Rose v. a Rose

One of Britain's great mathematicians is a bony, bulge-browed Peer named Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Earl Russell of Kingston Russell, Viscount Amberley of Amberley & Ardsalla. He is also famed as a philosopher, logician, pacifist, historian, author, lecturer. But it is doubtful if the name of Bertrand Russell would ever have become a household word in English-speaking lands had not the blue-blooded Earl and his free-thinking second wife set out some years ago to educate the world in what they considered the ways of sexual happiness. Now familiar to every schoolgirl, their views once more made news last week when Bertrand and Dora Russell turned up in a London divorce court.

Simple people can find a simple source of Bertrand Russell's sex opinions. In 1894, aged 22, he married Alys Smith of Philadelphia. With her he lived unhappily, childlessly for more than 20 years. Not until he was about to have a child by another woman would she release him.

In Dora Black, mother of his son, Bertrand Russell thought he had found a congenial spirit. She was a handsome, vigorous, earthy girl, daughter of a knight and lately down from Cambridge with highest honors. He married her, he explained, not because he thought it was his social duty but because he wanted to legitimatize his son to succeed to the Russell earldom.

A rehearsal of Bertrand Russell's sex opinions makes the 1920's seem a long time ago. Present-day laws and ideas about sex he regarded as an outdated hodgepodge based on the once inescapable connection between coitus and conception. Any man and woman, he boldly argued, should be free to live together without even the slim ties of Judge Ben Lindsey's companionate marriage, to part at any time until the woman became pregnant. Even then their bond should not be indissoluble. But he counseled parents to resort to divorce only for the gravest of reasons. Simple adultery was not one of them.

It was Philosopher Russell's cure for marital malaise which netted him the most attention. "Americans," he once declared, "should indulge in marital infidelity to preserve their homes....Marriage is not the culmination of romantic love as is conventionally supposed. It should be primarily a system whereby a home may be provided for children--and making a home has nothing, or very little, to do with sexual love." To most normal Anglo-Saxons such talk was the rankest social heresy and to most U. S. homes Earl Russell, for all his gift of persuasive language, was nothing but a reprehensible old lecher.

Dora Russell trotted hard on her husband's mental heels. Her book The Right to Be Happy, pleading full freedom for instincts and emotions, got her banned from a University of Wisconsin lecture hall in 1928.

To train up free spirits who could live comfortably by their creed the Russells decided they must begin early. In 1927, with their own son and daughter as a nucleus, they started an ultra-progressive school on an isolated woodland in Hampshire 60 mi. from London. The school, now run entirely by Dora Russell, has about 22 pupils, aged 2 to 18. The youngsters study when and what they please. Weather permitting, they romp stark naked. They may say anything they like, get honest answers to any question. They are never coerced, never punished.

Without such preliminary advantages, Bertrand and Dora Russell tried hard to apply their creed to their own lives. Even when the London Times last year announced the birth of a child to Countess Russell and a journalist named Griffin Barry, her philosophic husband took it almost as a matter of course. But behind even the most determinedly modern thought lie old-fashioned impulses ingrained by generations of social custom, Last spring Countess Russell filed suit for divorce, charging adultery. The Earl did not contest the action of his onetime partner in sex education.

Soon snagged were the proceedings on a curious clause in a deed of separation which the Russells had signed in 1932. Entitled "Rose v. a Rose," it contained mutual forgiveness for all marital infidelities up to Dec. 31, 1932. Countess Russell charged her husband with adultery in 1933. "This mutual condonation prevents any inquiry into my adultery," said she, "which I admit because my husband condoned it."

That was too much for a Court ever suspicious of collusion in divorce proceedings. The trial was adjourned while the King's Proctor pondered "Rose v. a Rose." Last week hearings were resumed with the Proctor declaring for full inquiry into Dora Russell's own extra-marital adventures.

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