‘Baby determined to hold her head up in the world’, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1840–1929) wrote of her infant daughter in her account of Marie's early intellectual development. A first-time mother of undaunted maturity at forty years of age, Charlotte may have been projecting her own desires onto her daughter, but her 1881 observation was prophetic. As a sex educationalist and birth control advocate, Marie Stopes (1880–1958) was to become one of the most prominent women of the twentieth century. Embracing the access to higher education for women, made possible by Victorian activists like her mother, in turn Marie was part of the vanguard of early twentieth-century social change. As the figure-head of a sustained and far-reaching birth control campaign, Marie significantly expanded choice and opportunity for women. Ultimately, both Charlotte and Marie Stopes gained public recognition for their achievements as writers, reformers and scholars, although in Charlotte's case acknowledgement was hard won.

Written as a biography of two interconnected lives, this book explores the ways in which women writers, scholars and social reformers entered the public cultural sphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and reshaped the attitudes of their time. Their ideas were contested, even dismissed as the inconsequential and stereotypical utterances of repressed bluestocking eccentrics, or in terms of the ‘threatening otherness’ of female desire. At the same time, as this biography will show, Charlotte and Marie Stopes each drew widespread attention for their work. Their adroitness with techniques of public performance, combined with remarkable personal persistence, helped them to succeed in publishing and promoting their writings. In very different ways, they both created controversy and recruited the popularity of drama and the theatre to promote their causes. Their achievements were partly driven by the competitiveness and affection between them, and by the recognition that social and cultural change for women could only be effected through active participation in public cultural and political debates. In each case, however, it was a problematic success. They were attacked or dismissed in their own time by those who disagreed with them, while many later accounts of both women have been partial, distorted or gendered, representing them in terms of neurosis or immorality rather than academic achievement or social benefit.