Dora Russell

Her father, Sir Frederick Black, had risen through the civil service. At Cambridge she joined the Heretics Society, which questioned traditional authority and religious dogma, and developed her feminism. During the First World War she supported Bertrand Russell’s campaign against conscription, and in 1920 she visited Soviet Russia, where, unlike Russell, who was disappointed by Lenin, she saw, like many English socialists, a vision of a future civilisation; she also sought to attend the Second Congress of the Comintern. She married Russell in 1921, seven months pregnant and dressed in black, having at first refused him because marriage subjugated women. With her husband and Keynes she paid the appeal costs of those prosecuted for publishing Margaret Sanger’s contraception guide, and in 1924 she founded the Workers’ Birth Control Group to advise working-class women. She pressed the Labour Party for birth-control clinics, but when the leadership, fearing the loss of Catholic votes, overruled her at the 1925 conference she said she hated the party. In 1925 she published Hypatia, on the unequal education of women. In 1929 she organised the World League for Sexual Reform’s London congress with Norman Haire, serving as treasurer and speaking on “Marriage and Freedom”. Their open marriage broke down after she had two children with another man. She ran Beacon Hill School alone until the Second World War. During the war she worked for the Ministry of Information and on British Ally, the British government newspaper published in Moscow, and after the war she was a founding member of CND, leading the “Women’s Peace Caravan” across Europe to Moscow in 1958.