Stella Browne

Stella Browne (9 May 1880 – 8 May 1955) was a Canadian-born British feminist, socialist, sex radical, and birth control campaigner. She was one of the primary women in the fight for women’s right to control and make decisions regarding their sexual choices. Active mainly in Britain, her principal focus was on sexual law reform, including the right for women to both access knowledge on and use birth control, as well as the right to abortion. She was also involved in labour parties, communist parties, as well as a number of women’s societies.

Stella Browne was one of the first women to speak out in somewhat offensive ways about her beliefs with a “Forward, Charge!” approach. She did this through attacks in her articles and letters that kept her in the public’s eye and added to the debates around many controversial topics surrounding women’s rights. She is famous for her lectures and her work with the Abortion Law Reform Association. As a women’s rights activist, Browne was able to keep questions of women’s rights to their body and sexuality in the public eye long enough to get other people interested enough to keep the cause going even after her death.

Stella Browne (birth name Frances Worsley Stella Browne) was born on 9 May 1880 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was the daughter of Daniel Marshall Browne and his second wife Anna Dulcibella Mary (née Dodwell), who went by the name Dulcie. Daniel Browne worked for the Canadian Department of Marine and Fisheries, after resigning from his post as Navigating Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Before marrying Stella’s mother, Dulcie, the eldest daughter of clergyman Reverend George Branson Dodwell, M.A., and his wife Isabella Naysmith, he was married to Catherine Magdalene MacLean in 1867. In 1869, Catharine gave birth to Daniel’s first daughter Maud, and shortly after died at the age of 35 from “chronic gastritis.”

Daniel and Dulcie were married on 23 February 1878, and Stella was born in 1880, followed in 1882 by her younger sister Alice Lemira Sylvia Browne, known as Sylvia. When Stella was three years old, Daniel, now Superintendent of Lighthouses, was aboard the Dominion steamship Princess Louise, and drowned. Though the family was in shock after his death, they were supported in part by money and property from his will, contingent on Dulcie remaining unmarried. Dulcie remained unmarried, sold the home and began a boarding house for single women. This boarding house meant that Stella was brought up in an environment surrounded by the struggles of single women throughout her childhood, and watched the struggle of her own mother, now a single working-woman.

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