The Botanical Section of the 1910 British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting

This photograph shows the Botanical Section of the 1910 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, which was held in Sheffield in September 1910. Marie Stopes (1880-1958) is on the left (as you look at the picture) on second row from the back. Stopes took zoology night classes at Birkbeck while she studied at University College London during the day. This enabled her to complete a University of London BSc with honours in botany, with geology as a subsidary subject, in only 2 years. She gained a first class degree in 1902. As an academic, Stopes went on to make significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. She was also a prominent eugenicist, but is most famous as a campaigner for birth control. Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain and edited the newsletter 'Birth Control News', which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual 'Married Love' (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse.