Marie Stopes’s wonderful rhythm charts: Normalizing the natural

Abstract

Historians of sexuality credit marital advice with disseminating a modern discourse of the sexual, as developed by sexologists who understood sex as normal or abnormal. Marie Stopes did not reproduce their findings but drew on the methods of biometricians in attempting to normalize the natural. Thinking about Stopes’s methods in discerning a naturally occurring curve of normal female sex-impulses in relation to Havelock Ellis points to constraints in his production of the normal. The article traces the impact of Stopes’s attempt to measure desire by analyzing letters from her readers who became partners in the great scientific project of normalization.