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How women in the UK started to learn about birth control.
And how it may have may be about eugenics.
Birth Control after WWI
In 1918 in Britain, Marie Stopes released Married Love: A Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties which, according to Karen Chow, 'bemoans a silence on sexual matters so profound that even doctors and educated people misrepresented facts of refused to write about sex' (65).
Judging from the production of this book and the later study of Maureen Sutton's (1992) We Didn't Know Aught, the lives of women in Lincolnshire from the 1930s to 1950s, it appears quite clear that many women were unsure as to what their sexuality entailed. Generally considered 'taboo' and embarrassing to talk about, Sutton's work shows that doctors were generally unhelpful.
Sex, pregnancy, and birth were topics many women were uninformed or misinformed about. Until World War I, nobody, even most feminists, was willing to discuss the need for birth control (Neushul 272). Stopes' study is important in that it recognises sexuality in marriage, outside its reproductive function, as a mutually satisfying experience contributing to the happiness of a couple. According to Chow, 'no marriage manual existed before Married Love that offered explicit explanations of bodies and pleasures in an accessible, personal rhetoric.' (66–7).
