Marie Stopes

Marie Stopes (1880 to 1958) was a British palaeobotanist, author and campaigner for birth control, eugenics and women's rights, born in Edinburgh. She studied botany and geology at University College London, took a doctorate there at an early age and worked on the reproduction of cycads in Munich. As a lecturer in palaeobotany at the Victoria University of Manchester from 1904 she became the first female academic on its faculty. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification. With her second husband she founded the first birth control clinic in Britain, and her book Married Love of 1918 brought contraception into wide public discussion.