The Body and Socialism: Dora Russell in the 1920s

Build, O Aspasia, a trade union of lovers . . . to conquer the world.

Dora Russell, Hypatia; or, Woman and Knowledge (1925)

Dora Russell (1894–1986) was a key figure in the campaign to secure a place for birth control within the programme of the British Labour Party during the 1920s. Her political and literary work in this period affords an opportunity to reflect upon the relationship between the body and political ideology in the twentieth century.¹ Russell constructed a socialist politics from the material experience of the female body in sex and motherhood, a politics rooted in concerns about the plight of working-class women and shaped by contemporary ideas of modernity, sexuality and feminism. Russell's interest in the body, sexuality and politics led her into what Geoff Eley has called the 'uncharted territories' of interwar socialism.²

The tale of Russell's voyage into these unfamiliar lands was at once bold and ambiguous. Recent feminist criticism and history has noted the tension between the materiality of the body and its discursive meaning.³ This ambiguity suffused Russell's work, arising from the very attempt to represent the material experience of the female body in socialist language. Russell used disparate narratives about work, sexual danger and sexual pleasure, romance, class inequality and motherhood to argue for a socialism of the body. Though these made a persuasive connection between the female body and socialism, they also opened up some experiences and foreclosed others, marking out differences between women as much as invoking commonality. The foundation of Russell's socialism may have been the body, but that foundation shifted under the weight of context and language.

This article begins with a brief biographical sketch of Dora Russell. It then proceeds to a discussion, first of Russell's campaign within the Labour Party for birth control, then of her literary work, concentrating upon the two books she published in the 1920s, Hypatia; or, Woman and Knowledge (1925) and The Right to Be Happy (1927). Political campaigning and literary work involved different contexts, different audiences and different roles for Russell. Her books were fired by utopian and often romantic visions of the liberation of women and the transformation of heterosexual love, while within the Labour Party her horizons were narrower, focused more upon improving what she perceived as the dystopia of working-class sexuality. Nonetheless, there remained common ground between the two contexts. In both, Russell emphasized the centrality of the material experiences of sex and reproduction for women. She also stressed that birth control was the key issue for securing women's emancipation. Most importantly, what gave life to Russell's work in disparate spheres was the fervent belief that the female body was political.

I

Dora Black was the product of a fairly conventional, middle-class Edwardian childhood. In 1912 she went up to Girton College, Cambridge, where she experienced a feminist and radical awakening that guided her personal and political outlook for much of her life. After university, Russell led a bohemian life, furnished with fleeting 'amourettes'.⁴ One of these romances was with the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell, a man more than twenty years her senior. Their affair soon became a serious relationship, and after Dora became pregnant with their first child in 1921, they married. Any fears Dora had that marriage would compromise her freedom were soon eclipsed by the conviction that her partnership with Bertrand promised not merely personal contentment, but world-historical change. The Russells' marriage would be an experiment in a new morality, in which sexual freedom and commitment would be combined.⁵ Dora felt the pull of sexual freedom no less than Bertrand, a situation further complicated by the impotence he experienced in his sexual relations with Dora after 1924.⁶ The marriage finally broke in the early 1930s, after Dora had two children by an American journalist and Bertrand entered into a long-term affair. They divorced acrimoniously in 1935. Dora's relationship with her lover ended soon afterwards. Surrounded by this wreckage, Russell told H. G. Wells that the real problem was [End Page...