Charlotte Stopes 1840 – 1929
Charlotte Brown Carmichael Stopes (née Carmichael: also known as C C Stopes)
Shakespearean scholar, writer, suffrage activist.
5 February 1840 – 6 February 1929
Recognising Charlotte Stopes: A Tribute by Stephanie Green
In September 1889, a woman in a flowing red velvet gown hijacked the normally sedate annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) and spoke rousingly to a packed audience about the health risks of wearing high heels and tight-laced corsets.[i] No woman had ever spoken at a BAAS meeting before. Over a hundred newspapers reported the surprising event around the nation and abroad. The inspiring woman in red at the centre of the controversy was Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1840-1929), who was later parodied in Punch as one of the quintessential New Women of the 1880s and 1890s.[ii]
Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was already a seasoned advocate for women’s rights, as one of the pioneers of female education and suffrage activism in Scotland during the 1860s. A prize-winning student during her school years, but discounted academically because she was a girl, in 1878 Charlotte became the first woman in Scotland to take a university level qualification. She was awarded a Certificate in Arts with first class honours from the University of Edinburgh,[iii] which was then the highest qualification available to a female student in Britain.[iv]
By the 1870s, women had entered the fields of writing and popular journalism in large numbers, but opportunities for women within academia and the professions were still largely unavailable. Charlotte worked as a teacher and wrote articles for magazines and stories for children until her marriage to the brewer, engineer and scientist Henry Stopes in June 1879.[v]
After an extended tour of Europe and Egypt, the couple moved to London, where they leased rooms at 31 Torrington Square in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum. Charlotte and Henry Stopes were a formidable couple, as travellers, writers and public speakers on topics ranging from evolution to health reform, they reflected the ‘new’ age of late-Victorian progressivism, in which science and social progress underpinned the vision of a bright future.
Stopes continued to contribute to the women’s emancipation movement after her marriage, giving lectures and participating widely in suffrage campaign events. She joined several prominent women’s advancement organisations, including the Rational Dress Society, the Women’s Progressive Society, and the Women’s Emancipation Union, and was an active member of the National Union of Suffrage Societies. She joined the editorial team of the feminist journal Shafts (1892–99) and became a founding member of the Women’s Institute,[vi] a social, educational and philanthropic club affiliated with the women’s movement. Stopes was never officially aligned with the emergent militantism of the Women’s Social and Political Union, critical of violence as a protest strategy. She was sympathetic, however, to the need for direct action in the face of entrenched opposition and appeared on the speakers’ platform with Christabel Pankhurst and Elizabeth Wolstoneholme Elmy at the WSPU demonstration in June 1908.[vii]
Alongside her political work, Stopes pursued her interests in English Renaissance drama. She joined the New Shakespeare Society and began her research on related subjects. She produced nine scholarly studies and numerous articles for journals, contributing regularly to the Athenaeum as a Shakespeare expert. In 1888 she published a refutation of the theory that Francis Bacon was the actual author of William Shakespeare’s plays.[viii] Elsewhere, she also argued that performances of Shakespeare’s plays should take account of their historical context and the language in which they were written, and not be abridged or distorted by an excess of Victorian theatrical grandeur. This was a view shared by younger theatre directors of the time, such as William Poel and Emma Cons. Stopes knew both directors and particularly admired Cons, who helped to popularize performances of Shakespeare’s plays for working people at the Royal Victoria Hall in London, the ‘Old Vic’.[ix] As a Shakespearean authority, Stopes was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy in 1916.
Stopes’ articles on a range of topics also appeared in Humanitarian, Woman’s Signal, Temple Magazine, Poet-Lore, The Women’s World and Englishwomen’s Review.[x] Although her great passion was Shakespeare, Stopes became best known as the author of a radical history of women as leaders and citizens in Britain, British Freewomen (1894). Drawing on some initial research by Helen Blackburn,[xi] she laid out evidence that female suffrage was an ancient right, taken away incrementally by a series of legalized acts against women. Stopes argued that this encroaching, institutionalised conservatism had relegated women to the private domestic sphere, not any supposed female inferiority. Listing precedents, she claimed that it ‘took centuries of mistranslations of the first principles of government to let this partial idea develop into its modern complexity’.[xii]
Stopes’ argument in British Freewomen would be referenced time and time again in the courts, the parliament, the press and on the public platforms of the emancipation cause. She could point to her own achievements and those of others, such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake, to show that opportunity was all women needed to contribute fully to society as citizens. Reflecting upon a narrative of loss, resistance and recovery expressed by the radical arm of the early twentieth-century women’s movement, Laura Nym Mayhall notes that British Freewomen ‘underwrote the practice of militancy’ in the crucial years between 1906 and 1909’. [xiii]
Women like Charlotte Stopes helped build the intellectual foundation for the movement. As a new generation of suffrage activists stepped into the limelight, notably Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Stopes and her pioneering work faded into the background of the campaign and the changing public discourse that surrounded it.
According to her autobiographical notes, Charlotte had never intended to marry.[xiv] As a girl, she was dedicated to the life of the mind and the advancement of women’s rights. She met Henry Stopes in 1877 in her late thirties, at a BAAS picnic, and regarded him as merely the irritating ‘man from Essex’ who would not leave her alone to contemplate a picturesque waterfall scene.[xv] He was a dynamic, attractive and enterprising polymath. Twelve years her junior, he thought of Charlotte as nothing less than remarkable. They leased a house in Hampstead, from where they would bring up their two daughters, Marie and Winifred. As the years brought financial strain, they each became increasingly absorbed in their different interests. Henry occupied himself with paleontological exploration along the Thames River valley near Swanscombe. Charlotte retained the rooms in Torrington Square for its proximity to the Reading Room at the British Museum until towards the end of her life.
Dauntless, Stopes continued working well into the twentieth century as a suffrage activist, Shakespearean scholar and writer. Her recognition in these fields culminated during the first two decades of the twentieth century, when she was in her sixties and seventies, overlapping with her daughter, Marie Stopes’s, emergence as a significant public figure in Britain.[xvi] Having helped to force open the door for women to enter higher education through her advocacy for the cause since the 1860s,[xvii] Stopes took great pride in the fact that women began to be admitted into universities from 1892 (enabling Marie to gain two doctoral qualifications).[xviii] She was equally proud that she lived to see legislation of the equal vote pass in the British parliament in 1928.[xix]
Stephanie Green is author of The Public Lives of Charlotte and Marie Stopes (Routledge, 2013) and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer with Griffith University, Australia. Her academic research interests encompass gender, writing and the Gothic. She also writes short fiction, poetry and travel essays and is regularly published in Australian and international journals and anthologies.
[i] ‘Psychological and Physiological Aspects of Women’s Dress,’ cited in the Court Journal, 1 December, 1889.
[ii] ‘The Root of the Matter: The Typical Woman’s Reply to the Arguments of the Rational Dress Society,’ Punch, 22 February 1890.
[iii] V. Blain, P. Clements and I. Grundy, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 1034. See also, K. Briant, Passionate Paradox: The Life of Marie Stopes (London: Norton, 1962), p. 20.
[iv] Women could sit the Certificate Examinations at the University of Edinburgh from 1873. Charlotte also received a Diploma from the Edinburgh Ladies Educational Association in April 1878.
[v] For a discussion of the life and work of Henry Stopes, see by F. F. Wenban-Smith, ‘Henry Stopes (1852-1902): Engineer, Brewer and Anthropologist’, Lithics–The Journal of the Lithic Studies Society, 30 (2015).
[vi] Autograph Letters Collection, Women’s Library Archive, GB 106 9/15, 1897-1928: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/a5835b2d-ab15-390e-a2e3-533aef4b761b (accessed 04/05/2023).
[vii] Crawford, E., The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide (London: UCL, 1999), pp. 656-657.
[viii] C. C. Stopes, The Bacon/Shakespeare Question Answered (London: T.G. Johnson, 1889).
[ix] Lillian Bayliss to Marie Carmichael Stopes, 16 January 1924. Stopes-Roe Family Archive (accessed 1/2/2012). See also, Kilburn, M. London’s Theatres (London: New Holland, 2002), p. 84.
[x] G. Murphy, ‘Charlotte Stopes: Some Aspects of Her Life and Work’, Reprinted from Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature (London: Adlard & Son: 1931: pp. 106-107).
[xi] S.S. Holton, ‘British Freewomen: Nationalist Identity, Constitutionalism and Languages of Race in Early Suffragist Histories,’ in E. J. Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 150.
[xii] C. C. Stopes, British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1894), pp. 18-19.
[xiii] L. E. Nym Mayhall, ‘Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1908-1909’, Journal of British Studies 39:3 (July, 2000), p. 340-371, 350.
[xiv] C. C. Stopes, ‘Autobiographical Notes, Notes’ I, p. 87-88. Stopes-Roe Family Archive (accessed 2/2/2012).
[xv] ‘Autobiographical Notes, Notes’ I, p. 88.
[xvi] S. Green, The Public Lives of Charlotte and Marie Stopes (London: Routledge, 2015).
[xvii] Female students were permitted so take the University of London’s General Examination from 1868, but in 1892 Edinburgh University became the first university in Britain to allow women to take full university degrees.
[xviii] Marie Stopes gained a PhD from the University of Munich (1904) and an honorary DSc from the University of London (1905). Alongside her scientific research, Marie Stopes became a prominent advocate of contraception and author of Married Love, A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (London: Fifield, 1918), a ground-breaking advice book, that set out to make childbirth a choice for women around the world.
[xix] Parliamentary Archives, United Kingdom, Representation of the People Act (Equal Franchise) HL/PO/PU/1/1928/18&19G5c12, 1928.
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
At school.
Some key Achievements and Interests
1865 Became a member of Ladies’ Edinburgh Debating Society and contributed articles to their journal The Attempt writing under the pseudonym Lutea Reseda.
1868 Attended classes under the auspices of the Edinburgh Ladies Education Association set up to offer university level education to women. 1878 Awarded a Certificate, First Class, in English Literature by the University of Edinburgh which did not offer degrees to women.
1876 In Glasgow, was Secretary of the Glasgow Association for the Higher Education of Women, campaigning for women’s higher education.
1883 Became a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science speaking, presenting papers at meetings.
1889 Joined the Rational Dress Association, writing and speaking on the subject.
Spoke and wrote on women’s rights.
1894 Joined the Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage.
1894 Published British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege which was to inspire and influence the female suffrage movement.
In response to the granting of women the vote, she wrote, When the only objection brought against a thing is, that it has not been, it is time to test if that statement be really true. We have not found the received assertions true in regard to this subject.’
1912 Made an Honorary Member of Royal Society of Literature.
1914 Became a founder member of the new Shakespeare Association
1916 Received the Rose Mary Crawshaw Prize from the British Academy for Shakespearean research.
Issues
Took work initially as a governess that being one of the few professions open to a woman.
Her husband’s bankruptcy and the death of husband left her alone and financially vulnerable with two daughters to bring up (Later was awarded a government pension for her literary contributions.)
As a woman she faced difficulties being accepted as a serious academic scholar not least in attempts to have her writing published.
She was accused of putting her interests above those of her children.
Connection to Bloomsbury
1894 Lived in lodgings at 31 Torrington Square.
Frequented the British Museum reading room conducting Shakespeare research.
Publications
Published children’s stories, criticism on Shakespeare and on women’s rights in monographs, periodicals and pamphlets including Shafts, the Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine, The Athenaeum, The Women’s World.
1861 Alice Errol and Other Tales for Chamber’s Library for Young People
1897 Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries.
1894 British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege.
1888 The Bacon- Shakespeare Question (London: T.G. Johnson, 1888).
1901 Shakespeare’s Family.
1907 The Sphere of ‘Man’ in Relation to That of ‘Woman’ in the Constitution.
1908 The Constitutional Basis of Woman’s Suffrage.
1913 Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage.
1914 Shakespeare’s Environment.
1916 Shakespeare’s Industry.
Further Reading
Charlotte Carmichael Stopes – Beyond Notability (wikibase.cloud)