Content warning: this blog post includes discussions of eugenics and racism which some readers may find upsetting.

This blog post is a brief introduction to my research on Marie Stopes’ children’s books written under the pseudonym ‘Erica Fay’ between 1926 and 1937, including A Road to Fairyland by Erica Fay (a twelve fairy story collection published in 1926), Buckie’s Bears by Erica Fay and Harry Buffkins (a children’s pageant play co-written with her son and performed in London Theatres between 1931-1937), and The story of Buckie’s Bears (its book adaptation published in 1936

In her 1920 advice manual Radiant Motherhood, British birth control pioneer Marie Stopes declared:

‘BABY’s rights are fundamental. They are:
To be wanted.
To be loved before birth as well as after birth.
To be given a body untainted by any heritable disease, uncontaminated by any of the racial poisons’.^[1]

This list captures the concomitance of ‘care’ and ‘violence’ seen, but not fully acknowledged, throughout Stopes’ work. Written a year before the establishment of her first Mothers’ Clinic in the working-class district of Holloway, North London in March 1921, the right to be ‘loved’ and ‘wanted’ epitomised the moral core of Stopes’ birth control cause. By promoting sexual autonomy for married women and the protection of unborn children, these clinics proved hugely popular, with female physicians and midwives offering free contraceptive advice to over 10,000 women by 1929.^[2]

However, they were not entirely altruistic. The anaphora of the third line layers previous emotive sentiment with violent eugenic language of racial poisons, contamination and Galtonian heredity; highlighting the perilous terrain the clinics occupied between feminist and eugenic interests. For Stopes, these children contributed toward ‘the utter deterioration of our stock through the reckless increase of the debased’.^[3] The contraceptive ‘Pro-Race’ cervical cap she sold to women for three shillings, was far from neutral.^[4] It endorsed the underlying violence of the Eugenics Movement; which, driven by prejudiced understandings of Mendelian genetics, targeted marginalised groups in its exclusionary campaigns to sterilise society’s ‘unfit’ as a duty to the British race. Stopes’ synthesis of romantic and social language with scientific theory made her ideas accessible to contemporary mass audiences, advancing her aims to change intimate practices within British homes.^[5] Yet, consequently, historians have struggled to place Stopes within public diatribes as a ‘saintly saviour of suffering womanhood’ or ‘evil eugenicist advocate’.^[6] The reality was far more complex and care and violence could be ambivalently woven together throughout her literature.

Despite galvanising widespread support across British feminist, socialist and conservative circles, the central paradox of the British Eugenics Movement related to the few tangible policy outcomes it achieved, later dissipating in the climate of Nazi racial hygiene after 1945.^[7] Instead, Greta Jones suggests the need to broaden the definitional scope of ‘eugenics’, beyond direct political campaigning, to understand its influence in interwar Britain.[8] So what sources can historians look to in order to understand this ‘popular’ culture of eugenics that ran parallel to political campaigning? One answer lies in Stopes’ lesser-known children’s books, published under the pseudonym ‘Erica Fay’ between 1926-1937.

Reading these children’s books (published during the peak of eugenic campaigns for voluntary sterilisation) against the grain supports John Macnicol’s view that the Eugenics Movement is ‘perhaps more interesting at the periphery of its influence than at the centre’.^[9] In the intimacy fostered by bedtime stories and rereading, these books reinforce the care attached to Stopes’ work, but suggest additional ways in which eugenics crept insidiously into the most intimate practices of the home. These books were ideologically and pedagogically loaded objects, with fantasy worlds that were politically engaged despite their aesthetic distance. The reluctance to probe the ‘comfort’ of children’s literature only enhanced the subversive potential of Stopes’ fantasy model, whereby the metaphorical structures and image schemas of these fantasy worlds developed children’s causal knowledge at the same time as expanding their fictional playgrounds.^[10]

Moreover, analysis of Stopes’ children’s literature builds on wider historical debates surrounding child agency and the distinct modalities of power that children exercised within British Eugenics.^[11] The sentimentalisation of childhood and its temporal malleability gave emotive potency to the movement which made the innocent child its beneficiary, but the impetus of generational change also made children themselves key actors in the revitalisation of the nation. This literature provides an immersive insight into the intersection of fantasy, family and eugenics, thus challenging how archivists have preserved and represented Stopes’ legacy.

But why have such sources been overlooked? In a letter to the editor of The Evening Standard on the 7th July 1928, Stopes bragged of the success of her children’s books, writing ‘over a year ago I tried publishing under still another name, the secret of which is absolutely kept so that no-one, neither friends nor enemies, know that it was mine’, the result being ‘magnificent, even superlatively appreciative reviews’.^[12] This ‘single book by an unknown and friendless author’ was A Road to Fairyland (1926) and was not only ‘secret’ to contemporary readers, but has remained unexamined in the historical archive. Amongst 83 other items in the labelled ‘Very Miscellaneous’ box in the Wellcome Collection, where this letter is found, lies a review cutting of A Road to Fairyland and a single theatre program of Buckie’s Bears from its run at The Royalty Theatre 1931-32.  However, these are the only glimmers of evidence pertaining to Stopes’ children’s books, which the Wellcome Collection does not store physical copies of. Accessibility improved with the digitisation of their Eugenics Society Archive in 2012, however, its selectivity has continued to curate Stopes’ legacy as a palaeobotanist, birth control campaigner and eugenicist, but never children’s author. As Fowler writes, ‘certain types of records cry out to be kept’, and whilst Stopes’ minute books and meeting papers of the Eugenics Society have been extensively preserved, her children’s books have not been appraised the same way.^[13]

Studying Stopes’ children’s books highlights her complex legacy, showing how eugenic themes infiltrated the intimate realms of family life and is a medium that deserves scholarly attention. Stopes’ dedication of A Road to Fairyland ‘to all children between the ages of seven and seventy,’ supports how adult and child histories were not separate, but powerfully intertwined.^[14]

Top image: Marie Stopes at the time of the marriage with Mr. H.V. Roe, Wellcome M0017375, Wikimedia Commons.

Morgan M. Miller is a recent History graduate from the University of Oxford where she focused on the British Eugenics movement in her thesis: ‘A Road to Fairyland’: Exploring the Intersection of Fantasy, Family and Eugenics in Marie Stopes’ Children’s Books 1926-1937’. Her special interests include the history of sexuality, childhood and emotions.

[1] M. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who Are Creating the Future (London, 1920), p.171.

[2] D. Cohen, ‘Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, the Mothers’ Clinics and the Practice of Contraception’, History Workshop Journal, 35/1 (1993), p.95.

[3] Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, p.213.

[4] Heidorn, Touching Matters of Care, Interactive Digital Object, Birth Rites Collection (July 2022)

https://noraheidorn.com/Touching-Matters-of-Care (3 Feb. 2024)

[5] A. Geppert, ‘Divine Sex, Happy Marriage, Regenerated Nation: Marie Stopes’s Marital Manual Married Love and the Making of a Best-Seller, 1918-1955’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8/3 (1998), p.408.

[6] L. Hall, ‘Situating Stopes: or, putting Marie in her proper place’, Wellcome Library, https://www.lesleyahall.net/stopes.htm

[7] D. Stone, ’Race in British Eugenics’, European History Quarterly, 31/3 (2001) p.398.

[8] Macnicol, ‘Eugenics and the Campaign for Voluntary Sterilisation in Britain Between the Wars’, Social History of Medicine: The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, 2/2 (1989), p.149.

[9] Macnicol, ‘Eugenics’, p.169.

[10] M. Levy and F. Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2016), p.101.

[11] M. Gleason, “‘Children Obviously Don’t Make History’: Historical Significance and Children’s Modalities of Power”, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 16/3 (2023).

[12] London, WC, The Evening Standard, SA/EUG/ K.9

[13]S. Fowler, ’Enforced Silences’ in D. Thomas et al. The Silence of the Archive (London, 2017), p.15.

[14] E. Fay, A Road to Fairyland (London, 1926).