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Dora Winifred Russell, Countess Russell ( Black; 3 April 1894 – 31 May 1986) was a British author, a feminist and socialism, and the second wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a campaigner for contraception and Peace movement. She worked for the UK-government-funded Moscow newspaper British Ally, and in 1958 she led the "Women's Peace Caravan" across Europe during the Cold War.
In 1924 Russell campaigned for birth control with the support of Katharine Glasier, Susan Lawrence, Margaret Bonfield, Dorothy Jewson, H. G. Wells and John Maynard Keynes and founded the Workers' Birth Control Group which provided advice on birth control to working-class women. In the same year she ran unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate for Chelsea. She campaigned in the Labour Party for birth control clinics, but the party was afraid of losing the support of Roman Catholic voters. She said that she hated the Labour Party after the leadership overruled her lobbied support at the 1925 convention. Public male ally H. G. Wells refused to support her campaign which he believed was only of appeal to women.
In 1929 Russell organised the World League for Sexual Reform's highly successful Congress in London with the Australian-born birth control campaigner Norman Haire. Held over the course of five days in Wigmore Hall it was attended by leading intellectuals including George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger and Sigmund Freud who debated topics that included psychoanalysis, prostitution, censorship, and contraception.Diana Wyndham. (2012) Foreword by the Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG. (Sydney:
"One of my fondest memories is of the Natural History lessons with Dora, based on the study of that great tome ‘The Science of Life’ (by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley & G. P.Wells). Dora encouraged us to question, to follow our curiosity … into all sorts of highways & bye-ways of phenomena of life; to speculate; to wonder … I remember sheer fascination and a sense of the infinity of the field of knowledge that was waiting to be explored."Russell expressed her views on education in a book called In Defence of Children. Russell ran the school on her own until World War II.
"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."She was still speaking on peace issues on 2 April 1981, when she addressed a Merseyside Peace Week.LSE archive at (accessed 26 July 2011)
Black and Russell visited Soviet Russia in 1920, soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Russell was unimpressed by Vladimir Lenin, but Black, like many English socialists at the time, saw a vision of a future ideal civilisation. The couple also visited China.
She had at first rejected Russell's offer of marriage. In common with some radical women of her generation, she felt 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 co-operation was required for raising their children. Implicit was her conviction that both men and women were polygamy 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. She regarded these as essential for women to gain control over their own lives, and eventually become fully emancipated. Her husband was a supporter of radical views but she said that she was expected to do the "bottle-washing".
She published her book on the inadequate education of women and inequality with the title Hypatia or Woman and Knowledge in 1925. The prologue explains why she chose the title: "Hypatia was a university lecturer denounced by Church dignitaries and torn to pieces by Christians. Such will probably be the fate of this book."
Russell became Countess Russell on 3 March 1931, when Bertrand Russell's elder brother Frank died and her husband became the 3rd Earl Russell. Bertrand left her for their children's governess, Patricia Spence. She noted that during the divorce her husband used all of his privilege to gain advantage.
Bertrand married Patricia Spence in January 1936. Dora had two children with journalist Griffin Barry while still married to Russell.
Death
Russell died at Porthcurno, Cornwall, on 31 May 1986, aged 92. Her ashes were scattered in the garden there.
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Categories: British Women's Rights Activists, Alumni Of Girton College, Cambridge, British Anti–nuclear Weapons Activists, British Humanists, British Atheists, British Communists, British Feminist Writers, British Anti-war Activists, 1894 Births, 1986 Deaths, People From Thornton Heath, British Socialist Feminists, People Educated At Sutton High School, London, Bertrand Russell, Labour Party Parliamentary Candidates, British Countesses By Marriage, Reproductive Rights Activists
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