[6] Daniel Browne worked for the Canadian Department of Marine and Fisheries, after resigning from his post as Navigating Lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
[8] Stella Browne was first educated in (Germany), as her mother's sister, Louisa Frances Siemens, had married an electrical-engineer with an extensive kinship network, enabling her to attend school there.
[5] Her health however, began to decline due to a heart condition that she had, and she was no longer able to handle the strain of the job, developing additional anxiety problems.
[5] She then moved back to Germany where she discovered the budding German woman's movement, which Helene Stöcker was heading in a fairly radical manner.
[10] Stöcker's arguments strongly affected Browne as she, later in life, would fight for women's rights to control their bodies and for the choice to become mother.
[16] Browne's response to this accusation was that she did not like how Oliver normalised sexuality, believing that there was "more in human nature than most people will admit" and that to enforce complete abstinence on anyone despite circumstance was unfair and "stupid".
[19] Many of the other feminists looking into eugenics at this time, such as Mary Scharlieb and Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, believed strongly that reform could be accomplished within the companionship of marriage.
More radical members such as Browne believed that the "cult of motherhood … would, if unchecked, diminish the importance of women as individuals and bind them more closely with conventional forms of marriage … [reinforcing] their subordination.
[20] Browne's advocacy of these rights for women, along with her goal of assistance for single mothers, one could argue stemmed from her living in a home with a single-mother for most of her childhood.
[28] However, its notoriety developed when in 1905 they first used militant methods as part of its campaign for the vote, where both leaders of this rebellion, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, were arrested, bringing the Manchester Independent Labour Party (ILP) to assist them.
[28] This radical form of feminism continued until 1913 and that had women committing to hunger strikes and being fed forcedly, and the imprisonment of almost a thousand suffragettes no longer made headlines it was so widespread.
[28] Browne left in 1913 however, opposing Christabel Pankhurst's "ignorant and presumptuous dogmatism" and the way that the group's leadership behaved towards women and men of lower class seemed to counter their arguments for feminism and democracy.
[29] After this she spent much of her time working with the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, attending meetings and writing papers on their behalf,[30] in hopes of discovering more for her future battles on birth control.
[35] In the years leading up to the presentation of this paper, Browne worked to gather information on maternal mortality, and found that rates were higher than ever before in 1929, and became the secretary of the Chelsea Labour Party in hopes of bringing ideas of birth control and abortion to light in political platform in 1926.
[clarification needed] By the end of the 1920s, Browne had felt that the fight for birth control had become more successful, as it was more frequently seen in the public sphere and was now being talked about and debated more openly.
[38] In July 1930, the Ministry of Health issued MCW/153, which allowed local authorities to give birth control advice in welfare centres, another partial success for Browne.
[39] She again began touring, giving lectures on abortion and the negative consequences that followed if women were unable to terminate pregnancies of their own choosing such as: suicide, injury, permanent invalidism, madness and blood-poisoning.
[40] On 17 February 1936, Browne along with Janet Chance and Alice Jenkins began the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), continuing to support it until their deaths years later.
[41] The ALRA, as ran by these three women, was very active between 1936 and 1939 sending speakers around the country to talk about Labour and Equal Citizenship and attempted, though most often unsuccessfully, to have letters and articles published in newspapers.
[34] Though Jones seems to consider Browne's social standing to have been mediocre, she does give her considerable credit for her radicalism, and passion, as do each of the other historians.
[41] This image of a woman resolute in defence of her beliefs is supported by Hall's biography of Browne, which consistently portrays her as someone who when knocked down, returned to her work with "unabated, even increased vigor.
[26] She notes that to do this feminists were required to, before World War One, to make these attacks on the vast majority of their colleagues, particularly "spinsters amidst the ranks".
Browne was a hardworking woman who believed in her work so much so that she was even considered to have a "personal intransigence [that] meant she was as often at odds with her allies as with this her enemies.
[52] She also left behind the ALRA upon her death,[53] which gained a flood of new members as women began to recognise the insufficiency of the current contraceptives, and the scandal that came with the effects of thalidomide.
Browne then, had a profound effect on the abortion reform, as Hindell notes in his article, "if ALRA had not worked steadily for many years in a hostile climate, and campaigned intensively…reform would not have come as early, or as radically as it did.