The Life and Times of Stella Browne: Feminist and Free Spirit

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Stella Browne’s life was an experiment in new possibilities. Passionately committed to socialism, feminism and the rights of the indvidual, she promoted a radical vision of the sexual reform of society. Drawing on Stella Browne's writings and the archives, Lesley Hall has done full justice to this vanguard woman, setting her into the context of her progressive times and friends and associates, including Edward Carpenter, Rebecca West, Havelock Ellis, Dora Russell and Winifred Holtby. Hall relates how Stella Browne overturned many assumptions about women in the early twentieth century. How at a time when even birth control was barely mentionable, she publicly argued for women’s access to safe abortion, revealed to a government committee that she herself had undergone this then illegal operation, and co-founded the Abortion Law Reform Association. She was a militant suffragette, campaigned for pacifism during the Great War, joined the new British Communist Party then left over its indifference to birth control. She was a dedicated internationalist, perhaps the first British women to speak publicly on lesbianism, and practised what she preached, living the free love she advocated.