The star rating is mostly because it would bug me if I didn't leave one. This was an incredibly difficult book to try to evaluate, but I think ultimately my opinion is that this is a very good book, written by someone who "controversial" doesn't begin to describe. Stopes was a eugenicist, and in some ways an extreme one even by eugenicist standards. It's been reported that she cut her son out of her will for marrying a short sighted person, she supported Hitler until his regime began to oppose birth control, there were times in her career when she seemed to advocate for the sterilisation of lower classes... it's really quite endless, even when accounting for the unfair slander levelled by those less progressive than her. Which itself is quite telling, really. Aimé Césaire was right in considering Hitler not an abberation, but an almost unavoidable point on the path western society had been treading for a very long time before him.

This is part of why I'm so surprised that Married Love is, genuinely, a well written, highly moving, in some ways even progressive book.

I guess everyone contains multitudes. Writing "In the noblest society love will hold sway. The love of mates will always be the supremest life-experience, but it will no longer be an experience exclusive and warped. The love of friends and children, of comrades and fellow-workers, will but serve to develop every power of the two who are mates. By mingling the greatness of their individual stature they can achieve together something that had both or either been dwarfed and puny individuals, would have remained for ever unattainable." and "Marriage can never reach its full stature until women possess as much intellectual freedom and freedom of opportunity within it as do their partners." and "in the whole human relation there is no slavery or torture so horrible as coerced, unwilling motherhood." and "The supreme law for husbands is: Remember that each act of union must be tenderly wooed for and won. and that no union should ever take place unless the woman also desires it and is made physically ready for it." and several passages addressing and condemning marital rape don't preclude someone from also advocating for atrocities, but it is difficult to reconcile.

It's unquestionably feminist. Not perfectly, to modern standards, and more or less restricted to married Brits, but the emphasis on women as equals to men - despite what the writer considers fundamental physical differences - is unwavering. Stopes advocates strongly for birth control despite relatively few methods being known at the time, imagines a future where IVF allows greater family planning, and cautions women from having more children than they want. Stopes argues with the church, with tradition, and with those of her fellow scientists who think women have no right to or need for sexual pleasure. The discussions of female sexuality are so frank, there's sections a lot of modern men could still benefit from reading.

To be clear, I don't mean that her more objectionable views aren't present here. To a certain extent you can look past some on the grounds of this being published 106 years ago, but many of the scientists she quotes are recognisable bioessentialists, and while she doesn't in this book say anything objectionable about other races, the repetition of "our race" alongside lauding strength and health make it easy to read between the lines. Relevant also is her constant use of a normal/abnormal binary - again, she's suprisingly sympathetic to those she deems abnormal in this book, but you can easily see how someone so fond of putting people in boxes can start deciding that only some boxes should be kept around.

It helps that Stopes is very clear about who she's writing for, and does not seem to judge those who she isn't. She tells the reader that she can only comment on British society, and primarily the educated classes to which she belongs - fair enough. There's times where she calls this society civilised (presumably implying uncivilised ones elsewhere), but equally often writes "civilised" with the quotation marks included, implying the civilisation is a lie - this interpretation bolstered by the number of times she openly condemns what we call civilisation. She states openly that this is a book for men and women who desire or have decided on marriage, and directs people who don't desire sex at all, as well as those more "fundamentally incompatible" (in context obviously homosexuals) to other books, so that they might "discover to which type of our widely various humanity [they] belong" rather than sitting here judging those considered "normal". I can honestly say I was touched by this. I can't begin to guess how much of the compassion here was genuine, whether Stopes consciously toned things down for this publication, whether it was written before her views on eugenics formed or expanded beyond babies doomed to very short lives, or whether there's more intended subtext than I as a modern reader am unable to pick up on, but, at least to me, the compassion is there. Personally I can appreciate a book that admits it's not written for me, at least when it doesn't seem to think that something I should be looking to change.