Stella Browne: Sex and Freedom Crusader
- Herstorical Tours
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
The freedom of sexual and reproductive rights is scarily fragile, as women have found out in recent reversals of abortion laws in certain places… the right to an abortion was hard won, and its even harder maintained, as the subject of today knew only too well. For todays Herstory is all about one of the true soldiers of the early fight for birth control and sexual freedoms: Stella Browne.
Humanists UK
A Radical Start
Stella Browne was born in Canada in 1880 to a fairly privileged middle class background, but her father drowned in a steamship disaster and her mother was compelled to open a boarding house for single women to keep the family afloat on her own.
Being surrounded by struggling working class women from an early age probably kindled the fire of women’s rights activism in her. This was only enflamed further by her extensive education - in Germany first where she became fluent in French and German, and then at a progressive girls school in Suffolk, England that promoted leadership, independence and achievement for young women. Quite rare at the time!
Her further education, and graduation with a history degree cemented her status in English society at the time as a very unusually educated woman with politically radical ideas about gender equality.
Stella started as a teacher but had to leave due to health problems and anxiety. She then took on a researcher job and finally became a librarian at Morley college in South London. Here she was introduced to even more radical ideas from leading thinkers. Stella had lots of kindred spirits in the WSPU too, and joined the group in 1908. She also began experimenting with her sexuality at this time, and took a lover purely for sexual gratification whom she referred to as “demi-semi-lover” ( reasoning behind the nickname is open to interpretation !)
In Stella’s view, women could be polygynous like men and extra-marital sex shouldn’t besmirch a woman’s reputation. This was an extremely radical view, since Victorian beliefs were very much that women were naturally sexually passive, and did not necessarily derive pleasure from sex. Women of course functioned simply as breeding machines for husbands’ benefit in this strictly patriarchal society.
1920s Morley College, Lambeth Archives
Freedom and the ‘Cult of Motherhood’
This was also a view completely at odds with many of the early feminists, who argued that women were victims of sex-obsessed predatory men (true) and therefore had to deny sex from men and maintain frigidity in order to be healthy and safe (not necessarily true or realistic!)
In a paper she published in 1915, Stella argues that women should have equal rights to sexual experience and variety outside marriage. They should also be able to refuse motherhood! She argued:
“(The) cult of motherhood … would, if unchecked, diminish the importance of women as individuals and bind them more closely with conventional forms of marriage … [reinforcing] their subordination.”
Sexual Variety and Variability Among Women, Browne 1915
In order to refuse motherhood, women should have free access to birth control.
But the stuffy, conservative, class driven and patriarchal world of the early 20th century needed convincing that these ideals should be achieved. So Stella became involved in activism. She wrote a number of radical papers on the subjects and ideals she believed in, and also participated in the militancy of the WSPU (although she ended up clashing with the Pankhursts’ classist and dogmatic views and left in 1913).
Abortion Rights
Then Stella went on tour, speaking publicly about both control and sexual freedoms. This gained momentum and resulted in several successes for Browne, including a 1930 decision by the Ministry of Health to allow local authorities to give birth control advice in welfare centres.
So far so good, but abortion was still a controversial topic. People were afraid to even speak about it, and Stella had many women approaching her asking for help to terminate their pregnancies. At this time, 15% of maternal deaths were due to illegal abortions, and abortion was of course, illegal except when it threatened the life of the mother. You needed more than one physician to sign off on this, which created a two tier system where only better off women could afford to see doctors. Stella herself had had terminations.
So eventually, in 1929, she published a paper called "The Right to Abortion” and began speaking publicly about maternal mortality rates and the consequences of women not having safe access to abortions: infanticide, suicide, and permanent injury or death from back street abortionists. In 1932, the BMA Council formed a Committee to discuss changing the abortion law.
Original Paper from ALRA (Humanists UK)
In 1936 Stella formed along with two others, the Abortion Law Reform Association. This was an advocacy group of almost 400 members of mainly working class women, calling not just for abortion freedoms but also equal rights across wider society. Stella remained an active campaigner and founder of this group for the rest of her life, and sadly did not live to see the 1967 Abortion Act being passed.
Stella also spent the remainder of her life continuing to fight for sexual freedoms, a cause close to her heart; - being eventually made Vice-President of the Society for Sex Education and Guidance to advise on such matters.
A Defiant Legacy
Stella died in 1955 aged 74. She is not someone as well known as say, Josephine Butler, Marie stopes, or any of the high profile suffragette campaigners, but it seems that her star is finally being allowed to shine brighter thanks to biographers who have given her story justice. Perhaps one of the reasons she has been lesser known is because her ideas were so radical for the time. She found it hard to find common ground with other leading feminist thinkers at the time - who were feminist, yes - but not necessarily socialist too.
Clearly in many ways Stella was ahead of her time. And her legacy lives with us today. The ALRA, that she helped found, merged in 2003 with the National Abortion Campaign to become Abortion Rights. It is thanks to Stella’s refusal to temper her demands or compromise, that we have the birth control and sexual freedoms in Britain that we have today.
Stella was a woman who’d never married, never had children, had lovers and likely, terminations herself (not confirmed, but she alluded to it). None of this would be particularly controversial to us today in Britain, but in her time, she was akin to a heretic. I see Stella as a heroine, regardless of your views on sexuality, birth control and abortion, who set the stage for us all to be able to choose what we want to do in these areas of our lives. Whether we want to be wives, mothers, monogamous, single or childless, it’s our choice as women.
And although there’s a lot of noise now about these topics, with ‘manosphere’ influencers and controversial figures like Bonnie Blue calling into question whether women’s rights has ‘gone too far’, we are still lucky enough to have these rights and we should treasure them.
Hope?
Last month in Parliament MPs voted unanimously to decriminalise abortion outside of the Law, which gives me hope that women’s rights and autonomy still matters. Maybe Stella is also smiling somewhere too. And to end with a quote from the main character herself:
“What is this ban on abortion? It is a sexual taboo, it is the terror that women should experiment and enjoy freely, without punishment. It is the survival of the veiled face, of the barred window and the locked door, of burning, branding, mutilation and stoning; of all the pain and fear inflicted ever since the grip of ownership and superstition came down on women, thousands of years ago.”
Stella Browne, speech to the Abortion Law Reform Association’s founding conference, Conway Hall, 1936
Hope you enjoyed reading. Drop a comment if you did. I love to hear you thoughts!