Helen Brook
If, like me, you have spent the last week binge watching the new series of Sex Education on Netflix you may have caught Mrs Sand’s passing reference “Helen Brook would be disappointed”. I immediately clicked that this may be someone I should know about. I jumped onto google and discovered that Helen Brook’s work is very relevant for our time, when American states are criminalising abortion and women everywhere still lack control over their bodies and sexual rights. In 2016, Helen Brook was voted 2nd out of 7 women who have had the biggest impact of women’s life in the last 70 years on the Woman’s Hour Power List. She was second place to Margaret Thatcher, one of the most famous women in British history – so why as no one heard of Helen Brook? Hopefully we can change this, although even the online information about her is scant!
Helen Brook, CBE (1907 – 1997) was a British
family planning adviser who in 1964 founded the Brook Advisory Centres with the primary aim of
reducing the number of illegal abortions and "to inculcate a sense of
sexual responsibility in the young". She was appointed CBE in 1995.
Born Helen Grace Knewstub in Chelsea, London, in 1907, one of six children, she was educated at the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus at Mark Cross, Sussex. Aged just 17 she married George Whitaker, leader of the Chenil Chamber Orchestra, and the pair had a daughter the same year. After just two years, Helen requested that the marriage be dissolved and she moved to Paris where she spent two years as a painter. quest after two years and she then spent two years in Paris as a painter. Having returned to London, in 1937 she married banker Robin Brook in 1937, with whom she had another two daughters.
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Brook initially worked as a volunteer for the Family Planning Association, where she argued that
contraception should be readily available to women who were not married. Her
introduction of contraception services soon after the pill became a safe and
accessible alternative in England, opened up a new world for women.
As Ann Furedi wrote in The Independent,
"Brook was motivated by fervent belief that children should
be born to mothers who wanted them and could care for them. She also believed
that women should enjoy equality with men and that to achieve this they needed
to be able to avoid unwanted pregnancy.... In 1958, when Marie Stopes died, Brook was invited to
run her independent clinic in Whitfield Street in London, and with the
support of the clinic doctors and a nurse she began to run an evening session
each week for the large numbers of unmarried women turned away from other
clinics. In 1963, she began 'secret' sessions aimed specifically at young
people. When, at the end of that year, a storm of publicity broke, the Marie
Stopes board suggested it would be expedient if she founded a separate centre.
The opportunity was duly seized and the first of the Brook Advisory Centres
exclusively for young, unmarried people opened its doors in London to women and
men in 1964."
The Brook Advisory Clinic was seen as scandalous by the majority
of the general public in 1964 when it opened, but the effect it had on women’s
ability to have control over their own lives in England is near incomparable.
On 16 February 1980, Brook wrote a letter to The Times in
which she stated:
"[T]here are countless men and women, parents, who are too
selfish, too ignorant, too lazy to be bothered about their children's general
education. From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State
to take major decisions— objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is
best for the child."
John Stokes described the letter in Parliament as "notorious" and "a terrifying doctrine, the end of which one dare not see."
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Brook was vice-president of the national council of the FPA from
1987. In later life, she lost her sight, and she died as the result of a stroke
on 3 October 1997, survived by her husband.
One of the most important changes she enacted was for women to
abandon so-called backstreet abortionists, who were notoriously unsafe and
unhygienic but had previously been the only alternative for women scared of how
to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.
What followed in the years after, with more women having access
to more jobs and employment opportunities, was a direct consequence of the
power she gave back to women in the form of controlling their own lives, and
deciding when they wanted to give birth. Without her impact the radical changes
that were made may never have happened or taken much longer to come into force.
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