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Freud encouraged women to become doctors, and further shocked the medical establishment by referring to the sexual organs in modern German, rather than Latin, as was the custom. Such iconoclasm drove doctors to form picket lines outside lecture halls in Vienna where Freud spoke.

All this sounds most encouraging, but the problem with Freud is that significant tracts of his work on sex simply fail to resonate with us today. He insisted on the importance of ‘penis envy' in women; he devised the wholly discredited view that the clitoral orgasm is ‘immature', that the developing girl must direct her clitoral eroticism and her penis envy into feelings of longing for a child – and that any woman who failed to graduate from clitoral to ‘vaginal' orgasms – these during intercourse rather than masturbation – was ‘frigid'.

He viewed masturbation as something one grew out of (he advised his sons to refrain), and that led to self-loathing and frigidity. He believed
coitus interruptus
had a harmful effect on the mind: ‘It is a question of a physical accumulation of excitement – that is, an accumulation of physical tension. The accumulation is the result of discharge being prevented. Thus anxiety neurosis is a neurosis of damning up, like hysteria: hence the similarity,' he wrote.

Freud tends, therefore, to be more remembered for his methodology than his often over-egged puddings, such as this less than palatable pronouncement on a common cosmetic practice employed by some couples: ‘Pressing out the contents of the blackhead,' he wrote in
The Unconscious
(1915), ‘is clearly to him a substitution for masturbation. The cavity which then appears owing to his fault is the female genital.'

While Freud's talking cure, such nonsense notwithstanding, worked away in one way at restoring the orgasm as a force of Nature for both sexes to enjoy freely, a more practical approach was being taken by the prime movers of modern birth control in the first decades of the century, Marie Stopes (1880-1958) and Margaret Sanger (1879-1966).

Sanger (née Higgins), working initially in the tenements of New York, was the first of the two to agitate and campaign for birth control – a phrase she invented. Sanger was a working-class New York Irish midwife whose mother had eighteen children. Margaret, the sixth, became a Socialist, and, seeing the number of women dying of back-street abortions, started publicly declaring in a self-published newspaper the value of sex and orgasmic pleasure, maintaining that contraception, backed up by safe abortion, was the basis for both sexual and social happiness.

Her campaigning was partly the result of social conscience and partly of her knowledge of women's struggle to assert their right to sexual enjoyment. In a 1931 book,
My Fight for Birth Control
, she recounted the story of one of her patient's attempts to seek medical advice on contraception.

‘Yes, yes, I know, Doctor,' said the patient with trembling voice, ‘but,' and she hesitated as if it took all of her courage to say it, ‘what can I do to prevent getting that way again?'

‘Oh, ho!' laughed the doctor good-naturedly. ‘You want your cake while you eat it too, do you? Well, it can't be done. I'll tell you the only sure thing to do. Tell Jake to sleep on the roof!'

Doctors Lena Levine and Abraham Stone, working in Sanger's birth-control clinics, became aware of the mixture of sexual discontent and ignorance in their clients and began to offer practical sex counselling using a model of the female genitals. Very few of their patients knew what or where the clitoris was. After Sanger's own rather more helpful advice on sexual satisfaction and birth-control appeared in her newspaper in 1915, she was charged with publishing an ‘obscene and lewd article', and fled to Britain.

It was in London that she met Dr Marie Carmichael Stopes, daughter of a radical intellectual Edinburgh family. As a child, Marie had announced that she would spend the first twenty years of her life in science, the second twenty working on social projects, and the final twenty writing poetry – and she did precisely that. Stopes became Britain's youngest doctor of science in 1905. She took a double first in botany (specialising in fossilised plants) from University College, London, and engaged in a chaotic love life. After a string of unsuccessful love affairs, she married a Canadian geneticist, Reginald Ruggles Gates, in 1911. It was as disastrous a choice of husband as she could have made. Not only did Gates hold highly traditional views on women's role in society and the behaviour to be expected from them, and not only did he vehemently oppose his wife's membership of the feminist Women's Freedom League, he was also impotent. Marie had the marriage annulled in 1916 on grounds of non-consummation.

Margaret Sanger ignited Stopes's interest in contraception, and the firebrand young scientist decided to start a campaign for birth control in Britain. Knowing the relatively recent experiences of the Carliles (who were persecuted in the 1820s for their sexual and political radicalism) and Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (prosecuted in 1877 for re-publishing an old birth control manual), Stopes pressed on regardless, and shortly after her divorce published a concise guide to contraception,
Wise Parenthood
.

The book predictably infuriated both the Church of England and the Catholic Church, but she escaped prosecution. During the First World War she had also started work on a book which, strictly speaking, she was less qualified to write. It was called
Married Love
, and argued, amidst a doughty early-feminist manifesto, that marriage should be an equal relationship between husband and wife. She declared: ‘I believe it is my destiny, to tell [young married couples] how to make love successfully.'

Which aspect of
Married Love -
the sex or the politics -was the most offensive to wartime British sensibilities is hard to assess, but finding a publisher for the book was certainly difficult. Walter Blackie, of Blackie & Son, sent her manuscript promptly back with the message: ‘The theme does not please me. I think there is far too much talking and writing about these things already … Don't you think you should wait publication until after the war? There will be few enough men for the girls to marry; and a book like this would frighten off the few.'

Some of Stopes's writing was on the florid side ('The apex of raptures sweeps into its tides the whole essence of the man and woman, vaporises their consciousness so that it fills the whole of cosmic space'), but it was the political content that Blackie objected to: ‘Far too often,' one such passage read, ‘marriage puts an end to women's intellectual life. Marriage can never reach its full stature until women possess as much intellectual freedom and freedom of opportunity within it as do their partners.'

It was Stopes's before-their-time beliefs on sexual pleasure that made
Married Love
such a remarkable book. ‘By the majority of “nice” people woman is supposed to have no spontaneous sex impulses. By this I do not mean a sentimental “falling in love”, but a physical, a physiological state of stimulation which arises spontaneously and quite apart from any particular man. It is in truth the creative impulse, and is an expression of a high power of vitality. So widespread in our
country is the view that it is only depraved women who have such feelings (especially before marriage) that most women would rather die than own that they do at times feel a physical yearning indescribable, but as profound as hunger for food.' (Naomi Wolf has pointed out that almost seventy years later, the writer Sallie Tisdale, author of
Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex
, shocked modern America by remarking in the book that she sometimes felt a sexual desire as sharp as hunger.)

In March 1918, Stopes finally found a small publisher willing to take its chances with
Married Love
. It turned out to be an inspired gamble. The book was a global sensation, selling millions of copies by the mid-1920s. It was published in America but declared obscene and banned. Marie was the first feminist media star, revelling in every awkward turn of a flat-footed establishment's attempts to silence her. A Catholic doctor, Halliday Sutherland, called for her to be imprisoned via an article in the
Daily Express
. In fact, she was never even prosecuted, but two of her supporters, Guy and Rose Aldred, a prominent anarchist couple who published a pamphlet by Margaret Sanger, were found guilty of selling an obscene publication.

In 1921 Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control, with financial backing from her wealthy second husband, Humphrey Roe, a philanthropic Manchester manufacturer who was an enthusiast for contraception, having seen the sufferings of the female workforce from having too many children. Marie also opened the first of her birth-control clinics at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London, in a converted house between a sweet shop and a grocer's. It was designed by Marie to be homely and welcoming ‘to mothers or fathers', but still only attracted a handful of women for many months; those who came were often afraid to give their name.

The letters Marie Stopes received, 40 per cent of which were from men, provide an eloquent grassroots statement of ordinary people's sex lives in her time. One, dated 1921, read: ‘So many
Englishwomen look upon sexual intercourse as abhorrent and not as a natural fulfilment of true love. My wife considered all bodily desire to be nothing less than animal passion, and that true love between husband and wife should be purely mental and not physical … Like so many Englishwomen she considered that any show of affection was not in keeping with her dignity as a woman and that all lovemaking and caresses should come entirely from the man and that the woman should be the passive receiver of affection.' Another letter, from an elderly man, recounted how when he was a young husband in 1880 and his wife had an orgasm, he ‘was frightened and thought it was some sort of fit'.

There was just one unfortunate and hugely embarrassing area where these pioneering sexual reformers let their Victorian petticoats show. A clue to this is to be found in the full name of the Society for Constructive Birth Control. A point mysteriously missing from the website of today's Marie Stopes International Global Partnership, and very likely unknown to the readers of the
Guardian
newspaper, who in 1999 voted Stopes their Woman of the Millennium, is that the radical organisation she founded was actually called the Society for Constructive Birth Control
and Racial Progress
.

Sadly, Marie Stopes's views on class would make her an intellectual leper, a consummate hate figure, in today's world, and her attitudes to racial issues would render her liable to immediate prosecution. In 1920, for instance, she wrote: ‘Society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, inferior infants … a large proportion of these are doomed from their very physical inheritance to be at best but partly self-supporting, and thus to drain the resources of those classes above them who have a sense of responsibility. The better classes, freed from the cost of institutions, hospitals, prisons and so on, principally filled by the inferior racial stock, would be able to afford to enlarge
their own families.' Stealing a march from Scrooge, who at least conceded that the poor had the right of being fed, albeit in prison or the workhouse, Stopes advocated that ‘the sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [be] made an immediate possibility, indeed, made compulsory'.

Marie Stopes's inspiration, Margaret Sanger was no more sound on these difficult matters. Her ‘mission statement', according to one biography, was: ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit'. She opined that birth control can be ‘… nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, or preventing the birth of defectives'. Sanger's medical views were equally creaky at times. We all acknowledge today that lack of orgasm is a great sadness and frustration for billions of women, but few go quite as far as Sanger who, in her 1915 pamphlet
Family Limitation
(ten million copies sold in thirteen languages) declared that failure to give a woman an orgasm would lead to the ‘disease of her generative organs'.

Even D. H. Lawrence considered one of the early-twentieth century's standard bearers of liberated sex, carried the burden of the nineteenth-century's core anti-sex attitudes. Of masturbation, he wrote in 1929: ‘Instead of being a comparatively pure and harmless vice, masturbation is certainly the most dangerous sexual vice that a society can be afflicted with, in the long run … in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening.'

Lawrence was also, much more importantly, caught in the mantrap that most characterises the first seventy years or so of twenteenth-century progressive thinking on sex. This is the idealistic, but wrong-headed and naïve, notion that the only form of orgasm that ‘counts' is when man and woman climax simultaneously, and do so exclusively by the mechanism of penetrative sexual intercourse.

Lawrence, like so many other sexual liberators, had his heart in the right place. In
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, written in the mid-1920s, one character, a parson, says to Clifford Chatterley, ‘My good man, you don't suppose for one moment that women have animal passions like ours?' It was clear that Lawrence did not accord in the least with this view. Here is a typical account from the book of a glorious, if slightly implausible, mutual orgasm:

… she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries … He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie's hand in silence. She turned and looked at him. ‘We came off together that time,' he said. She did not answer. ‘It's good when it's like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it,' he said, speaking rather dreamily. ‘Don't people often come off together?' she asked with naive curiosity. ‘A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.'