Another bit of historical griping

I am getting increasingly sick of the hysteria surrounding the inclusion of Marie Stopes in a series of Royal Mail stamps commemmorating 'Women of Distinction'. The PC-brigade have pounced on this, saying Ms Stopes was a eugenicist, sent poems to Hitler and advocated the compulsory sterilisation of those she saw as 'unfit for parenthood'. I'm not arguing with any of this - there is bountiful documentary evidence that Stopes did indeed believe in and do these things but my point is SO DID AN AWFUL LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE AT THE TIME.

Once again, we are up against the ignorant and poorly-educated activitists who simply can't see the wider historical picture outside their own beliefs. The sad fact is that people in the past wholeheartedly believed in quite a number of things which would be condemned outright today; it's called context, and to condemn the remarkable achievements of historical figures just because other parts of their lives or belief-systems wouldn't pass scrutiny when viewed through 21st-Century goggles is frankly pathetic. For example, there is some debate as to whether Winston Churchill had anti-semitic beliefs (my opinion is he would have been highly unusual given his social class and the period in which he was brought up if he HADN'T), it is generally agreed that Shakespeare did too, despite his 'hath not a Jew eyes' speech from The Merchant of Venice, and even the Iron Duke of Wellington is a bit suspect in this regard. Are we therefore to condemn Churchill, Shakespeare and Wellington and demand their achievements are not honoured? Virginia Woolf is on record as saying imbeciles (her word) should be 'killed' - should we demand therefore that Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are taken off school and university reading lists? (Personally I'd take them off on grounds of their navel-gazing self-indulgent tediousness, but that's just me). Of course nobody's going to suggest this, and I think the real reason for Marie Stopes being singled out for such venom has absolutely nothing to do with some of her more questionable opinions and an awful lot more to do with the fact she's mostly remembered for the impact she had on people's sex-lives.

The English have always had a peculiar attitude to sex, and their nudge-nudge wink-wink prudery combined with a distasteful sort of prurience when faced with the subject was bound to be in conflict with Marie Stopes' direct, objective and unsentimental approach. Naturally at the time a lot of this was subliminated through 'the Church' - that all-purpose convenient cloak for a whole number of quite questionable inclinations - and a mention of Stopes' work in the field of contraception is enough to get a few Churchmen writhing in condemnation even today. The fact Stopes was a WOMAN made the situation even worse - she flew in the face of the social conventions regarding femininity and 'what nice girls say/do/know about'. You'd think, given the almost 24 hour exposure to all things sexual we experience in modern society and the tedious 'wimmins' rights' movement shoving their particular concerns down our throats at every available opportunity people would have got over this by now... obviously this is not the case. We have a situation here where somebody's profound achievement working OUTSIDE the social mores of their time is being ignored in favour of the areas in which they corresponded with prevailing opinion. Thus, the so-called 'liberal' fraternity are merely displaying their own cultural facism - ie. 'you have to think like us or we'll suppress you' - and what is worse, trying to eradicate or diminish historical record too.

I'm not sure whether the Royal Mail has actually already produced the controverial stamp in question, or whether it's just discussing it, but I sincerely hope, if the latter, that they'll stick two fingers up at the ignorant lentil-knitting PC-mob and allow Marie Stopes' image to appear in the series. To honour somebody who made such a difference to the lives of women in particular (and indeed family life in general), from all classes, is surely a worthwhile thing, regardless of what she believed in other areas. An explanatory leaflet telling the aforementioned mob where they can learn a bit of historical context wouldn't go amiss either...