'Tomorrow's Children' (1934)

Marie Stopes is forgiven racism and eugenics because she was anti-life

“Dear Herr Hitler,

Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these (poems) that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?”

These gushing words from an ardent fan (she was lucky Unity Mitford did not scratch her eyes out) were written in August 1939, just a month before this country went to war with Nazi Germany, by Marie Stopes, the “woman of distinction” who will ornament our 50p stamps from October.

Sending the Fuhrer a book of her sentimental poems was an appropriate gesture. This keen advocate of eugenics and subverter of family life had a long career of activity in the politics of human reproduction.

In 1919 she urged the National Birth Rate Commission to support mandatory sterilisation of parents who were diseased, prone to drunkenness or of bad character. In 1920, in her book Radiant Motherhood, she demanded “the sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory”.

Her 1921 slogan was: “Joyful and Deliberate Motherhood, A Safe Light in our Racial Darkness.”

As a letter writer to yesterday’s paper pointed out, her organisation was called the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress and her clinics were situated in poor areas, to reduce the birth rate of the local residents.

Not that Stopes wanted the working class to stop having children altogether. On the contrary, she was also a supporter of child labour: “Not many years ago the labourer’s child could be set to work early and could very shortly earn his keep… The trend of legislation has continuously extended the age of irresponsible youth in the lower and lower middle classes”…

In 1926 Stopes stipulated that the boy she would adopt as a companion for her son would be “completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised”.

In 1935 she was present at the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the auspices of the Third Reich. On her death she bequeathed her clinic and much of her fortune to the Eugenics Society.

Today, Marie Stopes International has nearly 500 centres in 38 countries, performing more than half a million sterilisations a year, and is a major abortion provider.

Considering the hysteria nowadays attaching to issues of race, at first sight it seems extraordinary that Stopes should have earned commemoration on a stamp. To the PC establishment, however, even racist peccadilloes can be ignored to honour a pioneer who helped promote the anti-life culture and relieve women of the intolerable trauma of giving birth to a child with a cleft palate.

Eugenic abortion accounts for an increasing proportion of the 7 million “terminations” in Britain since 1967. Poor old Josef Mengele was not eligible for a stamp, being a dead, white male. Perhaps in 2009…

Is Marie Stopes really an appropriate icon for Britain’s stamps?

Marie Stopes (site supported by PP)

Marie Stopes AKA Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes

Born: 15-Oct-1880
Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
Died: 2-Oct-1958
Location of death: Dorking, Surrey, England
Cause of death: Cancer - Breast
Remains: Cremated, (ashes scattered at sea)

Gender: Female
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Scientist, Author

Nationality: England

Executive summary: Scientist and birth control advocate

Marie Stopes was a paleobotanist, author, and social activist best known for her efforts in the early half of the 20th century to promote safe birth control for women. In 1921 Stopes opened Britain’s first birth control clinic and, with the aid of second husband Humphrey Roe, she went on to found an entire chain of clinics with chapters in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Marie Stopes was a passionate promoter of women’s rights and women’s sexual pleasure, and a staunch supporter of eugenics. Although also a poet and novelist, her best-known works are those dealing the topics which one made her so famous, sexuality and birth control. Among her most popular titles were Married Love, Wise Parenthood, and Radiant Motherhood.

Marie Stopes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1880. Her father, Henry Stopes, was a distinguished scientist specializing in paleobotany, and her mother, Charlotte, was an ardent feminist and suffragette. The victim of sex discrimination, Charlotte Stopes had been barred from attending university classes. She had however been allowed to take the exams, and was thus able to earn a university “certificate”, in place of an actual college degree. A generation earlier, Charlotte’s mother, J. F. Carmichael, had been the first woman to obtain such a university certificate.

Improving on this tradition, Marie won a science scholarship at the age of 18 and began attending classes at University College, London. Her level of excellence was such that when she took her exams a year early as a trial run, she not only passed but also received dual honors, in Botany and Geology. In a 1902 letter she confided to her mother, “I am the only candidate with honours; the others (men only) all failed, so my name stands alone in the list. It is supposed to be impossible to take one honours in a year, to get two is nice.” She then embarked on graduate training in Munich, Germany, graduating in 1904 with her Ph.D. in Science and Philosophy. She joined the scientific staff at the University of Manchester that same year as an assistant lecturer and demonstrator in botany.

By 1911, Marie Stopes had established such a reputation in the specialized field of fossilized plants that the Geological Survey of Canada requested her to visit and pass judgment on certain fossilized fern samples found by paleobotanist Sir William Dawson. In essence, the caliber of her professionalism and skill was of sufficient quality to override the usual prejudice against female scholars. Stopes herself was meanwhile undeterred by having to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to accomplish the task. Indeed, on another occasion she traveled all the way to Japan for the sake of gathering fossil samples.

It must have seemed by this point that she had succeeded admirably in soaring past all of the barriers that had limited her mother and her grandmother — and that surely now her life would be filled only with increase and accomplishment. But in 1911 Stopes entered into marriage with a fellow scientist, Reginald GATES, and quickly discovered that being highly intelligent was not enough to surmount the challenges of married life. Sexual troubles plagued them from the outset. Anxious and mystified Marie turned at last to doing research at the British Museum, to unravel the source of their troubles: Reginald Gates was impotent.

Unable to resolve the problem with her husband, Stopes eventually went to court, some three years later, and had the marriage legally annulled. The painful experience, which included a public airing of her husband’s condition, prompted her to write a book to help others plagued by sexual ignorance. Armed now with an understanding of erections and vaginal intercourse, she penned Married Love, a mix of sage advice about women’s sexual cycles and foreplay and women’s rights advocacy (both sexual and social). The manuscript offered such bold, unladylike statements as:

Many men imagine that the turgid condition of an erection is due to the local accumulation of sperms, and that these can only be naturally got rid of by an ejaculation. This is entirely wrong.

The mutually best regulation of intercourse in marriage is to have three or four days of repeated unions, followed by about ten days without any unions at all, unless some strong external stimulus has stirred a mutual desire.

...when the woman is what is physiologically called tumescent... local parts are flushed by the internal blood-supply and to some extent are turgid like those of the man, while a secretion of mucus lubricates the opening of the vagina.

Publishers declined the book on various grounds, both moral and political, with many fretting, in essence, that women were becoming uppity enough without being urged to demand sexual and intellectual satisfaction. But Marie’s disappointment would not last long.

In 1918 she married wealthy manufacturing magnate Humphrey ROE. With Roe she not only lost her virginity but gained a partner in her crusade for sex education. Roe had seen the terrible toll exacted upon his female workers by constant pregnancy and childbirth, and agreed that something must be done. So he happily footed the publishing fees, and Married Love saw the light of day at last. In an astonishing two weeks’ time the book had already sold out, and soon Stopes was swamped with letters from women wanting to learn about birth control.

Although she had studied sperm under the microscope and was well-informed at last about the mechanics of reproduction and lovemaking, Stopes felt relatively ignorant about the specifics of birth control devices. So she consulted with friend Margaret Sanger, a birth control advocate recently chased out of the U.S. on obscenity charges. Sanger gave Stopes an assortment of pamphlets and “French pessary” (most likely diaphragms) and filled her in on all the facts. Stopes then incorporated all this information into Wise Parenthood.

Like Married Love, Wise Parenthood found instant popularity and success with the reading public. But it earned tremendous criticism from the Church of England and the Catholic Church, both of which forbade birth control through means other than abstinence. Naturally Stopes worried that she would be arrested for obscenity as was Margaret Sanger, or even sent to prison for it like Annie Besant, but somehow she managed to saunter through unscathed.

Meanwhile, in 1921, Stopes and husband Humphrey Roe founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and opened the first birth control clinic in England. The latter soon expanded into an entire chain of clinics where the all-female staff of nurses and doctors fitted women with “vaginal caps” and educated them on birth control and related facts of life. The clientele were predominantly poor women, and were restricted exclusively to those who were married. Staff members collected scientific data about contraception as well, material that would fuel Stopes’ later books. Marie Stopes also designed a new high-domed vaginal cap for better fit and efficiency.

In 1923, when Dr. Halliday Sutherland penned a pro-Catholic tirade against Stopes in his book Birth Control, he stepped over the line into misrepresentation, and Stopes took him to court for libel. She lost, then won at appeal, and then lost again when it went to the House of Lords. But along the way she gained considerable publicity for herself and for the cause of birth control.

In time she learned how to fan the flames of such notoriety, even writing inciting letters to Pope Pius XI and chaining a copy of her book Roman Catholic Methods of Birth Control to the front of Westminster Cathedral.

After the birth of her son Harry in 1924, Stopes managed to juggle motherhood with her crusades for birth control and other causes. It hardly seemed to slow her down. She introduced a horse-drawn birth control caravan, opened more clinics, and set her sights on opening clinics in other countries.

She ultimately opened chapters in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, Stopes wrote extensively on the subject of birth control, and even published articles on the subject in Indian newspapers.

Never a two-dimensional character, Marie Stopes’ strongly opposed reproductive rights for those who carried inheritable defects, mental or physical. In Radiant Motherhood (1920) Stopes suggested that the “sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood be made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.”

And in The Control of Parenthood, (1920) and wrote that were she in charge, she would “legislate compulsory sterilization of the insane, feebleminded... revolutionaries... half castes.”

She opposed the marriage of her own son merely because his bride-to-be wore glasses. And upon her death a large portion of her fortune was bequeathed to the Eugenics Society.

The fact that Stopes’ clinics were predominantly aimed at slowing the reproduction of the lower classes, has brought criticism in later years that this was part of her plan to weed out undesirables. Whether this accusation is deserved or not, it remains a fact Stopes had a very real commitment to emancipating all women from unwanted pregnancies, and poor women suffered from this condition more than any other group. Stopes regulary received heart-wrenching pleas from women too poor to feed their children and bewildered about how to stop procreating without abandoning their husbands.

Additionally, Stopes’ views — as bullying, bombastic, and eccentric as they were — should be viewed within the context of her era, specifically, an era when many of the cures and treatments for inherited diseases now available had yet to be discovered.

Eugenics appeared as the panacea for all such social woes, and in an England still steeped in social Darwinism, it was a very seductive panacea indeed. Many believed that the world’s great ills, whether social, mental, or physical, were the fault of inferior genes: eliminate the genes, and you would increase the fitness of the species as a whole. Ironically, when Adolf Hitler, that more notorious and brutal proponent of genetic cleansing, came to power, he ordered all of Marie Stopes’ books burned. Eugenics and female fulfillment were not a mix he favored. (YET SHE SENT HIM LETTERS AND POEMS)

Meanwhile, Stopes was very actively pursuing her own fulfillment, both professional and sexual. She was very careful to distance herself from charges of depravity by loudly specifying that her sexual advice, and devices, were married persons only. She expressed great outrage and disgust at all forms of sexual “perversion”, a tag which she applied to homosexuality, but apparently free love within marriage, if practiced only with the opposite sex, was acceptable. In this she had the full blessing and consent of her husband, as testified in a contract drawn up between them in later years.

Stopes also acquired a reputation for dominating those men near and dear to her, especially her husband and son. This reputation was only fueled by her penchant for much younger men, whom she also is said to have dominated.

Marie Stopes spent her final years working for the causes she loved, and most especially writing poetry. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1950s and quietly put her affairs in order, dissolving her Society for Constructive Birth Control, dying in 1958. Yet the clinics that she established were reborn as units of Marie Stopes International. MSI now offers birth control information and materials in some 38 countries around the globe. Wherever legal, the clinics offer safe, medical abortion and related counseling for women from all backgrounds.

Father: Henry Stopes (paleobotanist)
Mother: Charlotte Stopes (suffragette)
Husband: Reginald Gates (scientist, m. 1911, div. 1914)
Husband: Humphrey Verdon-Roe (aircraft manufacturer, m. 1918, two sons)
Son: Harry (b. 1924)

University: BS Botany, University of Munich (1904)

Risk Factors: Breast Cancer

Author of books:
Married Love (1918, non-fiction)
Wise Parenthood (1918, non-fiction)
Radiant Motherhood (1920, non-fiction)
The Control of Parenthood (1920, non-fiction)
Love Songs for Young Lovers (1938, poetry)
http://www.nndb.com/people/572/000024500/

The name of her first husband GATES and second husband ROE gives one pause.

Annie Besant

Born: 1-Oct-1847
Birthplace: London, England
Died: 20-Sep-1933
Location of death: Madras, India
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Cremated, (ashes scattered in the River Ganges, some placed at Adyar)

Gender: Female
Religion: Cult
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Activist, Religion

Nationality: England
Executive summary: Theosophist & Social Activist

Annie Besant is best known for her association with Theosophy, the Buddhist and Hindu influenced religious society founded by H. P. Blavatsky. Besant also gained considerable renown, during her lifetime, fighting for various social causes, including Indian home rule, the plight of London’s poverty stricken women and children, and birth control. Besant was nearly jailed for the latter, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. She joined Blavatsky’s Theosophy Society in the 1890s, and created her own splinter group after Blavatsky’s death.

Father: William Wood
Mother: Emily Morris
Husband: Frank Besant (m. 1867, legally separated 1898)
Son: Digby Besant
Daughter: Mabel Besant

Theosophical Society
Fabian Society
Obscenity (obscene libel) convicted Jun-1877
Lost Child Custody
Irish Ancestry
Risk Factors: Yoga

Author of books:
The Political Status of Women (1874, non-fiction)
Marriage, As It Was, As It Is, And As It Should Be: A Plea For Reform (1878, non-fiction)
The Law Of Population (1877, non-fiction)
Autobiographical Sketches (1885, non-fiction)
An Autobiography (1893, non-fiction)
The Ancient Wisdom (1898, non-fiction)
Introduction to Yoga (1908, non-fiction)
The Doctrine of the Heart (1929, non-fiction)
http://www.nndb.com/people/299/000098005/

Annie Besant

H.P. Blavatsky (site funded by PP)

AKA Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Born: 12-Aug-1831
Birthplace: Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine
Died: 8-May-1891
Location of death: London, England
Cause of death: Influenza
Remains: Cremated, Theosophical Society Adyar, Chennai, India

Gender: Female
Religion: Cult
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Author, Religion

Nationality: Russia
Executive summary: Founded Theosophy; The Secret Doctrine

H. P. Blavatsky, also known as Madame Blavatsky or HPB, is best known as the co-founder of Theosophy and as the author of such esoteric classics as Isis Unveiled (1877), The Secret Doctrine (1888), Key to Theosophy (1889), as well as her highly praised work on Buddhism, The Voice of Silence (1889). In pulling together and systemizing a wealth of information on spiritualism and the occult, Blavatsky claimed to be guided by “The Brothers”, advanced spiritual teachers from a higher plane of being. Critics argued that she merely ripped off already existing works, ancient and modern, without giving any credit to the original authors. Blavatsky also claimed, at times, to also have highly developed psychic powers, but she was accused of fraud several times due to her tendency to bolster with trickery whatever gifts she did, or did not, possess. Nonetheless her teachings profoundly affected the thinking of such notables as Mahatma Gandhi, James Joyce, and William Butler Yeats.

Furthermore the activities of her Theosophical Society did much to bring positive awareness of Eastern religions to Europe and other parts of the Western world. Blavatsky and other theosophists are also given special praise in India and Sri Lanka for their efforts to re-popularize both Hinduism and Buddhism within those nations.

H. P. Blavatsky was born Helena Petrovna Hahn on 12 August 1831 in Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine. Her father, Peter Alexeivich von Hahn, was a colonel in the Russian army, while her mother, Helena Andreyvna Fadeyev, was an accomplished novelist. Both parents were often preoccupied with their various career duties, so much of young Helena’s upbringing was left to servants. She became neurotic, demanding, and prone to fits of temper. From the servants she imbibed all manner of peasant superstitions, often claiming to see and command strange beings. When given offense she often threatened to bring the wrath of supernatural beings down upon whoever opposed her. Her threats and fury once so terrified a fourteen-year-old peasant boy that he fell into a river and drowned.

Favorite pastimes included lulling pigeons into a hypnotic stupor by stroking them; such was the charismatic quality of her tremendous imagination that other children often became entirely caught up in her stories, claiming to see before them the very things that she described. In addition she had a tendency to wander and talk in her sleep. Not surprisingly, the servants became convinced that possessed supernatural powers, and before long young Helena agreed with them.

When she was eleven years old her mother died, though Helena would later claim her mother had died many years earlier than that. With her mother gone and her father caught up with military campaigns, Helena and her brother were sent off to live with their maternal grandmother. At age seventeen, willful, temperamental, and undaunted by adventure, Helena rebelled against familial expectations and criticisms by marrying a middle-aged General, Nikifor Vassilievitch Blavatsky. Three months later, with the marriage still supposedly unconsummated, she gave the general’s bodyguards the slip and ran off. To escape the wrath of her family she fled to Constantinople.

Thus she began a series of incredible adventures that involved perilous travels to India and Tibet, where she was supposedly able to disguise herself and sneak into secret lamaistic rites and to study with an “ascended master” or two. According to her own tales, she was also a circus performer, a concert pianist, an opera singer’s mistress, and a soldier in Garibaldi’s army, during which adventure she was wounded and left for dead at the battle at Mentana. According to Blavatsky, she was “picked out of a ditch for dead with the left arm broken in two places, musket balls embedded in right shoulder and leg, and a stiletto wound in the heart”. She also had a string of failed businesses, sailed to Egypt and was one of the few to escape drowning when the ship went down, and became involved with a mysterious Egyptian brotherhood. At one point she worked as a fortuneteller in Cairo with another woman as a medium, but was put out of business amidst charges of fraud.

She returned to Russia for a period around 1858, impressing some with her table turning, as well as other, reportedly more authentic, feats of psychic prowess. She became embroiled in various love triangles and affairs, and somewhere along the way she may have birthed a son, but her conflicting stories make it unclear whether the boy was her own by an affair, or merely adopted from another couple. In any event the boy, named Yuri, born around 1861, was deformed, possibly with a hunchback, and died at around age five. Helena claimed to have loved him more than anyone in the world and to have been sufficiently devastated by his death as to lose all belief in God.

She arrived in New York in July of 1873. She moved into a crowded tenement house where she eked by on money sent from relatives and gleaned from various schemes, including seamstressing. She later moved in with some journalist friends, who found that photos that they left out at night were found the next morning miraculously tinted by “the spirits” with watercolors. The wonder and awe disappeared when Helena was observed sneaking about in the night with paintbrushes and paint. She next tried her hand at a farming venture with a couple she knew from Russia, but this failed and she was subsequently cheated out of her share when the farm sold at auction.

In October of 1874 she read an article by New York journalist and lawyer Henry Steele Olcott concerning his investigations into the paranormal, specifically some séances and other mediumist phenomena at the Eddy Brothers’ farm in Chittenden, Vermont. Helena made a pilgrimage to the farm where she finessed her way into an audience with Olcott by claiming association with the brothers. Though Olcott saw through her story, he agreed to observe Helena in action and eventually became quite impressed by her apparent abilities.

Eventually the two teamed up and decided to found a society for the further study of spiritualism — mediumship, arcane spiritual knowledge, and the like. Their first attempt, The Miracle Club, foundered when some of the spiritual performers involved began demanding payment. Their next attempt was more successful, drawing a broader range of spiritual mysteries, including occultism from ancient Egypt. A consultation with the dictionary, in the late fall of 1875, helped the group settle on a name: the Theosophical Society. Olcott, Blavatsky, and some of the other Theosophists had meanwhile moved in together in a large flat, calling it a Lamasery or Lamastery. Helena turned her attention from journalism toward a longer, more substantial project, and in 1877 published her first book of ruminations on the occult, Isis Unveiled. According to Blavatsky, the work was channeled from the (otherworld) spiritual masters who were her guides. She would later claim that these same guides had orchestrated all of the significant actions that led to and developed her work with the Theosophical Society.

Yet criticisms of fraud and plagiarism continued to hound Blavatsky. For example, William Emmette Coleman, writing in the early 1890s, claimed to have uncovered some 100 works from which Blavatsky had clearly stolen material while crediting it to her spiritual teachers on the “other side”. Furthermore Coleman asserted he could prove that while Blavatsky had claimed to have read many old and rare great books in the original, she had clearly lifted quotes from secondary materials about those same books. Later Theosophists, in defending Blavatsky, dismissed Coleman as a Victorian crank.

In April 1875 Blavatsky married a second time, to Michael C. Betanelly. This was apparently another unconsummated marriage of convenience, with Betanelly insisting on providing for Blavatsky. This arrangement lasted but a few months, and their divorce was finalized 25 May 1878. A few months later Blavatsky was granted U.S. citizenship, at which point she, along with Olcott and two other Theosophists, set out for India to immerse themselves in Buddhism. So successful was their foray that in 1882 the Theosophical Society relocated its headquarters to Adyar, near Madras, India. In addition to deepening their knowledge of Buddhism, and fostering its re-emerging popularity among local peoples, the Theosophists became involved in various schools and assorted promotions of Theosophy, including faith healing and mediumistic displays — some of which entailed letters of wisdom and advice penned by “the brothers” (Blavatsky’s spiritual guides), letters which materialized apparently out of thin air.

As expected, scandal soon attached itself to Blavatsky’s paranormal activities. In 1884, one Dr. Hodgson was sent by the Society for Psychical Research to investigate allegations that Blavatsky’s psychic and spiritualistic feats were fraud. Hodgson not only procured confessions by individuals who claimed to have helped Blavatsky contrive her “supernatural” theatrics, but he also claimed to have found an assortment of physical evidence as well — sliding panels, a dummy head and shoulders, and slim spring-loaded openings in the ceiling. (Theosophist recent reviews of Hodgson’s report claim extreme bias and incorrect handwriting analysis of the letters in question.) Olcott, whose reputation was unscathed by the report, ordered Blavatsky to withdraw from Adyar. Other Society members, most notably Annie Besant and A. P. Sinnet, attempted damage control, but the scandal was slow to fade.

Blavatsky retreated to Germany to work on her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. More extensive than her earlier work, it was finally published in 1888. She then moved to London where she founded the magazine Lucifer (Light Bringer), which would have a marked influence in some artistic and intellectual circles.

In 1889 she issued The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of Silence. Yet her health was in decline; she struggled with Bright’s Disease, heart disease, and rheumatism. On 8 May 1891, she succumbed to influenza.

Despite her passing, the Theosophical Society persevered. After Olcott’s death in 1907, it turned its focus from Buddhism to Hinduism, under the leadership of Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbetter. 100 years later, the Society is still going strong, although it now distances itself from psychic phenomena. Blavatsky’s writings have continued to be immensely popular, and whether their contents represent channeled wisdom and original thought, or a cleverly systemized amalgam of other people’s contributions, they have had a profound influence on religion, literature, and even politics.

As already mentioned, Blavatsky’s work, and that of the Theosophical Society in general, was responsible for introducing the West to the spiritual teachings of the East, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. It further introduced the idea of the Brotherhood of Man, and the notion of a great Wisdom Tradition existing beyond any particular religion. According to Blavatsky and the Theosophists, this Wisdom Tradition was simply the great Truth, existent on some higher plane, manifest to varying degrees in the world’s many religions, however distorted by human bias. Thus although no religion was a perfect embodiment of this Truth, all religions were an attempt to reach toward it. It was bringing it forth in a new and more pristine form that Blavatsky saw as the central task of the Theosophical Society.

Whether Theosophy represented some higher wisdom or not, the fact remains that many of the ideas popularized in Blavatsky’s work, and those of fellow Theosophists, have become standard fare within the modern “New Age” spiritual movement, and many concepts, such as reincarnation, ascended masters, higher planes, communication with spirits, and the lost continent of Atlantis have filtered into mainstream and pop culture — much to the chagrin of fundamentalist Christians.

In the literary world meanwhile, both William Butler Yeats and James Joyce both acknowledged the profound influence which Blavatsky’s spiritual teachings had upon them. Joyce even stated “it is impossible to grasp the meaning of Ulysses, its symbolism and the significance of its leitmotifs, without an understanding of the esoteric theories which underlie the work”. Many other artists and writers trace an influence from Theosophy and specifically Blavatsky. Untold numbers have read the works of such artists, listened to their music or viewed their painting or sculpture, without any realization of the underlying philosophical lineage, and many of these have gone on to create their own works, ignorantly perpetuating Theosophist themes and values.

Similarly, many of admired the work of Mahatma Gandhi without realizing that he had been introduced to Blavatsky in 1890, while he was studying law at University College London. Gandhi himself states that it was the works of Madame Blavatsky, especially Key to Theosophy, that convinced him there was something of value within the spiritual teachings of his homeland — teachings which later gave shape, form, and moral authority to his challenge to British rule in India. This, coupled with the boost given by Theosophists to their indigenous religious beliefs, has endeared Blavatsky to many in India, who praise her for exhibiting such broadmindedness and generosity of spirit in the face of bigoted colonialism and encroaching Christianity.

All in all, if Helene Blavatsky truly could have glimpsed the future (or looked down on us from the beyond), she would likely be chagrined at the beating her name has taken over the decades, and perhaps amused equally at those who dismiss her and those would would attribute her with undue spiritual authority (as some sort of savant, without human foibles and shortcomings). But she would surely be deeply gratified to observe the influence of her work and her writings, and the webs of affect that have spread out from her early endeavors. Ironically, so much of her influence, so much of her hand in setting things in motion, has been entirely forgotten, and very few today still recognize the name of Madame Blavatsky.

Father: Peter von Hahn
Mother: Helena Andreyevna de Fadeyev
Husband: Nikifor Vassilievitch Blavatsky (m. 7-Jul-1849, never consummated)
Husband: Michael C. Betanelly (m. 3-Apr-1875, div. 25-May-1878, never consummated)

Theosophical Society
Naturalized US Citizen

Official Website:
http://www.blavatsky.net/

Author of books:
Isis Unveiled (1877)
The Secret Doctrine (1888)
The Voice of Silence (1889)
Key to Theosophy (1889)
http://www.nndb.com/people/310/000033211/

Just a very brief summary of Blavatsky who arrived in London from Russia as a teenager (long-time companion from same area)and from London emigrated to NYC.

Blavatsky influenced Alice Bailey, who, along with Emma Goldman, influenced Margaret Sanger a friend of Helen Keller.

Not as pretty as the front saleswomen.

Letter to Margaret Sanger from Helen Keller (December 8, 1952)

Transcription

Dear Margaret Sanger,

What a glow of gratification was kindled in my heart when Polly read last week the wonderful news that you had founded the Planned Parenthood Association in India!

Not only have I continued to follow your work with loving admiration and expect ever greater results from your beneficence, I have also known of Nehru’s statesmanlike interest in birth-control, and now I behold you and him and Lady Rama Rau working together — a triple Hercules — for the deliverance of a land long cursed with excess of population. I cannot imagine anything more blessed happening on earth. As you teach, mankind has through ignorance often destroyed the sweet joy of childhood. Now a tide of enlightenment, slow but sure, shall lift its healing waves from one end of the world to the other until every child has a chance to be well born, well fed and fairly started in life — and that is woman’s natural work as the creator of the human race.

Affectionately I salute you, Margaret Sanger, as the prophet and the the woman Prometheus of humanity’s highest physical and mental welfare.

Often Polly and I speak of the visits we used to have with you and the inspiration I drew from your brave words. You have travelled up and down and athwart the world since, but I never lose the warm thrill of your beautiful personality.

With Polly’s and my love and wishes for a Christmas luminous with the service you are rendering to mankind, I am,

Devotedly your friend,

Westport, Conn.,
December eighth, 1952
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID=193&SubTopicID=20&DocumentID=1097

One can see the influence of Sanger via Blavatsky, Goldman, and Bailey...

Letter to Helen Keller from Margaret Sanger (January 27, 1953)

Transcription

[Letterhead]
65 SIERRA VISTA DR.
TUCSON, ARIZONA
[End of Letterhead]

January 27, 1953

Miss Helen Keller
Arcan Ridge
Westport, Connecticut

My dearest Helen and Polly,

What a welcome letter, yours of December 8th. was to me when I arrived in Tucson only a few days before Christmas. I have thought so often of both of you and wished that we again could have a weekend together such as we had at Willow Lake a long long time ago.

Indeed you will both agree that India is much in need of birth control and perhaps my last news letter quoting a part of that wonderful address of Dr. Radhakrishna shows how advanced the thinking of the intelligencia of India really is. Lady Rama Rau is one of the most wonderful women that I have met anywhere, and it gives me such pleasure to know that she is taking up the torch and carrying on the work of birth control for her country.

I wish you were coming to Tucson both of you, and could stay with me here, and also if I come east next summer, and if you are nearby I want very much to see you both somewhere, sometime, but soon.

My dearest love to you both and happiest wishes for the new year,

[Signature]
Margaret

Margaret Sanger
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID=193&SubTopicID=20&DocumentID=1098

It’s obvious the rich don’t include themselves as those who need to be aborted or euthanized as Keller would have been first on the list. It was in essence a class system presented as a “new deal” involving all the usual Marxist/Darwin drivel minus Christianity especially Catholicism. Christianity is the enemy continued to this day...wipe it out and the difference between Humans and Animals are gone - both will have the same rights and all will be relative.

Helen Keller and Margaret Sanger

EMMA GOLDMAN (friend of Margaret Sanger)

Emma Goldman (June 27 (NS), 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.[1] Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.[1] She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for “inciting to riot” and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to “induce persons not to register” for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country’s Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, MY DISILLUSIONMENT in RUSSIA. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking “rebel woman” by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.[2] Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women’s suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman’s iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life...

Fleeing the rising antisemitism of Saint Petersburg, their parents and brothers joined them [in the USA] a year later...

...Days after returning to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), she was shocked to hear a party official refer to free speech as a “bourgeois superstition”.[117] As she and Berkman traveled around the country, they found repression, mismanagement, and corruption instead of the equality and worker empowerment they had dreamed of. Those who questioned the government were demonized as counter-revolutionaries, and workers labored under severe conditions.

They met with Vladimir Lenin, who assured them that government suppression of press liberties was justified. He told them: “There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period.”[118] Berkman was more willing to forgive the government’s actions in the name of “historical necessity”, but he eventually joined Goldman in opposing the Soviet state’s authority.[119]

In March 1921, strikes erupted in Petrograd when workers took to the streets demanding better food rations and more union autonomy. Goldman and Berkman felt a responsibility to support the strikers, stating: “To remain silent now is impossible, even criminal.”[120] The unrest spread to the port town of Kronstadt, where a military response was ordered.

In the fighting that ensued, approximately 1,000 rebelling sailors and soldiers were killed and two thousand more were arrested. In the wake of these events, Goldman and Berkman decided there was no future in the country for them. “More and more”, she wrote, “we have come to the conclusion that we can do nothing here. And as we can not keep up a life of inactivity much longer we have decided to leave.”[121]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman

She escaped Russia and almost immediately started agitation in the USA where they got away with murder. Deported back to Russia they understood fast that their agitating wasn’t going to go down well nor would they be treated as easily as the USA. They witnessed one protest where thousands were killed and thousands more arrested and high-tailed it outta there fast...(Ha!)

-

- Goldman enjoyed a decades-long relationship with her lover Alexander Berkman - Goldman's image, often accompanying a popular paraphrase of her ideas—"If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution"—has been reproduced on countless walls, garments, stickers, and posters as an icon of freedom.

- In 1906 Goldman decided to start a publication of her own, "a place of expression for the young idealists in arts and letters".[75] Mother Earth was staffed by a cadre of radical activists, including Hippolyte Havel, Max Baginski, and Leonard Abbott. In addition to publishing original works by its editors and anarchists around the world, Mother Earth reprinted selections from a variety of writers. These included the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and British writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Goldman wrote frequently about anarchism, politics, labor issues, atheism, sexuality, and feminism.[76][77] - Goldman's Mother Earth magazine became a home to radical activists and literary free thinkers around the US. -

- Goldman initially viewed the Bolshevik revolution in a positive light. She wrote in Mother Earth that despite its dependence on Communist government, it represented "the most fundamental, far-reaching and all-embracing principles of human freedom and of economic well-being".[115] By the time she neared Europe, however, she expressed fears about what was to come. She was worried about the ongoing Russian Civil War and the possibility of being seized by anti-Bolshevik forces. The state, anti-capitalist though it was, also posed a threat. "I could never in my life work within the confines of the State," she wrote to her niece, "Bolshevist or otherwise."[116] She quickly discovered that her fears were justified. Days after returning to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), she was shocked to hear a party official refer to free speech as a "bourgeois superstition".[117] As she and Berkman traveled around the country, they found repression, mismanagement, and corruption instead of the equality and worker empowerment they had dreamed of. Those who questioned the government were demonized as counter-revolutionaries, and workers labored under severe conditions. They met with Vladimir Lenin, who assured them that government suppression of press liberties was justified. He told them: "There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period."[118] Berkman was more willing to forgive the government's actions in the name of "historical necessity", but he eventually joined Goldman in opposing the Soviet state's authority.[119] In March 1921, strikes erupted in Petrograd when workers took to the streets demanding better food rations and more union autonomy. Goldman and Berkman felt a responsibility to support the strikers, stating: "To remain silent now is impossible, even criminal."[120] The unrest spread to the port town of Kronstadt, where a military response was ordered. In the fighting that ensued, approximately 1,000 rebelling sailors and soldiers were killed and two thousand more were arrested. In the wake of these events, Goldman and Berkman decided there was no future in the country for them. "More and more", she wrote, "we have come to the conclusion that we can do nothing here. And as we can not keep up a life of inactivity much longer we have decided to leave."[121] In December 1921 they left the country and went to the Latvian capital city of Riga. The US commissioner in that city wired officials in Washington DC, who began requesting information from other governments about the couple's activities. After a short trip to Stockholm, they moved to Berlin for several years; during this time she agreed to write a series of articles about her time in Russia for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World. These were later collected and published in book form as My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). The titles of these books were added by the publishers to be scintillating and Goldman protested, albeit in vain.[122] (heh)

Emma Goldman and Free Speech

Freedom of expression was a cause Emma Goldman championed throughout her adult life. She was outraged that in the United States, “a country which guaranteed free speech, officers armed with long clubs should invade an orderly assembly.” As an anarchist orator, Emma faced constant threats from police and vigilantes determined to suppress her talks. Undeterred, Goldman continued to assert her right to speak, though she paid dearly for her principles. Arrested and tried in 1893 for urging a crowd of hungry, unemployed workers to rely on street demonstrations rather than on the electoral process to obtain relief, Goldman based her defense squarely on the right of free speech—and lost. She spent ten months in jail, a reminder that in nineteenth century America the right of free speech was still a dream, not a reality.

Following the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, tolerance for free speech declined even further. Repression culminated in the passage of the draconian Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, which resulted in long prison terms for those who protested United States entry into the First World War. At the same time, liberal and radical Americans became more vocal in their opposition to the abridgement of first amendment rights. The government’s attempts to suppress Goldman’s unconventional views actually led many who disagreed with her to support nonetheless her right to express her ideas freely.

It was in this context that Goldman began lecturing regularly on freedom of speech and, in 1903, worked with the newly formed Free Speech League. The extremity of the situation sometimes led to amusing results. Once, expecting the police to disrupt a lecture in Philadelphia, Emma chained herself to a podium in order to make it physically impossible for the police to remove her before she finished speaking. But as fate would have it, this time the police did not appear.

Goldman’s insistence on freedom of speech had a profound influence on Roger Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Baldwin heard Goldman speak in 1908 at a working class meeting hall in St. Louis, and what he heard led him to dedicate his life to the cause of freedom. He later told Goldman in a letter, “You always remain one of the chief inspirations of my life, for you aroused in me a sense of what freedom really means.” In his old age, Baldwin said, “Emma Goldman opened up not only an entirely new literature to me, but new people as well, some who called themselves anarchists, some libertarians, some freedom lovers . . . bound together by one principle—freedom from coercion.”

The ultimate irony of Emma Goldman’s crusade for free speech in America is that she was deported to Russia for exercising her right to speak against United States’ involvement in World War I. Undaunted, Goldman risked further political isolation by becoming one of the Left’s most vocal and eloquent critics of political repression in the Soviet Union.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Exhibition/freespeech.html

No mention of her attempted assassinations and bombing material in the USA nor how she and her fellow anarchist didn’t stay long in Russia. They’re very brave in a country where they get away with blue murder but cowards when they witness real coertion.

- This letter, published in an anarchist periodical, reflects Goldman's early efforts to publicize the continued police suppression of her lectures, and draw the ominous implications for first amendment rights in America. (Lucifer the Lightbearer, December 11, 1902) - Note the publisher - Alice Bailey/Saul Alinsky et al...

- Roger Baldwin, a Founder of the A.C.L.U. - Roger Baldwin was one of the most prominent advocates of civil liberties in twentieth-century America. Baldwin was a friend of Emma Goldman, and he credited her work on behalf of free speech as the inspiration for his own lifelong battle to assert and protect the right of political freedom in the United States. - (Papers of Roger Baldwin, Mudd Manuscript Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries)

- Characteristically Diverse Goldman Lecture Series - Emma Goldman gradually expanded her lecture topics from straightforward expositions of anarchist theory to include applications of this theory to contemporary social and political issues. Among these were socialism, birth control, women's emancipation, free speech, and free love. (New York Public Library)

- Prominent Chinese Writer Inspired by Emma Goldman - Born in Chengtu, Szechwan, in 1904 with the name Li Fei-Kan. Inspired by the popular anarchist literature during the May Fourth Movement (May 4, l9l9), he adopted as his pen name, Ba Jin, using parts of the names Bakunin and Kropotkin. At the same time, the Chinese translations of Emma Goldman's essays inspired the fifteen-year-old Ba Jin to write to Goldman as his "spiritual mother" for advice on how to reconcile being a child of an old feudal family with his sympathy for the suffering of the masses. Goldman reassured him that though "we cannot choose the place where we are born . . . we decide ourselves the life we live afterwards. I see you have honesty and enthusiasm, which every young rebel should have . . . " - Among Ba Jin's most important novels is Chia (Family), a moving and courageous critique of China's patriarchal feudal family structure, published in 1931 as the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy. Ba Jin, who is now in his nineties, is still one of the most respected leaders of the Union of Chinese Writers. - Similar letters collected by The Emma Goldman Papers document the importance of international support and the inspiration that individuals of different cultures and generations can draw from one another in sustaining activism for social justice. Goldman's example of lifelong devotion to the principles of freedom of speech, anarchism, and women's independence inspired activists in Japan, China, the Soviet Union, India, Europe, Canada, and Latin America. (Excerpt from September 1933 letter from Ba Jin to Emma Goldman, preface to The General, or Confessions--The Outcry of My Soul, a collection of short stories, Kai Ming Press, Shanghai, China, 1934.) - http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Exhibition/freespeech.html And today is coming to fruition...

Fascinating reading. Thanks so much for posting.

Most folks are totally unaware of this period of history you so comprehensively laid out for our education.

Leni

BEATRICE WEBB

Born 22 January 1858(1858-01-22)
Gloucestershire, England
Died 30 April 1943(1943-04-30) (aged 85)
Liphook, Hampshire, England
Spouse Sidney Webb

Martha Beatrice Webb (née Potter; 22 January 1858– 30 April 1943) was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, reformer and a co-founder of the London School of Economics, usually referred to in association with her husband, Sidney Webb. Although her husband became Baron Passfield in 1929, she refused to be known as Lady Passfield. She coined the term COLLECTIVE BARGAINING.[1]

Beatrice Potter was born in Standish House in the village of Standish Gloucestershire, the daughter of a businessman Richard Potter and Laurencina Heyworth, daughter of a Liverpool merchant. Her grandfather was Radical MP, Richard Potter. From an early age she was self-taught and cited her influences as the cooperative movement and the philosopher Herbert Spencer with whom she became acquainted after an early stay with relatives in Lancashire.

In 1882, she had a relationship with Radical politician Joseph Chamberlain, by then a Cabinet minister. After this relationship failed, she took up Social Work and assisted her cousin Charles Booth who was carrying out a pioneering survey of the Victorian slums of London. Upon the death of her father, Potter inherited an endowment of £1,000 pounds a year which she used to support herself during this research. In 1890 she was introduced to Sidney Webb whose help she sought in this research and in 1891 she published The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, based on her experiences in Lancashire. Marrying Webb in 1892, the two remained together and shared political and professional activities, becoming active members of the Fabian Society. With support from the Fabians, she co-authored books and pamphlets on socialism and the co-operative movement including The History of Trade Unionism in 1894 and Industrial Democracy in 1897. In 1895, a donation from Henry Hutchinson, a solicitor from Derby, was used by the Society to found the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In 1913, she co-founded with her husband the New Statesman, a political weekly edited by Clifford Sharp with contributions from many philosophers, economists and politicians of the time including George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes.

In late 1914, the Webbs became members of the Labour Party. At this time, their leadership of the Fabian Society was facing opposition from H.G. Wells, who lampooned them in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli as ‘the Baileys’, a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators. They were also opposed from the left in the Labour Party by the Guild Socialists and the historian and economist G.D.H. Cole. During this time, Webb collaborated with her husband in his writings and policy statement such as LABOR AND THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER in 1918 and his election in 1922 to the parliamentary seat of Seaham in Durham.

In 1928 the Webb’s retired to Liphook in Hampshire, where they lived until their deaths. In 1932, Sidney and Beatrice travelled to the Soviet Union and later published in support of the Soviet economic experiment with SOVIET COMMUNISM: A NEW CIVILISATION? and The Truth About Soviet Russia. When she died in 1943, Webb’s ashes were interred in the nave of Westminster Abbey, close to those of her husband, and were to be joined subsequently by the remains of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin.

Webb has made a number of important contributions to political and economic theory of the co-operative movement. It was, for example, Webb who coined the terms “Co-operative Federalism” and “Co-operative Individualism” in her 1891 book Cooperative Movement in Great Britain. Out of these two categories, Webb identified herself as a co-operative federalist; a school of thought which advocates consumer co-operative societies. Webb argued that consumers’ co-operatives should form co-operative wholesale societies (by forming co-operatives in which all members are co-operatives, the best historical example being the English Co-operative Wholesale Society) and that these federal co-operatives should undertake purchasing farms or factories. Webb dismissed the idea of worker co-operatives where the people who did the work and benefited from it had some control over how it was done, arguing that – at the time she was writing – such ventures had proved largely unsuccessful, at least in ushering in her form of socialism led by volunteer committees of people like herself.[4] Examples of successful worker Cooperatives did of course exist then as now. In some professions they were the norm. But Webb’s final book, The Truth About The Soviet Union celebrated central planning.

Webb’s nephew, Sir Stafford Cripps, became a well-known British Labour politician in the 1930s and 1940s, serving as British ambassador to Moscow during World War II and later as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Clement Attlee. Her niece, Barbara Drake, was a prominent trade unionist and a member of the Fabian Society. Another niece, Katherine Dobbs, married the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, whose experience reporting from the Soviet Union subsequently made him highly critical of the Webbs’ optimistic portrayal of Stalin’s rule. Their books, Soviet Communism: A new civilization? (1935) and The Truth About Soviet Russia (1942) have been widely denounced for adopting an uncritical view of STALIN’s conduct during periods that witnessed a brutal process of agricultural collectivization as well as extensive purges and the creation of the gulag system.[5]

Beatrice Webb’s papers, including her diaries, are among the Passfield archive at the London School of Economics. For a small online exhibition featuring some of these papers see ‘A poor thing but our own’: the Webbs and the Labour Party. Posts about Beatrice Webb regularly appear in the LSE Archives blog, Out of the box.

[edit] BibliographyWorks by Beatrice Webb

Cooperative Movement in Great Britain (1891)
Wages of Men and Women: Should they be equal? (1919)
My Apprenticeship (1926)
Our Partnership (1948)
Works by Beatrice and Sidney Webb

History of Trade Unionism (1894)
Industrial Democracy (1897)
English Local Government Vol. I-X (1906 through 1929)
The Manor and the Borough (1908)
The Break-Up of the Poor Law (1909)
English Poor-Law Policy (1910)
The Cooperative Movement (1914)
Works Manager Today (1917)
The Consumer’s Cooperative Movement (1921)
Decay of Capitalist Civilization (1923)
Methods of Social Study (1932)
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935)
The Truth About Soviet Russia (1942)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Potter