Stella Browne (9 May 1880 – 8 May 1955) was a Canadian-born British feminist, socialist, sex radical, and birth control campaigner. She was one of the primary women in the fight for women's right to control and make decisions regarding their sexual choices. Active mainly in Britain, her principal focus was on sexual law reform, including the right for women to both access knowledge on and use birth control, as well as the right to abortion. She was also involved in labour parties, communist parties, as well as a number of women's societies.
Stella Browne was one of the first women to speak out in somewhat offensive ways about her beliefs with a "Forward, Charge!" approach. She did this through attacks in her articles and letters that kept her in the public's eye and added to the debates around many controversial topics surrounding women's rights. She is famous for her lectures and her work with the Abortion Law Reform Association. As a women's rights activist, Browne was able to keep questions of women's rights to their body and sexuality in the public eye long enough to get other people interested enough to keep the cause going even after her death.
Early life Stella Browne (birth name Frances Worsley Stella Browne) was born on 9 May 1880 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was the daughter of Daniel Marshall Browne and his second wife Anna Dulcibella Mary (née Dodwell), who went by the name Dulcie. Daniel Browne worked for the Canadian Department of Marine and Fisheries, after resigning from his post as Navigating Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Before marrying Stella's mother, Dulcie, the eldest daughter of clergyman Reverend George Branson Dodwell, M.A., and his wife Isabella Naysmith, he was married to Catherine Magdalene MacLean in 1867. In 1869, Catharine gave birth to Daniel's first daughter Maud, and shortly after died at the age of 35 from "chronic gastritis.
Daniel and Dulcie were married on 23 February 1878, and Stella was born in 1880, followed in 1882 by her younger sister Alice Lemira Sylvia Browne, known as Sylvia. When Stella was three years old, Daniel, now Superintendent of Lighthouses, was aboard the Dominion steamship Princess Louise, and drowned. Though the family was in shock after his death, they were supported in part by money and property from his will, contingent on Dulcie remaining unmarried. Dulcie remained unmarried, sold the home and began a boarding house for single women. This boarding house meant that Stella was brought up in an environment surrounded by the struggles of single women throughout her childhood, and watched the struggle of her own mother, now a single working-woman.
Little else is known about Stella's childhood as she rarely referred to it in her later writings. She was known to have considered herself British, as opposed to Canadian – detaching herself from her roots, her family having left Halifax in 1892 when Stella was twelve.
Stella Browne was first educated in (Germany), as her mother's sister, Louisa Frances Siemens, had married an electrical-engineer with an extensive kinship network, enabling her to attend school there. While in school she became fluent in both French and German by 1899. This allowed her to write the "Women's First" to gain entrance at Oxford. She would be recognised for her refined and correct translations of German in her later life. In 1897, Browne entered the St. Felix School for Girls in Southwold, Suffolk. This school had very relaxed rules and encouraged its students to discover new things on their own. This promoted independence and leadership, as even their schoolhouses were named after women of achievement in history. While she was at school here she won a History Exhibition at Somerville College, Oxford in 1899, that afforded her £20 a year for the three years, which was given to her guardian as her mother was still living in Germany at this time. Browne then attended Somerville, where she graduated with a second-class Honours degree in Modern History in 1902. This school was especially important in her career as it was one of the only schools at the time that allowed women to write exams alongside men and had them working towards an Honours rather than a mere Pass Degree as many would. This had an influence on Browne's expectations and ideals on gender equality as it was given to her in part while she was at school here. Her political activism was also fostered at this school through her involvement with Student's Parliament.
Upon completion of her education, Browne first worked as a teacher in hopes of achieving some independence for herself. Her health however, began to decline due to a heart condition that she had, and she was no longer able to handle the strain of the job, developing additional anxiety problems. She then moved back to Germany where she discovered the budding German woman's movement, which Helene Stöcker was heading in a fairly radical manner. Stöcker was fighting at this time for women's rights of motherhood and support for the unmarried mother. Stöcker's arguments strongly affected Browne as she, later in life, would fight for women's rights to control their bodies and for the choice to become mother. Browne then began work for the Victoria County History, writing up parish histories, and learning researching skills that she would use in her later career. She left this job in 1907, moving into the position of Librarian at Morley College in South London. Here she was able to take in various controversial lectures, with topics ranging from marriage and divorce reform to eugenics. Working at the college also allowed Browne to see the different social problems faced by both working class and professional class women. Browne met her first male lover here, known as her "demi-semi-lover" and never noted by name, only by his sexual prowess. She also joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1908, which marked the beginning of her social activism.
Ideals
Browne began to develop her belief system while at the college, experimenting with her lover and taking in the lectures of Morley College from her post there. She wrote a letter to H. G. Wells, arguing that not only men could be polygynous, women could too and these women were "not the least attractive and intelligent, believing extramarital sex was not to be something blackening a woman's reputation.
Many of Browne's beliefs stemmed from her following of the work of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter and other sexologists. She combined it with her own feminist tradition forming a perspective unique from Ellis and Carpenter, on these concepts of sexuality. In 1912, she wrote in to The Freewoman under the pseudonym "A New Subscriber", arguing with Kathlyn Oliver's article that frigidity in single women was key to good health, and should be a standard for all women. Browne's response to Oliver argued that women should not be denied sexual pleasure simply because they are not married and do not wish to be married in fear to the cruelty that sometimes accompanies this union. Oliver responded to this saying that "A New Subscriber" must be "of the male persuasion" and that women are "above and beyond men" in "sex matters". Browne's response to this accusation was that she did not like how Oliver normalised sexuality, believing that there was "more in human nature than most people will admit" and that to enforce complete abstinence on anyone despite circumstance was unfair and "stupid". This was the beginning of Browne's advocacy that women should have control over their own sexual behaviour, and not be judged by society for these activities.
Browne was a strong believer that women should have the right "equally with men, to sexual experience and sexual variety outside conventional marriage" which she addressed in her most famous paper "Sexual Variety and Variability Among Women" of 1915. She believed that women should not be confined to marriage to experience and develop the maternal instinct, while at the same time encouraged women to refuse motherhood if they wished to. Many of the other feminists looking into eugenics at this time, such as Mary Scharlieb and Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, believed strongly that reform could be accomplished within the companionship of marriage. More radical members such as Browne believed that the "cult of motherhood ... would, if unchecked, diminish the importance of women as individuals and bind them more closely with conventional forms of marriage ... [reinforcing] their subordination. Browne's advocacy of these rights for women, along with her goal of assistance for single mothers, one could argue stemmed from her living in a home with a single-mother for most of her childhood.
Browne strongly believed working women should have the choice to become pregnant, or terminate their pregnancy while they worked in the horrible circumstances surrounding a pregnant woman who was still required to do hard labour during her pregnancy. In this case she argued that doctors should give free information about birth control to women that wanted to know about it. This would give women agency over their own circumstances and allow them to decide whether they wanted to be mothers or not. It also would give women the opportunity to, as Browne advocated, engage in sex solely for pleasure and outside of marriage if they chose. Browne would remain loyal to this perspective throughout her life.
Activism By 1911, Browne identified herself as being "a Socialist and 'extreme' Left-Wing feminist. She worked most notably as a campaigner for women's rights to birth control and abortion and was most interested in rights and control over women's sexuality and body. Over this time period she wrote for a number of papers including The Call, The Malthusian, The New Generation (a new instalment of The Malthusian), The Freewoman, and Beauty and Health, as well as some of her own independent publications. She also wrote a number of reviews, and translations of popular works on the reforms mentioned above as well, which she was often commended for.
She began her activism in 1907 when she joined the WSPU for a short time. The WSPU was founded on 10 October 1903 and had nothing to differentiate it from other women-only groups of the time, not even having reached 30 members by 1905. However, its notoriety developed when in 1905 they first used militant methods as part of its campaign for the vote, where both leaders of this rebellion, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, were arrested, bringing the Manchester Independent Labour Party (ILP) to assist them. The ILP's assistance brought them to the forefront of media coverage and the WSPU and their militancy swept the country. This radical form of feminism continued until 1913 and that had women committing to hunger strikes and being fed forcedly, and the imprisonment of almost a thousand suffragettes no longer made headlines it was so widespread. Browne left in 1913 however, opposing Christabel Pankhurst's "ignorant and presumptuous dogmatism" and the way that the group's leadership behaved towards women and men of lower class seemed to counter their arguments for feminism and democracy. After this she spent much of her time working with the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, attending meetings and writing papers on their behalf, in hopes of discovering more for her future battles on birth control.