Dora
Black, the daughter of Frederick Black, a senior Civil servant, was
born in London in 1894. Black held strong
progressive views and believed that girls had the right to as
good an education as boys. Dora responded well to her father's encouragement
and won scholarships to Sutton High School and
Girton College, Cambridge. At university
she gained a first-class honours degree in modern languages.
Dora met Bertrand Russell in 1916 and
soon afterwards he asked her to marry him. Dora's feminism involved
a belief in sexual freedom and although she was willing to live with
Bertrand, she rejected his proposal of marriage. Dora saw marriage
as a restriction on women's liberty, and although Bertrand accepted
her philosophical argument on the subject, he wanted a son and legitimate
heir to the family title.
In the First World War Dora joined Russell's
campaign against military conscription. After Russell was released
from Brixton Prison in 1918 for his role in the struggle against the
Military Service Act.
Dora and Bertrand visited Russia and China together.
When they returned to England in 1921 Dora
agreed to marry Bertrand Russell. After
giving birth to her first child Dora became involved in the birth
control movement. The 1923 Dora along with Maynard
Keynes, paid for the legal costs to obtain the freedom of Guy
Aldred and Rose Witcop after they had been found guilty of selling
pamphlets on contraception. The following year, Dora, with the support
of Katharine Glasier, Susan
Lawrence, Margaret Bonfield, Dorothy
Jewson and H. G. Wells founded the Workers'
Birth Control Group. Dora also campaigned within the Labour
Party for birth-control clinics but this was rejected as they
feared losing the Roman Catholic
vote.
Dora did a considerable amount of writing during this period. With
Bertrand she wrote The Prospects of Industrial
Civilization (1923) and two years later she published her
book, Hypatia: Women and Knowledge.
The book was severely attacked by people who disapproved of Dora's
theories on sexual freedom for women.
In 1927 Dora and Bertrand Russell opened
their own progressive boarding school, Beacon
Hill, in West Sussex. The school reflected Bertrand's view
that children should not be forced to follow a strictly academic curriculum.
Other aspects of the school illustrated Dora's ideas on education.
The school was run on the principle that freedom, if understood early
enough, would result in maturity and self-discipline. Dora also emphasized
co-operation rather than competition and believed that the best way
to teach the benefits of democracy was to run the school on democratic
lines. Dora's educational philosophy was expressed in her book In
Defence of Children (1932).
Both Bertrand and Dora continued to have sexual relationships with
other partners. This resulted in Dora having two children with the
journalist, Griffin Barry. In 1935 Bertrand
Russell left Dora for one of his students, Patricia Spence. When
Barry returned to the United States, Dora continued to run Beacon
Hill School on her own until the Second World War
when she went to work for the Ministry of Information.
Dora was active in the peace movement after the war and in 1958 joined
with Bertrand Russell, J.
B. Priestley, Vera Brittain, Fenner
Brockway, Victor Gollancz, Canon
John Collins and Michael Foot to form
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Later that year Dora organised the Women's Caravan of Peace and toured
with it through much of Europe.
After retiring to Cornwall in 1962, Dora wrote Religion
and the Machine Age (1982) and
three volumes of autobiography, The
Tamarisk Tree (1977, 1981, 1985).
Dora Russell died in 1986.
(1) Dora Russell, The Tamarisk
Tree (1975)
I accordingly went up to Girton College, Cambridge. Architecturally
rather hideous, Girton was commodious and also, in its way, homely.
At study of your own and an adjoining bedroom separated either by
doors or a curtain, gave you a feeling of privacy and the dignity
of being grown-up. Girton, even more than Newnham, was like a large
girls' boarding school. Intellectually we were reckoned to be adult,
but as young inexperienced women we had to be guarded with care. You
could not receive a young man in your room; you might be permitted
to have him to tea in one of the public reception rooms, but you could
accept no invitation from young men to tea or other entertainment
without a chaperone from the College.
Miss Jex Blake, a classics don, who was thoroughly robust and rather
like a horse; this is not unkindly meant, for I liked and respected
her. She had a great sense of humour.
Eileen Power dealt with history. She became distinguished for her
fine scholarship and her utter charm, which captivated many of both
sexes. We always found it a pleasure to watch her, tall and placid
and very much a personality, as she came in to take her place for
dinner at high table. She had very beautiful, candid blue-grey eyes.
(2) Dora
Russell, The Tamarisk Tree (1975)
My first impression of him (Bertrand Russell) was that he was exactly
like the Mad Hatter. The thick and rather beautiful grey hair was
lifting in the wind, the large sharp nose and odd tiny chin, the long
upper lip were outlined against the sky; of middling height, lean
and spare, he moved with impetuous energy, but jerkily, not with the
grace of an athlete.
(3) Dora
Russell, The Tamarisk Tree (1975)
Marie Stopes had established the first birth control clinic in Britain;
the whole question of informing women, especially those who were poor,
about methods of contraception, began to be discussed. Early in 1923,
Rose Witcop and Guy Aldred, both on the left politically, were selling
cheaply a pamphlet by Margaret Sanger explaining about sex and contraception
in terms which, it was thought, uneducated women could understand.
The police seized the pamphlet for destruction as obscene. The report
of this made me exceedingly angry, for I could not see why information
which a middle-class woman could get from her doctor should be withheld
from a poorer woman who might need it far more. Bertie agreed with
me that we should take some action; I contacted Maynard Keynes, who
agreed to go surety with me for an appeal.
(4)
Bertrand
Russell, was the Labour Party candidate
at Chelsea in the 1924 General Election.
In her autobiography, The Tamarisk Tree, Dora Russell explains
why she believes Labour lost the election.
The
Daily Mail carried the story of the Zinoviev letter. The whole
thing was neatly timed to catch the Sunday papers and with polling
day following hard on the weekend there was no chance of an effective
rebuttal, unless some word came from MacDonald himself, and he was
down in his constituency in Wales. Without hesitation I went on the
platform and denounced the whole thing as a forgery, deliberately
planted on, or by, the Foreign Office to discredit the Prime Minister.
(5)
In
her autobiography, Dora Russell describes a visit to the Nursery School
founded by Margaret McMillan.
We
took John and Kate to spend half a day at the McMillan open-air nursery
school, and we talked about her and studied her ideas in action. We
studied the Montessori material, much of which was to teach number,
reading and writing, we thought too rigid; we preferred the McMillan
style of providing the child with all kinds of materials by means
of which it would find its own way. Nor did we think it was necessarily
a good thing for a child to read and become bookish and academic too
early. This is a period of doing, feeling, observing the world and
his fellow citizens - the concrete over the abstract - apparently
almost completely lost to sight by our planners today, when it seems
that children are to be stimulated to read, write and do sums even
before they leave the nursery school.
(6) Crystal
Eastman, Equal Rights
(8th June, 1926)
And
who is Dora Black? When I came to England in 1919 I met her at Cambridge
- a slender, vivacious, dark-eyed girl with the reputation for being
brilliant and unusual. She was then considering, I remember, whether
she should go on with the scholastic career, which seemed to be opening
up for her, or abandon it and try to make her living as an actress.
A short time after this she became Bertrand Russell's secretary, then
his wife, and the mother of his two children.
Mrs.
Russell is 31 years old now, and seems to have given up all thoughts
of the stage and of the scholar's life in which she had made so fine
a beginning. However, she has by no means retired into obscurity.
Although her children are but two and four she has found time to stand
for Parliament; she is the secretary and active leader of the Workers'
Birth Control Group which is doing such splendid work in forcing this
issue on the attention of the Labour Party; and she has begun to write
books.
(7)
In
her autobiography, Dora Russell describes the setting up of Beacon
Hill in 1927.
Measures of self-government and a school council, especially for such
young children, were a great innovation. Democracy can only spring
from practising it early, and democratic action was not to expected
from young people brought up under a close authoritarian system. According
to our view, freedom given and understood early enough would result
in a natural evolution to maturity and self-discipline. Severity and
repression of the old type, however, almost certainly carried with
it in adolescence, disturbance, confusion and the necessity of revolt.
Following the rise of the Labour Party it seemed reasonable, in 1927,
to expect, or at least hope, that co-operation for the common good
might gradually replace the competitiveness of capitalism. Hence we
did not foster competition in our school, on the contrary. Nor is
it true that children are naturally competitive, unless egged on to
be so. Physical punishment was, of course, not permitted, and we sought
to mitigate aggression among the children themselves. If an adult
uses violence on a child, the child will naturally assume that he
too, has the right to use it on one smaller or weaker.
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