Jim Farmelant -----------------------------------------------
Q: Apparently Simone De Beauvoir deserves more credit than she is usually given for her contribution to the existentialist ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre. Are there any other women whose contributions to the philosophy have been eclipsed by those of their partners? G.A. Henderson, London.
Answer:
Bertrand and Dora Russell by James Farmelant
The Prospects of Industrial Civilization was advertized as "by Bertrand Russell with the co-operation of Dora Russell" and was written in the first person singular. This would seem to imply that it was more Bertie's work than hers. Furthermore, there has been a tendency for biographers of Bertie to treat it as simply his book and not also Dora's. The Prospects of Industrial Civilization was written after Bertie's and Dora's trips to Russia and China. On their visit to Russia, Bertie and Dora arrived at divergent assessments of the Bolshevik Revolution. Bertie's assessment was quite negative, a position which put him at odds with many of his friends on the left. Dora's assessment was much more favourable. Bertie remained everafterwards an anti-communist socialist (at least until the late 1960's), while Dora always took a more benign view of the Soviet Union and of Communism generally (see her autobiography The Tamarisk Tree). Their joint book The Prospects of Industrial Civilization was in large part the outcome of both Bertie and Dora's efforts to find areas of common ground in their respective political positions. This is emphasized by Alan Ryan in his Bertrand Russell: A Political Life. However, even Ryan, after pointing out that The Prospects of Industrial Civilization represented Bertie and Dora's shared views, afterwards in almost all his subsequent references describes it as Russell's (Bertie's) work.
Beverley Earles in her article "Humanist Women" which appeared in the January/February 1993 issue of The Humanist (and which originally appeared in the July 1992 issue of International Humanist) asserts that biographers of Bertrand Russell have denied Dora the credit due her for her ideas. She takes Ronald Clark to task for attributing the main ideas of The Prospects of Industrial Civilization to Bertie when it was in fact a joint work. She contends that Clark had no justification for making that attribution and goes on to say "...Knowing Dora's work as well as I do, I can assure you that Clark has done this with no justification whatsoever." In the same article she criticizes humanist and freethought organizations for giving Dora Russell's work short shrift.
Dora Russell in The Tamarisk Tree (vol. 1) insisted that: The Prospects of Industrial Civilization would never have been written but for my insistence; it is titled a joint book. It is of interest that recent attacks on the technological world have caused this book to sell and be reviewed more of late."
To sum up, if Beverley Earles and Alan Ryan, in his more careful statements, are to be credited then The Prospects of Industrial Civilization was at least as much Dora's work as Bertie's, with Beverley seeming to imply that its main ideas may have owed more to Dora than to Bertie.
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