Charlotte Carmichael Stopes

Charlotte Brown Carmichael Stopes (née Carmichael; 5 February 1840 – 6 February 1929), also known as C. C. Stopes, was a British scholar, author, and campaigner for women's rights. She also published several books relating to the life and work of William Shakespeare. Her most successful publication was British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (published 1894), a book which influenced and inspired the early twentieth century British women's suffrage movement. She married Henry Stopes, a palaeontologist, brewer and engineer. They produced two daughters, the eldest of whom was Marie Stopes, known for her advocacy of birth control.

Early life

Charlotte Stopes was born in Edinburgh on 5 February 1840 to Christine Brown Graham Carmichael and James Ferrier Carmichael, a landscape painter, who died of tuberculosis when Stopes was fourteen. She had the desire to become a writer, devising stories for her brothers and sisters when she was a child and at twenty-one publishing a collection, Alice Errol and Other Tales. On completing the only schooling a young woman could then receive, she took posts as a governess, one of the few careers available to her, throughout the 1860s and early 1870s.

University education

In 1865 Sarah Mair founded the Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society, which published a regular writing journal, The Attempt. Charlotte Carmichael had become a member by 1866 and published sundry pieces in The Attempt.