Charlotte Carmichael Stopes
Charlotte Carmichael Stopes | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 6, 1841 |
| Died | February 6, 1929 |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Shakespeare scholarship, and Women's Rights |
| Spouse | Henry Stopes |
| Children | Marie Stopes |
Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1841–1929) was a British scholar, author, and campaigner for women's rights. She published several books relating to the life and work of William Shakespeare. Her most successful publication was British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (published 1894), a book which influenced and inspired the early twentieth century British women's suffrage movement. She married Henry Stopes, a palaeontologist, brewer and engineer. They produced two daughters, the eldest of whom was Marie Stopes, birth control advocate.
University Education
Determined to overcome the barriers for women to access higher education, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes attended university classes in Edinburgh, taught by Professor John Stuart Blackie, Professor of Greek at Edinburgh University, ‘at a time when the University was not open to women and courses were given to them privately by the male Professors’[1]. Although women were not permitted to take a degree, she achieved the highest certificate then available to a female student, in subjects as diverse as literature, philosophy and science, achieving first class honours[1]. In fact, she "was the first woman in Scotland to gain a Certificate of Arts".[2] She used her education for the advancement of women and pursued scholarly interests in English Renaissance, particularly Shakespearean, literary history.
Shakespearean Scholarship
Her first book was The Bacon/Shakespeare Question, published in 1888: refuting the popular speculation that Francis Bacon was the actual author of Shakespeare's plays. This was the first of several works of scholarship concerning Shakespeare and literature of his period. Her books in the field included Shakespeare’s Family (1901), Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries (1907), William Hunnis and the Revels (1910), Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage (1913), The Seventeenth-Century Accounts of the Masters of the Revels (1922) and many published notes and articles. Stopes received an award from the British Academy in 1916 for her Shakespearian research, thirteen years before her death in February 1929.
According to Boas, [3] on the day after Stopes died, The London Times published the following comment:
- "The Royal Society of Literature has lost a distinguished veteran among its Fellows, and the study of Shakespeare a brave and devoted servant."
Feminist Scholarship and Activism
C.C. Stopes' study of British women’s history proved to be the most popular and influential of her numerous publications. British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege was published by Swann Soennenshein in 1894. It ran to several editions and was a key reference point for the British female suffrage movement. As Laura E Nym Mayall observes that British Freewomen was ‘perhaps the single most influential text in casting women’s struggle for the vote within the radical narrative of loss, resistance and recovery’ since Stopes’ arguments, as outlined in successive editions of British Freewomen, were frequently cited by ‘suffragists of all stripes in making the case for women’s suffrage in print, before crowds, and in the courtroom’[4]. Stopes was a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. She wrote pamphlets and spoke publicly in campaigns for women’s rights.
Stopes' papers
Some of Stopes' research notes and correspondence are deposited at the University College London in a collection entitled MS ADD 157.[5]
References
- Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. London: Batsford, p 1034.
- Boas, Frederick S. 'Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Some Aspects of her Life and Work', Essays By Divers Hands: Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom, New Series Vol. X, 1931.
- Briant, Keith. Passionate Paradox: The Life of Marie Stopes. New York: Norton, 1962.
- Mayall, Laura E. Nym. ‘Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1908-1909’, The Journal of British Studies, 39.3 (July, 2000): p. 350.
- ‘Notes and News’. History: Journal of the Historical Association 14.53 (April 1929): p 45.