Controversial: The Royal Mail has included Marie Stopes, who was accused of racism, in a set of stamps marking women's achievement

Royal Mail has prompted criticism by including family planning pioneer Marie Stopes in a set of stamps marking women's achievements.

The feminist is best remembered for opening the first birth control clinic in Britain in 1921.

But she is also a controversial figure who was accused of being racist and anti-Semitic.

She advocated eugenics - 'perfection of the race' through selective breeding - and disapproved of her own son's choice of wife because she was short-sighted and wore glasses.

She also sent a loving letter and book of her poems to Adolf Hitler.

From next month her face will appear on the 50p stamp in a commemorative set which additionally features suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett and politician Barbara Castle.

One commentator condemned the Royal Mail for honouring Stopes and others vowed to return their mail if it bears her portrait.

Chaplain to the Stock Exchange Peter Mullen, who is Rector of St Michael's in the City of London, branded Stopes a 'Nazi sympathiser'.

He said: 'She campaigned to have the poor, the sick and people of mixed race sterilised.

The offending stamp will be available to buy from next month

'Stopes extended her vile doctrines even to her own family. She cut her son Harry out of her will after he married a near- sighted woman - actually the daughter of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb deployed by the Dambusters.

'She planned to adopt a child herself-but stipulated that "the boy must be completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised".

'The managers of the Royal Mail deserve to be condemned for their honouring Marie Stopes.'

Father Ray Blake, pastor of St. Mary Magdalen parish in Brighton, said on his internet blog: 'Any items of post arriving here with this stamp on it will be returned to the sender. I hope other bloggers take this up, especially amongst the Jewish community.'

Anthony Ozimic of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said: 'Praising Marie Stopes as a woman of distinction should be as unacceptable as praising Adolf Hitler as a great leader.

Both promoted compulsory sterilisation and thereby the eventual elimination of society's most vulnerable members to achieve what they called racial progress.'

A Royal Mail spokesman said a group of female academics and historians had compiled the names to be included on the stamps.

'They were asked for their views of the women they believed had a big impact on other womens' lives over the past 100 years,' he said.

So was she a Nazi or just a megalomaniac?

By Neil Sears

When Marie Stopes sent a volume of her love poems to Adolf Hitler, accusations she was a Nazi sympathiser became inevitable.

She accompanied the copy of Love Songs For Young Lovers with a note: 'Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?'

Added to that damning evidence is not only her attendance at a Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935, but also her repeated calls for compulsory sterilisation of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character. Such harsh action

was essential for 'racial progress', she argued - and it was no coincidence that her birth control clinics clustered in poor areas, as she wanted the birth rate of the lower classes to be reduced.

Even when she publicly attacked the Nazis, it was for unusual reasons. Hitler's encouragement of a large birth rate was too indiscriminate, she felt, and she was worried war would eliminate the cream of the male population.

Finally, she left the bulk of her estate to the Eugenics Society, the body that campaigned for 'racial purity' and endorsed compulsory sterilisation. But attitudes such as Stopes's were widespread in her day.

Eugenics, meaning 'well born', was considered respectable science.

Six members of Charles Darwin's family were members of the Eugenics Society.

The writers H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw and philosopher Bertrand Russell were all eugenicists.

Wells publicly said 'swarms of blacks and brown and dirty-white and yellow people will have to go'.

Winston Churchill urged compulsory sterilisation for 'the feeble-minded and insane classes', and founding father of British socialism Sidney Webb deplored the high birth rate among Jews. And we should not forget that compulsory sterilisation remained in regular use in liberal Sweden until the 1970s. More than 62,000 Swedes were sterilised - including girls with 'gipsy characteristics'.

As recently as 1999, Stopes' only son, Dr Harry Stopes-Roe, defended his mother, although she tried to stop him marrying because his bride had poor eyesight.

Eugenics was uncontroversial in its time, he argued, adding that his mother sent Hitler her book only because she believed she could single-handedly stop the war.

'It is a perversion to suggest she admired him,' said Dr Stopes-Roe. 'She was anti-Nazi. Sending the poems was an example of her megalomania.'