Reviewed: Lesley A. Hall, The Life and Times of Stella Browne, Feminist and Free Spirit
In 1938, at a time when activists for legal abortion were middle-class reformers who based their argument on the alarming numbers of working-class mothers harmed or killed by illegal abortions, Frances Worsely Stella Browne stood up before a parliamentary committee on abortion and assured it, ‘I have…the knowledge in my own person that, if abortion were necessarily fatal or injurious, I should not now be here before you.’ Stella’s admission that she, an unmarried, childless, educated middle-class woman, had had an abortion—three, in fact—at a time when the topic was barely discussed was in keeping with a life so devoted to massive change that even her own colleagues thought her radical.
In this impeccably researched biography, enriched by its sympathy for its subject, Wellcome Library archivist Lesley A. Hall illuminates a long-neglected figure and her determined campaigns for a range of issues—the vote for women, birth control, divorce reform, socialism, pacifism, and a more enlightened attitude toward sexuality among them—while establishing the importance of her work to the pro-choice cause in the UK. Hall also suggests ways in which Stella’s own life, as difficult as it is to reconstruct, may have helped shape her thought; her commitment to free love and her own experiences influenced her opinions on human sexual diversity as well as her translations of sexological works, lectures, and published work.
Born in Canada in 1880, Stella most likely had personal experience of abortion by 1915, and in 1922 she made what is likely the first argument on a public platform in Britain for legalization. This was at a time when birth control activists like Marie Stopes were distancing themselves from abortion, and even talking about contraception could get health workers fired and publishers tried for obscenity. Stella was a lone voice. As colleague Dora Russell said of the 1920s: ‘We were trying to get birth control on the way and we didn’t want a disturbance to our work.’
Even when Stella’s colleagues, including Dora Russell, joined her to form the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in 1936, Stella’s belief that a woman had an ‘absolute right to decide whether or not she would bear a child’ kept her on the radical fringe. While most ALRA activists employed the more pragmatic argument that the abortion ban was ‘a law for the rich’ that led to the death and ill health of overburdened, married, working-class mothers, Stella argued in her contribution to the 1935 book Abortion for ‘the (as yet still rather unpopular) assumption that women are really human beings, and that freedom of choice and deliberate intention are necessary for them in their sexual relations and their maternity’ and that some women were ‘not primarily maternal.’ In a 1936 speech, she argued that the ‘ban on abortion’ was ‘a sexual taboo…a 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.’
Stella did not live to see the change to abortion law in 1967—she died 12 years before—and would have no doubt been dismayed at the law’s failure to ensure a woman’s absolute right to abortion, but her activism certainly helped make change of any kind possible. In a chronology of the movement, a younger ALRA member had ‘Stella Campaigns Alone’ as the only entry between the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (the basis for the illegality of abortion in England and Wales) and the foundation of the ALRA. At a time when anti-abortion campaigners like Nadine Dorries are attempting to roll back reproductive rights, claiming that ‘a woman seeking an abortion in this country is the victim of a well-organised industry,’ it is all the more important for the pro-choice movement to recognize the radical contributions of StellaBrowne and celebrate the legacy of her work on behalf of a woman’s absolute right—let alone competence—to choose for herself in reproductive matters.
The Life and Times of Stella Browne, Feminist and Free Spirit by Lesley A. Hall (IB Tauris, 2011)
Reviewed by Fran Bigman