Anger as stamp honours 'racist' Marie Stopes
A new stamp has prompted criticism by including family planning pioneer Marie Stopes in a set of stamps marking women's achievements.
The feminist is best remembered for opening the first birth control clinic in Britain in 1921.
But she is also a controversial figure who was accused of being racist and anti-Semitic.
She advocated eugenics - 'perfection of the race' through selective breeding - and disapproved of her own son's choice of wife because she was short-sighted and wore glasses.
She also sent a loving letter and book of her poems to Adolf Hitler.
From next month her face will appear on the 50p stamp in a commemorative set which additionally features suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett and politician Barbara Castle.
One commentator condemned the Royal Mail for honouring Stopes and others vowed to return their mail if it bears her portrait. Chaplain to the Stock Exchange Peter Mullen, who is Rector of St. Michael's in the City of London, branded Stopes a 'Nazi sympathiser'.
He said: 'She campaigned to have the poor, the sick and people of mixed race sterilised.
'Stopes extended her vile doctrines even to her own family. She cut her son Harry out of her will after he married a near-sighted woman - actually the daughter of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb deployed by the Dambusters.
'She planned to adopt a child herself but stipulated that "the boy must be completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised".
'The managers of the Royal Mail deserve to be condemned for their honouring Marie Stopes.' Father Ray Blake, pastor of St. Mary Magdalen parish in Brighton, said on his internet blog: 'Any items of post arriving here with this stamp on it will be returned to the sender.
I hope other bloggers take this up, especially amongst the Jewish community.' Anthony Ozimic of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said: 'Praising Marie Stopes as a woman of distinction should be as unacceptable as praising Adolf Hitler as a great leader.
Both promoted compulsory sterilisation and thereby the eventual elimination of society's most vulnerable members to achieve what they called racial progress.' A Royal Mail
spokesman said a group of female academics and historians had compiled the names to be included on the stamps.
'They were asked for their views of the women they believed had a big impact on other womens' lives over the past 100 years,' he said.
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I for one, think that her achievements on the part of other women far outway her freaky foibles!!
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