Marie Carmichael Stopes was born in Scotland in 1880. She studied Botany and Geology at the University of London. Then, in 1902, she graduated with a first class B.SC. After that, She went to Munich where she studied Palaeobotany.
Then she got a D.SC degree, becoming the youngest person in Britain to do so. On top of that she became a lecturer in Palaeobotany and the first female academic at Manchester University. While she was in Manchester, she studied Coal and the Seed Ferns and proved the theory of Eduard Suess about the existence of Gondwanaland or Pangaea.

Some years later, she met Robert Falcon Scott (Scott the Antarctic), and they talked about the possibility of her joining his next expedition. Although she failed to do so, he promised her to bring back samples of fossils to prove the theory of the existence of Gondwanaland.

In 1921, Stopes opened the UK’s first family planning clinic which was called “Mother’s clinic”. It tried to break down taboos about sex and also to increase knowledge, and pleasure and to improve reproductive health. At first, it was established in North London but, in 1925, it moved to Central London. The National Birth Control Council started in 1930.

A Few years later, Stopes participated in the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, where she was accused of being anti-Semitic by other pioneers of the Birth Control Council such as Havelock Ellis. Finally, years later she died of breast cancer in Dorking .