Lesley Hall’s long-awaited biography of Stella Browne has appeared, and it does not disappoint. During the first half of the twentieth century, Browne was a leading advocate of progressive causes such as women’s suffrage, pacifism, divorce law reform, and women’s reproductive freedom. Her contributions to feminism and socialism are less well known than those of her contemporaries and friends Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger, Edward Carpenter, Marie Stopes, and Dora Russell, although Hall’s book goes a long way toward reviving Browne’s reputation as an intellectual and political organizer. Since Stella Browne left no archives or personal papers, Hall has had to painstakingly reconstruct Browne’s life and thought through her published work and extensive correspondence. This has proved no easy task, as these materials are in numerous libraries and archives scattered around the globe. In many ways, the book is a model for constructing a life for which only fragmentary materials have survived.

Stella Browne was born in Canada in 1880 to a middle-class British family employed in colonial service. After her father’s death, she spent time with relatives in Germany, where she developed language skills that would serve her well in her future work. In 1899 she won a scholarship to Sommerville College, Oxford, where she earned a certificate in modern history. Employed variously and intermittently as a teacher, librarian, researcher, translator, and civil servant, Browne often struggled to make ends meet. Comments by Browne’s contemporaries regarding her shabby appearance and dowdy clothes tell us as much about her financial hardships as they do about a bohemian disregard for fashion. Much of Browne’s work as a writer, reviewer, and agitator was unpaid, which sometimes led her to feel exploited and unappreciated by her more well-heeled colleagues and led to a dramatic falling-out with Margaret Sanger in 1923.

A frequent contributor to progressive journals like the Freewoman, the New Age, and the New Generation, Browne vigorously and consistently defended women’s rights to sexual autonomy and reproductive freedom, including the right to refuse motherhood. As she wrote in 1912, “our wills are ours, our persons are ours: nor shall all the priests and scientists in the world deprive us of the right to say ‘no’” (34). Browne was attracted to eugenics as a science that could detach reproduction from patriarchal marriage, but she roundly condemned the racist and imperialist varieties of eugenics as well as the conservative eugenic “view of women as automatic childbearing machines” (39).

Stella Browne was an early and active member of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. In 1917, under the Society’s auspices, Browne published her pathbreaking pamphlet, The Sexual Variety and Variability of Women. She argued against the conventional view that a woman’s sex drive was inevitably less than a man’s or that it was necessarily satisfied by monogamous marriage and motherhood. Indeed, Browne was almost unique among early twentieth-century British feminists in denying a universal maternal instinct and in advocating reproductive choice for all women as a means to a pleasurable sex life. She was also among the first people to write and speak about lesbianism in a totally nonjudgmental way. Lesley Hall frequently speculates that Browne’s writings on sex might have reflected her own sexual experiences, although the evidence for this is inconclusive.

A member of the British Communist Party, Browne condemned Fascism for exalting women’s “maternity at the expense of their full humanity” (202). She later left the Communist Party because of its lack of commitment to women’s reproductive freedom. Writing to the Communist in 1922, she insisted that “birth control for women is no less essential than workshop control and determination of the conditions of labour for men” (102). Browne’s “deep-rooted belief in the virtues of difference and diversity” (87) probably made her ill-suited to any political movement that demanded doctrinal purity. Hall puts it aptly: “she did not respond well to authoritarian demands” (111).

Stella Browne’s most important legacy is probably as an advocate of a woman’s right to safe and legal abortion on the grounds of bodily autonomy. A founding member of the Abortion Law Reform Association, she also insisted that women should have access to abortion without submitting to “insolent inquisition” or “tangles of red tape” (208). In the aftermath of the First World War, Browne’s positions were quite radical and the cause of some embarrassment to her colleagues in the birth control movement. Through persistent argument and agitation, Browne played a vital role in making abortion an acceptable topic for public debate. When the British government decided to investigate abortion law in 1937, she was an obvious choice to call as a witness. In her appearance before the Interdepartmental Committee on Abortion, Browne bravely testified that she herself had had an abortion and that if the procedure were as dangerous as its opponents argued, she “should not now be here before you” (228).

Stella Browne’s career is testament to an enduring British feminism in the decades after 1918, when the movement is often held to be in decline. She is also an extraordinary radical voice among first-wave feminists, many of whom sought empowerment through traditional ideals of feminine virtue and motherhood. While most of Browne’s contemporaries hoped to justify birth control through recourse to eugenics or a rhetoric of innate maternalism, she boldly asserted a woman’s right to sexual fulfillment. Thanks to Lesley Hall’s persistent mining of the archives, Browne’s unique contributions to the women’s movement will finally get the attention they so richly deserve.