 March 1921.

Stopes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to the English architect, archeologist, and geologist Henry Stopes (1852-1902) and his feminist wife, Charlotte Carmichael (1841-1929), one of the first women to attend a Scottish university. Stopes and her younger sister, Winnie, were raised in London in a curious mixture of socially progressive scientific thought and stern Scottish Protestantism. Her authoritarian mother trusted the Bible, but supported woman suffrage, clothing reform, and free thought. Stope's father cared mainly for science. As a young girl Stopes met many of her father's friends in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, including Francis Galton (1822-1911), Thomas Henry Huxley...