Dora Russell
| Dora, Countess Russell | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Dora Black 3 April 1894 London |
| Died | 31 May 1986 (aged 92) Porthcurno, Cornwall |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | author and social activist |
Dora, Countess Russell (née Black; 3 April 1894 – 31 May 1986) was a British author, a feminist and socialist campaigner, and the second wife of the eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Dora Black was born into an English upper-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' home and 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 dogma 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.
In 1924, Russell campaigned passionately for birth control, joining with 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 only limited success.
Russell founded a progressive school in 1927 called Beacon Hill School, with Bertrand Russell, in which they tried to teach children to leave behind superstition and the irrational views of previous generations as they viewed them. 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. After the war, she became an advocate of the peace movement and was one of the founding members of the CND, in which she joined with other prominent leftists (Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestley, Michael Foot, Victor Gollancz among others) in campaigning for worldwide nuclear disarmament.
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