'No Leisure for myself': Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, British Freewomen and the Past

C.C. Stopes was one of the most active women scholars during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was well known through her writings on Shakespeare, and her British Freewomen still offers some of the best evidence and strongest arguments for women’s citizenship throughout British history. She was an activist, someone who today we would call a progressive, who was involved in a massive array of causes including dress reform, the advancement of science, women’s suffrage, and detailed study of Shakespeare’s life, which was analyzed by Kathleen McLuskie. This talk will focus on her as a historian of women in an age when women were not admitted to universities or allowed to receive degrees even following the establishment of women’s colleges. Her scholarship dealt with broad topics, especially citizenship, which were used by women suffrage leaders to argue the tradition of women’s voting and nominating members of parliament in the nation’s past. She did thorough archival research and made a compelling case in British Freewomen, even if the suffrage movement failed successfully to make the constitutional argument for women’s political standing. As the mother of Marie Stopes, she raised the most important leader of the British birth control movement during the twentieth century as well as a major scientific student and the earliest woman to receive a scientific doctorate in Germany. She belonged to virtually all of Britain’s progressive organizations and lived a life full of activism and scholarship it is difficult to see how she managed it.