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'Even those who read widely about sex often learned very little. In the 1920s Jennie Lee won a psychology degree from the University of Edinburgh... She went beyond the syllabus to read Ellis and Freud. While her collier father could not bring himself to discuss the subject, he was progressive enough to leave a book by Marie Stopes where she was likely to find it. All the same, Jennie was still capable of chatting with a prostitute on Princes Street without realizing what was going on. Stopes on sex "was all a bit remote and unattractive", she found'.
'when Gladys [Teal] took a job at a draper's shop around 1930, a female assistant gave her a Marie Stopes book on birth control , which she gratefully read'.
'Houseservant Margaret Powell was unusually daring: she left Marie Stopes, along with the Kama Sutra and Havelock Ellis, on the bedside table for her husband. (Eventually, she was forced to conclude that the books went unread, or at least unheeded).'