VIRTUAL LAUNCH | Friend Beloved: Marie Stopes, Gordon Hewitt, and An Ecology of Letters Book launch - Laura Jean Cameron

Event streaming link

To celebrate the launch of Friend Beloved: Marie Stopes, Gordon Hewitt, and an Ecology of Letters, the Redpath Museum presents a conversation between author/editor Laura Jean Cameron and Redpath Museum's Ingrid Birker, with dramatic readings by Andrew Cameron.

Come listen to a reading of some of these letters by Player’s Theatre and Soulpepper Theatre alumnus, Andrew Cameron. Learn too about how the Redpath Museum’s fossil collection assisted in unearthing this intercontinental social history of field science.

This event will be streamed live on McGill’s Youtube channel with the support of McGill Multimedia Services.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Friend Beloved 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.

Ecology was a new science that connected Stopes and Hewitt, the word coming from oikos, the Greek term for "home." Reproducing a small but significant cache of letters written before the First World War, the book unearths their respective versions of home and shows how these mattered in both domestic affairs and scientific passions. Their co-authored 1909 scientific article, which Hewitt called "the one little sin," is reprinted as an appendix, along with a chapter of Stopes's unpublished novel A Man's Mate, entitled "Friends." Laura Jean Cameron provides a lively, thought-provoking introduction. Her epilogue considers why Stopes and Hewitt's friendship was largely forgotten and how its recollection reveals early ecology's revolutionary promise but also its colonial and eugenic entanglements.