…a feminist visionary, she opened the first birth control clinic in Britain and her book, Married Love — which argued marriage should be an equal relationship between husband and wife — was an international bestseller.
She treated her only son as a social experiment, dressing him up in girl’s clothes, choosing, and then discarding, adoptive brothers for him, and later cruelly victimising his wife.
When Marie Stopes died in 1958, at the age of 77, her son found she had cut him out of much of her will, she had remained so angry at his marriage. (…)Marie Stopes didn’t allow him to read books when younger, because she thought they stopped children thinking for themselves. Until the age of 11, he was forced to wear skirts as his mother took against trousers, which she considered ‘ugly and heating-in-the-wrong-places garments’. Bicycles — thought equally wicked by her — were also banned.
