A vivacious scholar and activist who argued that women had ancient rights to equal citizenship with men, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes has been wrongly portrayed in biographies of her daughter as a sexually repressed religious conservative. She was born in Edinburgh on 5 February 1840, in the same year that Queen Victoria married Prince Albert and the foundation stone for the massive Sir Walter Scott monument in Edinburgh was laid. It would be another fifty-two years before women could enter Edinburgh University and seventy-eight years before women over the age of thirty gained the right to vote in Britain. Charlotte was a part of the early struggle to bring these changes into being, and she lived long enough to see them both happen. She would be privately teased, publicly lampooned and academically dismissed for her efforts as a female scholar and advocate for feminist reform. Her friends found her stoicism remarkable. The degree to which she has been represented so consistently in discriminatory terms points to the potency and the longevity of antagonism towards women, particularly those who resisted inequality. It was also a consequence of Charlotte's determination to raise her voice in the late nineteenth-century arena of public discourse and debate.

As a passionate and questioning young woman, she adored company and dancing. Culturally rich, although far from wealthy, her home life was filled with music in the evenings and with family and friends who shared interests in art and literature. Her mother's family had played a significant role in Edinburgh's architectural history. Her father, James Ferrier Carmichael (1812–54), was a landscape painter who taught art classes in Edinburgh and exhibited with the Royal Scottish Academy between 1833 and 1853. She felt a strong connection to the city's literary heritage through her grandfather, William Carmichael, who worked as Assistant Clerk of Sessions in Edinburgh during Walter Scott's tenure as Clerk of Sessions in the same office.