Desiring Connection – Friendship, Ecology and the Intimacy of Letters: Laura Jean Cameron Blog Post

“Friend beloved, this is my last letter in England. I will say simply ‘good night’—and pass out into the West.”  9^th September 1909, Friend Beloved

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disruptive impact on the ways in which we communicate and connect with others, creating an unprecedented need for distanced correspondence. From emails, to Zoom meetings, to conventional letter writing, various alternative and socially distant means of communication have replaced our usual face-to-face interactions. In this week’s blog post, Laura Jean Cameron looks back at the intercontinental correspondences of Marie Carmichael Stopes and Charles Gordon Hewitt, two young scientists exploring the nature of friendship, love, insects, and life on Earth. In doing so, she reveals the similarities between our current socially-distant world and that of Stopes and Hewitt, as well as the intricacies of our connections to nature, science, and each other.

Laura Jean Cameron’s new book, Friend Beloved: Marie Stopes, Gordon Hewitt, and an Ecology of Letters, invites readers to enter the imaginative worlds of two ambitious young scientists: Marie Carmichael Stopes, the paleobotanist who found international fame as a birth control advocate and feminist icon, and Charles Gordon Hewitt, the housefly expert who became one of Canada’s trailblazers of nature conservation before he died in the Spanish flu pandemic. Weaving accounts not only of the professional worlds the correspondents traversed in Britain, Japan, and Canada, but also of intensely personal relationships involved in the changing nature of their field, Friend Beloved connects careers and emotional trajectories at a key moment in the women’s suffrage movement and the making of modern science.

Marie Carmichael Stopes, c.1909

Gordon Hewitt’s farewell to Marie Stopes marked in ink and melodrama the cardinal voyage of his young life. Just twenty-four, he was about to cross the Atlantic from England to take up his appointment in Ottawa as Canada’s Dominion Entomologist. Over the next few years, the job description would expand to involve settler colonial ‘care’ for all of the wildlife in the vast country.

In this time of global pandemic, close connections to loved ones may be difficult at best and, at worst, impossible. The practice of correspondence, which has regained some popularity of late, points to a time when affection and love traveled in material form. To hours spent pouring out hearts onto sheets of paper and to the ensuing days and weeks awaiting replies. Often letters accompanied objects in their journeys: photographs, cufflinks, ants preserved in saké, fossilized mosquitoes….

For Hewitt, even over an ocean of distance, it wasn’t really goodbye. In the next few months, Hewitt would consider a legally binding relationship with his fellow scientist, collaborator and friend, a feminist rapidly gaining renown as one of the most extraordinary figures of the new century.

Charles Gordon Hewitt, c.1909

Marie Stopes is perhaps most widely remembered as the pioneering British campaigner for birth control. In 1918, four years after the apparent end of her correspondence with Hewitt, she published Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties. Banned for two decades in the United States, her book became a bestseller anyhow, containing advice derived from citizen science and self-observation. It scandalously linked fulfillment to fertility control and marital happiness to women’s sexual pleasure—best aroused, Dr. Stopes advised, in garden, wood and mountain air.

Stopes believed a friendship of equality between men and women was not only possible but an evolutionary imperative. She was a feminist but also a paleobotanist. Ecology, the study of life as it exists in its home, was a new science that connected the two friends, the term itself coming from oikos, “the Greek word for home,” as Stopes explained in a 1912 textbook.

Although some of the letters between Stopes and Hewitt are charged with longing and desire, all are enmeshed more broadly in the stakes of earthly life and death. They give us a glimpse of their ideals in respect to oikos and how the practices and possibilities of friendship were being created, risked, advanced and transformed as individual women as well as men took up roles in the service of nature, as they each conceived it.

Marie Stopes with microscope, Manchester University, c.1906.

In The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, Hewitt warned of species extinction and called for Canadians to accept their obligation to preserve wild life “not of this hemisphere alone but of the whole world.” Like Stopes’s Married Love, Hewitt’s public address was in the service of a greater joy. Nature protection insured national happiness.

Title page of Married Love by Marie Carmichael Stopes.

But happiness for whom, exactly? Nature for whom? Hewitt’s oikos imagination here elided Stopes’s fieldwork practise: the wild made men specifically: manly men, sportsmen, fighting men. At a time when it was becoming clear that human activity was having a significant impact on the Earth, Hewitt, along with Stopes, offered up intensive management strategies for Life, writ large and small, both public and personal. Some of these were entangled with disturbing currents directly associated with other close friends. These included Duncan Campbell Scott, a powerful civil servant linked to Indian residential schools and genocidal policies, and Helen MacMurchy, a doctor besotted with Stopes—and one of Canada’s most prominent eugenicists.

Hewitt’s book was published posthumously in 1921, exactly a century ago and a year after the author’s own life had ended. He was thirty-five when he died in the influenza pandemic that killed millions in the wake of the Great War.

Title page of The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada by C. Gordon Hewitt.

In our current pandemic, nature connection, through activities like birdwatching and forest bathing, has become a recommended antidote to overwhelming anxiety and Zoom-induced fatigue. Since its beginning, there has even been a sense that the crisis offers us an uncommon opportunity to heal and deepen our relationship with(in) nature.

What might that connection look like?

Through letters that preceded the publication of two impactful books, Friend Beloved explores early ecology’s promise for equality and revolutionary change. But it also unearths its darker possibilities and connections. The turbulent friendship it recalls highlights the vital roles of correspondence: both for developing equitable and collaborative relationships to support life’s flourishing, and for opening dialogues committed to addressing the injustice in our living histories.

Laura Jean Cameron is professor of historical geography at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and the editor of Friend Beloved: Marie Stopes, Gordon Hewitt, and an Ecology of Letters.