Dora Russell

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Dora Black (3 April 1894 - 31 May 1986), was an author, a feminist and progressive campaigner, and the second wife of the eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Black was born into an English middle class family, the second of four children. Her father, Sir Frederick Black, worked his way up in the Civil Service and laid great store by his children's education, regardless of their sex. She went to a private co-educational primary school near her parents' place, won a junior scholarship to Sutton High School. In 1911 she spent nearly a year at a private boarding school for girls in Germany, in preparation for the 'Little Go' at Cambridge. There she won a modern languages scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge. Soon she joined the Heretics Society, co-founded by C. K. Ogden in 1909. It questioned traditional authorities in general and religious dogmas in particular. The society helped her to discard traditional values and develop her own feminist mode of thought. In June 1915 she received a First Class Honours degree in modern languages at Girton with a special distinction in Orals.

By autumn of that year she had moved to London and begun postgraduate studies in eighteenth century French thought at University College London. She first met Bertrand Russell in 1916 when joining him on a weekend walking tour. However, the pair did not embark on a relationship before 1919, when Russell invited her to join him during his summer holidays. Before that, Black had supported Russell in his campaign against military conscription in World War I.

Black and Russell visited Russia in 1920, soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Russell was unimpressed by Lenin, but Black, like many English socialists at the time, saw a vision of a future ideal civilisation. The pair also visited China.

Upon their return to England, Black married Russell. They soon had their first child, John Russell (1921).

She at first rejected Russell's offer of marriage. She - and many of her generation - had realised the extent to which the laws regulating marriage contributed to women's subjugation. In her view, only parents should be bound by a social contract, and only insofar as their cooperation was required for raising their children. Implicit was her conviction that both men and women were polygamous by nature and should therefore be free, whether married or not, to engage in sexual relationships that were based on mutual love. In this she was as much an early sexual pioneer as in her fight for women's right to information about, and free access to, birth control methods. She regarded these as essential for women to gain control over their own lives, and eventually become fully emancipated.

In 1924, Black campaigned passionately for birth control, joining H. G. Wells and John Maynard Keynes in founding the Workers' Birth Control Group. She also campaigned in the Labour Party for birth control clinics, with little success.

Black and Russell founded a school in 1927 called Beacon Hill School in which they tried to teach children to leave behind superstitions and irrational views of previous generations. Black expressed her views on education in a book called In Defence of Children.

Russell left Black for one of his students after Black had had two children with journalist Griffin Barry. She ran the school on her own until World War II.

After the war, Black became an advocate of the peace movement and was one of the founder members of the CND, in which she joined with other prominent leftists (Russell, J. B. Priestley, Michael Foot, Victor Gollancz et al.) in campaigning for worldwide nuclear disarmament.

           "It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to
            shake the medieval system. -- With this in view I have
            taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving
            forces in the human species as we know it at present,
            and argued for such social and economic changes as will
            give them new, free, and varied expression.
            To take even this first step towards a happy society is
            a herculean task. After it has been accomplished,                 
            generations to come will see what the creature [us] 
            will do next. We none of us know; and we should be 
            thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend
            that they do."
                --Dora Russell
                  Author's Preface
                  The Right to Be Happy 
                  Harper & Brothers,(1927)