Doors in Abercromby Place, New Town

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 2 Jul 2010

The plaque reveals that No.3 was once the home of the celebrated, some might say controversial, Edinburgh doctor, Marie Stopes. Her 'Married Love' caused a sensation when it was published in 1918, not so much because she advocated contraception to reduce family-size and spare women a continual round of childbirth, but because she believed that women enjoyed and had a right to a physical relationship within marriage. The book was banned in the U.S.A. until 1931. Regarded as a progressive pioneer of birth control through the establishment of her family planning clinics, her reputation has grown more ambivalent since one of her motivations was the eugenically inspired and now unfashionable desire to restrict the breeding of the 'criminal classes'. "Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes, Read a book by Marie Stopes, Now, to judge by her condition, She must have read the wrong edition!" -- Edinburgh school playground rhyme, 1920s

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