In the 1920s, Dora Russell, second wife of Bertrand, proclaimed that all women have a ‘right’ to sex, which she detailed in terms of free choice of partners and taking pleasure in sex. “Animals we are, and animals we remain, and the path to our regeneration and happiness….lies through our animal nature”, including our sexual nature (The Right to be Happy, 241). The idea of female sexual autonomy was relatively new. John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell’s ‘secular godfather,’ a generation earlier focused on women’s desire to abstain, understandably horrified by the fact that any husband can “enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her own inclinations” (Subjection of Women, 148).
The reluctance of women is also apparent in the more humorous Sex Tips for Husbands and Wives from 1894: “While the ideal husband would be one who would approach his bride only at her request….such nobility and unselfishness cannot be expected from the average man. Most men, if not denied, would demand sex almost every day” (2). It is assumed that women would not. Other discussions emphasized the very institutions which were likely to produce reluctance; marriage and prostitution constitute men’s purchase of sexual access to women, a situation fundamentally incompatible with female sexual self-determination. Given scant scientific work on female experience, male expectations were inevitably internalized; Sarah Holmes writing in 1888 in a periodical called Liberty expresses this as an inability to rely on ‘natural, spontaneous feelings.’ A sexual ethics which included what women actually want presupposes, as Holmes termed it, ‘self-understanding.’ Sexual autonomy requires the ability to articulate one’s desires within a framework of self-knowledge and self-control (Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century). An early example of new sexual ethics is Dora Forster’s 1905 book Sex Radicalism: As seen by an emancipated woman of the new time. Forster criticized the current moral system which condemned people to unnecessary unhappiness. Rather than self-control, women were controlled through fear of disease and damnation. Forster argued that in order to counteract the middle-class female ‘Birth strike’ friendship between the sexes must be fostered and there should be sex education for the very young.
These early discussions were not taken up with any great enthusiasm by the most successful wave of feminism yet—the liberal and suffragist movements of the late 19th century. In seeking a place for women in the establishment, it was much more common to see any intimate life for women as a hindrance to their freedom. The brightest women of that era were either celibate, widowed, or conservative in their sexual lives. Men expressed their worry about this trend, particularly the move away from motherhood, what Mill in Subjection of Women assumed would remain an attractive choice for women. In his 1916 Principles of Social Reconstruction, Bertrand Russell called for action on the problem of the ‘birth strike.’ Influenced by Francis Dalton’s views on inherited genius and imbecility, what troubled him particularly was the thought that intelligent women would not breed. In the 1920s, Frank Ramsay, infant genius of the next generation at Cambridge, dedicated one session of the exclusive Apostles discussion group to debating the same issue. The disinclination of intelligent women to have sex with men, marry and have children is not only bad for men it is bad for the English ‘race.’
A few years earlier, Russell had his first serious conversation with the woman who was to become his second wife, the brilliant Cambridge student, Dora Black. On coming up to Girton, one of two women’s colleges, Dora sped into university life with huge energy and into radical politics with equal zeal, joining the Heretics club, founded and run by her lifelong friend and correspondent, C.K. Ogden. Russell’s encounter with Dora is recounted by both in their autobiographies. Russell enquired of the educated young women gathered for him by his friend Jean Nicod what their ambitions were. Dora shocked all by revealing her desire to “marry and have children,” although she quickly qualified this as not marriage but a non-traditional partnership and that women ought to have control over their own children, to which Russell replied “I won’t be having children with you then,” an ominous foreboding of their failed experiment in living (as told of in Dora’s autobiography, The Tamarisk Tree: My Quest for Liberty and Love, 53, 68).
Dora was a thoroughly modern woman who considered sexual choice to be a part of the well-lived life for any woman. But what this sexual autonomy looked like and how to bring it about were problems still in their infancy. Russell considered sexuality to be a part of a good healthy mentality; women are sexually inhibited and as such in a ‘mental prison.’ But the question of whether the choices these women made were really free was not on his mind. Instead, for Russell, the effect of sexual liberation for women is to ease problems for men. Since prostitution is bad for them both physically and psychologically; “The young man who would formerly have been driven to occasional visits to prostitutes is now able to enter upon relations with girls of his own kind” (Marriage and Morals, 123).
While for men in Russell’s class, extramarital sex was never a problem, the women they had sex with could find it difficult not to oblige. Many upper-class women also made recognizable choices, such as Russell’s aristocratic lover Ottoline Morrell, however, the choices of his stream of middle-class lovers might strike us as compromised. For example, there was Helen Dudley who traveled from the US during the Great War with the promise of marriage and ended up in Russell’s flat as his temporary lover for the times Morrell was not in the mood; Dudley suffered psychological difficulties for the rest of her life. Another one of his vulnerable lovers, Vivien Eliot (an ‘incarnate provocation,’ according to Russell) was bought with dance lessons, lingerie, and the attentions her husband, Thomas Stearns, was not willing to give her. But Dora seemed different; she was aiming for free love: “I held that one entered into a sexual relationship for love which was given and received freely; this might last long, it could also be very brief. No other motive but such love…was to be tolerated” (The Tamarisk Tree, 69).
Dora was a woman who was not on birth strike and did not think that to be equal a woman had to be celibate or in a conventional monogamous marriage. Indeed, she sought to combine feminism with motherhood and sexual freedom for women, joining the political and personal in her philosophical outlook. After their marriage and the birth of their children, Dora wrote two extraordinary books, Hypatia, Or Woman and Knowledge (1925) and The Right to be Happy (1927) giving an account of female sexual autonomy in a time when such matters may have been tolerated but were seldom written about, especially not by women. Hypatia proclaimed women ‘polyandrous’ provoking the Sunday Express to describe it as “a book that should be banned” (The Tamarisk Tree, 180).
An advocate of birth control, who managed not to harbor the eugenic undertones of most of her contemporaries, Dora sought to argue for women’s sexual liberation as part of their right to be happy no matter what their background or circumstances. As she puts it: “the impulse to sexual pleasure has never yet had its rightful place in shaping our society” (The Right to be Happy, 131). Women should choose when and how to love; but how would this work? For Dora, women would need full control over their children and incomes to support them, quite apart from the men they chose as fathers for their children or those they chose to love. Only then could women truly be equal to men.
If women really desire an individual life, freedom and a part in the cultural development of the race, they must not only fight for the right to do any man’s work of which they are mentally and physically capable, they must also be most honest and frank about their instinctive nature and its functions (The Right to be Happy, 163)
Her system posited four sets of ‘rights,’ including the right to food, work, knowledge, and sex and parenthood, all of which require a society in which they can develop and be nurtured through education; this would be particularly important for girls and women.
The happy sexual life is, in fact, in a developed personality, the product not only of strong instinct but of art and science in its use (The Right to be Happy, 158)
For all its supposed frankness about sex, her books are coy concerning the details. Railing against the idea of women as ‘delicate’ and men as ‘rapacious,’ her solution seems to be merely to allow women to admit that the ‘functions’ are pleasant and all the rest will easily follow.
A real sex union does not perpetuate the emotions of the chase, and a warm and physical love from a woman in some way stills the hunger of a man for the blunt sexual experience…. If the delicate woman really desires to diminish the dreaded masculine rapacity, her artificial barriers and niceties are a gross error in psychology. The civilizing of sex, as of everything else, lies in the thought and emotion which give varied and supple expression to primitive passage, not in checks and suppression of the passion itself (The Right to be Happy, 167)
Dora’s account does not touch on what women might want just for themselves, apart from intercourse with a man, or the ways in which women are coerced by people and circumstances in their sexual lives. In the post-Freudian age, her main message is that ‘sex starvation’ is miserable and dangerous.
[S]ex-love is the most intense instinctive pleasure known to men and women, and starvation or thwarting of this instinct causes more acute unhappiness than poverty, disease, or ignorance (The Right to be Happy, 128)
Woman are unsexed at present by a steady and merciless process of elimination that leaves them atrophied and self-denying (The Right to be Happy, 148)
It is hardly surprising that her work had its limitations in terms of more explicit expression of women’s sexual selves; the consequences for middle-class women pursuing a life of ‘free love’ were severe. Dora gave up her academic career in pursuit of it; “I must give up my Fellowship (at Girton College, Cambridge) and take some job in which reputation does not matter and in which the work isn’t damaged by affairs of the heart” (Letter to Ogden 1919 as recounted in The Tamarisk Tree, 80). In The Right to be Happy, she explains:
A woman may feel that in sex she is merely claiming, as indeed she is, a right and need of her nature, but guilt, disaster, difficulty lie in wait for her on every side (153)
I am really very unhappy because I do not want to get married and yet I am given no peace….He IS a terror. Rages like a small boy in a temper when I refuse to marry him…. Am I an utter rotter not to put him entirely before myself and spend time making life easy for him?’ (Letter to Ogden December 1919, The Tamarisk Tree, 80)
Dora seemed to believe, at least at first, that her marriage to Russell meant only temporary partnership while it suited them; in any case, love could exist with others.
Bertie and I [did not] consider ourselves ‘married’ in the conventional sense…We had made John and Kate legitimate, but Bertie often said that this had been the sole purpose of our marriage, and further, that we should continue to conduct our lives according to our own moral code (The Tamarisk Tree, 207)
But she was naïve about the power of the institution which put children in the hand of their fathers, and women’s bodies at their disposal. Russell “tried to preserve that respect for my wife’s liberty which I thought that my creed enjoined” (130). He was never a real advocate, though; he thought of his wife’s body as his alone; as soon as she took another lover, he began to hate her (324).
Sexual autonomy was not, then, merely a matter of self-knowledge and self-control; while women of ‘bad character’ were still punished and ostracized by society, this made their lives intolerable. For the Russells, the fact that they married (and divorced) in the time they did, before more equalitarian and humane laws, meant that their union was not their own and that control was tilted toward the man in the partnership. What she warns of in her book, had happened to her personally: ‘from the moment a woman in our society desires sex or maternity we compel her if we can to become dependent on a man’ (The Right to be Happy, 147). After the divorce, no longer in Russell’s circle, Dora’s life was dominated by hardship, poverty, and loneliness. She would later recall this situation with some bitterness:
Nobody could be more disappointed than I was over the marriage. For my own part I felt it had no justification…BR has always held that children are the basis of marriage…There is however no doubt that any academic work would have been closed to BR or myself, if we’d not married…I have a RIGHT to have a child if I wish without my neighbours peeping and trying to starve me and it….SO, under pressure of Bertie’s health and aristocratic feelings, and the knowledge that he did not support my view, the decision was taken. In the light of subsequent events the legal nature of that marriage was, for me personally, little short of disaster (The Tamarisk Tree, 148-149)
Why don’t we know about Dora’s early explorations into female sexual autonomy? Ironically for the same reason that she ever got published in the first place—her marriage to one of the more important philosophers of the 20th century. Publishing as ‘Mrs Bertrand Russell,’ she was treated as ‘just his wife.’ Ironically, her book points out that “the sexual submission of wife to husband’ is ‘symbolized by the acceptance of his name” (The Right to Be Happy, 180); the lure of fame and publication must have been strong in her decision to become Mrs (and later Lady) Russell. Because she was not really considered as a person in her own right, her work on happiness and sexuality was not taken seriously and is now ignored. This situation must be ameliorated by more recognition of the importance of these early attempts by Dora (and others) to make sexual autonomy a part of women’s liberation. It is easy enough to trace and read about these arguments in the work of feminists in the late 19th and early 20th century since their books and papers are readily available. We must analyze such texts in much greater detail and not rely on the works of men in the period, such as Russell, who we now tend to turn to due to his philosophical authority. Russell’s Marriage and Morals and other writings that touch on theories of female sexual freedom owe a great deal to what women in his life thought and wrote about; it’s time to let them do the talking.
