...and feminist activist and sex radical. An excerpt:
She met Bertrand Russell, arguably her greatest mentor, on a walking tour of the moors in 1916. By candlelight at a little inn, he asked his three young companions what each wanted in life. Compelling work, a world-changing cause, the others answered. And Dora? She didn’t hesitate: marriage and children. Dora was forthrightly sexual, her wide-set eyes vividly intelligent. Russell—forty-five, in a childless, moribund marriage and partial to women half his age—was intrigued.
Some time later at tea in London, Dora clarified: not a conventional monogamous marriage, of course. Of course, he agreed. But if children resulted? They should belong to the mother, she asserted. “Well, whoever I have children with, it won’t be you,” he sniffed. He was wrong, she wishful....
But Bertie did find happiness with Dora. He badgered her to marry him. Lord Russell wanted a legitimate heir; he could not respectably divorce with no new wife on tap. Dora was just twenty-five, footloose in Paris, reading at the Bibliothèque Nationale and “sketch[ing] notes for a satirical musical about concepts of God.”
She wrote Ogden, “The kind of slavery he wants me to accept is what he, at my age, would have emphatically denounced . . . . But he hates an irregular relation and wants absolute surrender or a complete break.” She dreaded either, but this New Woman was ready to sacrifice for love. “I do want to try and do what is best for his work and him without destroying myself.”
She solved the dilemma unconsciously, you could say, by not using contraception. Within months she was pregnant. They married—without vows of monogamy—in 1921, two months after their son John was born.
The dozen years with Bertie were mind-reelingly fruitful. Dora had four children, published four books, founded a school, ran for Parliament....
In writing, speaking, and organizing, Dora always linked sex and socialism—pay for housework with fair industrial wages, the intimate labors of women with the sweated labor of men. Pregnancy was four times more fatal than mining, the most dangerous of occupations, she told Parliament and the minister of health. Her Workers’ Birth Control Group of activists and progressive members of Parliament explicitly allied with Labour to distance itself from the eugenic ideologies of birth control advocates such as Marie Stopes, who would limit the propagation of the genetically inferior working classes. A “trade union of lovers,” Dora proclaimed, will “conquer the world....”
In 1929, with the Australian gynecologist Norman Haire, Dora did the mule’s work of pulling together the London Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, a five-day confab where medicine met sex radicalism. Topics from psychoanalysis to prostitution, contraception, and censorship were debated. Haire was widely mistrusted as an arriviste, but the Russells’ good names attracted the attendance or endorsement of dozens of celebrities—George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Radcliffe Hall, Margaret Sanger, even Sigmund Freud. The eminent sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, the first champion of homosexual rights, spoke. In Berlin, to Dora’s astonishment, he introduced her to two transsexuals....
While agitating for their principles in public, Dora and Bertie were testing them at home. Both had other lovers; the lovers were sometimes dealt with jointly. “For some weeks I have wished to express my gratitude for your generous conduct since you have known that Dora and I love each other,” Bertie wrote to an erstwhile paramour of Dora’s. When she got pregnant with Griffin Barry, Bertie welcomed the child, who was registered as Harriet Ruth Barry Russell....
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