03/09/2026
4th September marks Sexual Health Awareness Day, and few people did more to advance our understanding of the subject than Dr Marie Stopes, a woman whose life was entwined with Portland and with Portland Museum.
Born in 1880, the daughter of a women's rights campaigner, Marie Stopes had a prodigious appetite for science, and by her 20s, was an acknowledged expert on palaeobotany – the study of fossil plants. However, her prowess in this field was soon overshadowed by what came next.
Possibly as a result of a disastrous and short-lived marriage, she set about writing her 'magnum opus' – Married Love.
It was one of the first texts to propose routine birth control, or family planning, and indeed to propose the idea of women enjoying s*x. But at that time, 1913, it was considered too scandalous to publish. It was only when she met (and later married) Humphrey Roe, a remarkable businessman associated with aircraft maker Avro, and a pilot, that publication was financed in 1918. It was such a success, it was reprinted five times in the first year.
On top of this, she and Roe also founded a birth control clinic, the Mother's Clinic, in London in 1921, but by 1923, was involved in a bitter legal battle and needed a place to rest. She bought the Higher Lighthouse on Portland as her bolt-hole. On the Jurassic Coast, her fossil study also flourished.
She became a friend of Dorset author Thomas Hardy, whose first book, The Well-Beloved, was based on Portland life and identified a small cottage outside the boundary of Pennsylvania Castle as the home of a central character, Avice. By that time, 'Avice's cottage' was almost a ruin, so she persuaded Hardy to help fund its restoration as a place to store her fossils and as a museum. She was curator of Portland Museum for many years and was associated with it until her death in 1958.
Image https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/18/45/f14896c5658187a0a1b687a9e268.jpg
