Introduction
In early 1946, working in the United Kingdom, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Bertrand Russell proposed a manifesto for a new League for the Rights of Man. Their intervention took place alongside the contemporaneous drafting, in the United States, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Eighty years later, the UDHR still stands as an enduring monument to the postwar human rights moment, while the 1946 manifesto for a new League for the Rights of Man is remembered only by a handful of scholars.Footnote 1 Why did one take off as spectacularly as the other failed? Although the standard explanations have pointed to the practical failures of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle, this article argues instead that a culture of abuse toward women tainted the drafting and dissemination process of the manifesto and disrupted a related petition to the British government.Footnote 2 The documentation of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle’s disregard of women’s rights—in theory and in practice—supports the feminist internationalist view, nascent in the 1940s and more vibrant over intervening decades, that human rights manifestos and organizations are unworkable without the integration of women and their rights.Footnote 3
Fresh archival evidence shows that it was neither their mere practical failures nor their simple philosophical differences that undermined Orwell, Koestler, and Russell’s manifesto and petition projects in the first half of 1946. The systematic study of their unpublished papers reveals that the three men’s lack of concern for women’s rights, in their collaborative writing and behavior, exacerbated the practical failures and personal conflicts that ultimately left their project unworkable. What little influence or legacy their project had was the result of what the hardworking women in their circle salvaged for them. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that the recorded incidents of a culture of abuse toward women in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle correlated with the pivotal events in the group’s failure to launch their proposed international organization for the promotion of the rights of man and democracy in the wake of what Orwell was the first to call the “Cold War.”Footnote 4
In June 1946, the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz judged the Orwell–Koestler–Russell manifesto as seriously flawed for stating that “democratic rights” have “little value” without conditions of equal economic opportunity.Footnote 5 Gollancz countered that concepts and practices of equal rights always had value, especially for those who did not enjoy them yet. Although Gollancz did not specify the inclusion of women in this forward-looking conception of the value of equal rights for all people regardless of economic or other social status, there is a remarkably close historical analogue, also from early 1946, that did.
In late April 1946, an international committee of nine met together in a room on New York’s Upper East Side. There unfolded the first meeting of the commission on human rights that would set in motion the drafting of the UDHR and its promulgation by the United Nations in 1948.Footnote 6 Notable on the drafting committee was its sole woman and chair, Eleanor Roosevelt, the former US First Lady and women’s rights advocate, who would play a leading role in shaping the ideas of this foundational human rights document and its legacies for “women’s human rights,” alongside a range of other international actors and women intellectuals.Footnote 7 At the twenty-ninth plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly, on 12 February 1946, Roosevelt had read an “Open Letter to the Women of the World,” on behalf of her fellow women representatives, which urged “the Governments of the world to encourage women everywhere to take a more active part in national and international affairs” and “women who are conscious of their opportunities to come forward and share in the work of peace and reconstruction as they did in war and resistance.”Footnote 8 By 8 May 1946, the UN’s Economic and Social Affairs division had assembled the six-woman “Sub-commission on the Status of Women,” representing a diversity of countries and regions, and chaired by Bodil Begtrup of Denmark. By 21 June 1946, the sub-commission had formally become a commission and served as the advisory body on “the status of women” for the UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Roosevelt.Footnote 9 Together these women leaders ensured that the UDHR integrated a range of women’s rights among the many human rights that the political document sought to globally promulgate and protect across peoples, nations, and cultures.Footnote 10
Just a few weeks earlier—across the Atlantic Ocean in a small town in northern Wales—a hotel booking for 19–23 April had been cancelled for what Russell described as a “small” but ambitious meeting to discuss a “Manifesto” on a “possible programme for the world.”Footnote 11 The collapse of the conference plans marked the failure to launch a new “League” for the “Rights of Man” and “Democracy” by its organizers, the liberal pacifist philosopher Russell and his recent acquaintances, the prominent socialist writers Orwell and Koestler.Footnote 12 The 1946 Easter conference in Wales had been planned to finalize the manifesto for a new “international organization” that would rectify the flaws of the League for the Rights of Man founded in France in 1898.Footnote 13 The latter Ligue des droits de l’homme” (LDH) had issued an influential 1936 update of the 1789 and 1793 French Declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.Footnote 14 The main problem with the LDH, in Orwell’s view, was its persistent left-wing support of the USSR.Footnote 15 This was a misguided loyalty for socialists, Orwell argued, and an especially dangerous one since Stalin had stepped in to fill the void in European geopolitical power politics left after the Allied defeat of the Nazi regime and the United States’ bombing of Japan in 1945.Footnote 16 From late December 1945 into mid-January 1946, Orwell convinced Koestler and then Russell to get on board his vision for building a new socialist–liberal League for the Rights of Man. It would be better equipped to promote rights and democracy in the postwar landscape, wherein the rise of Stalinist communism and totalitarianism threatened the protection of a fragile world peace and civil liberties such as habeas corpus and freedom of speech, information, and the press.
Over the past few decades of critical biographical scholarship and investigative journalism, it has become more widely known that Orwell, Koestler, and Russell each revealed the limits of their commitments to egalitarian political ideals such as socialism, democracy, and human rights through their individual mistreatment of women.Footnote 17 Until now, there has not been a study of how a culture of abuse toward women shaped their failed attempt to launch a new League for the Rights of Man in 1946. Although they shared many of the same democratic, socialist, and antifascist values, these three leading figures of the postwar British left were unlikely collaborators. As relatively new friends, they had overt differences in their respective political philosophies before they initiated their manifesto project in January 1946. Their most obvious disagreements—especially Russell’s strong commitments to liberalism and antiwar activism; Orwell’s distinctive anti-Soviet and antitotalitarian democratic socialism; and Koestler’s controversial interest in cultural exchange with communist societies, despite his stubborn anti-Russian bias—have together shaped the scholarly assumption that the group would have failed, practically speaking, at any attempted collaboration.
In this vein, there have been three standard practical explanations for the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle’s collective failure to launch the new League for the Rights of Man. First, the sickly Orwell lost interest in leading the drafting of the manifesto as he resolved to move to the remote Scottish island of Jura to work on his novel-in-progress, “The Last Man in Europe,” which he published in 1949 as Nineteen Eighty-Four.Footnote 18 Second, Koestler was unable to secure funding from his publisher Rodney Phillips to support the conference to launch the league and finalize the manifesto.Footnote 19 Third, Russell fell out with Koestler over edits to their subsequent project of a petition to the British government on the foreign-policy issues of nuclear disarmament, freedom of information, and cultural exchange with communist societies.Footnote 20
While these practical failures of Orwell, Koestler, and Russell correlate with the timeline of the breakdown of the proposed new League for the Rights of Man and its manifesto and petition projects, the correlation in itself does not explain why this confluence of failures occurred in the first place. Glen Burgess pointed to the conflicted gender dynamics of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle as a background feature of the failure of the league, and noted a possible “rape” perpetrated by Koestler against Russell’s wife, Patricia “Peter” Russell, around the same time in late April 1946 when the petition project fell apart.Footnote 21 However, Burgess did not explore how Orwell, Koestler, and Russell aided and abetted an entrenched culture of abuse especially but not exclusively toward their primary romantic partners and collaborators: Koestler’s wife by deed poll, Mamaine Paget Koestler; her twin sister Celia Paget Kirwan (later Goodman); and Peter Russell.
The archives of Orwell, Koestler, Russell, and their colleagues provide systematic evidence of an abusive culture of indecent assault, exploitation of women’s labor, and disregard of women’s rights in their circle, dating from 1945 to 1950. The timeline of their collaboration’s formation and dissolution, including the known or probable dates of the abuse of the bodies or labor of the women involved, establishes a strong correlation between this abusive culture and the failure to launch the new League for the Rights of Man, which indicates that this abusive culture was the background condition or reason behind the group’s many practical failures and personal conflicts. It also indicates that this abusive culture tainted the manifesto’s drafting and dissemination and disrupted the related petition to the British government.Footnote 22
The transcription, comparison, and handwriting analysis of all known draft typescripts, fragments, and copies of the manifesto and petition, alongside the published and unpublished correspondence concerning them, show how (1) Orwell introduced sexually discriminatory language into the manifesto’s concept for the organization of the league, (2) Koestler refused to accept Peter’s substantive philosophical contributions to the petition because she was a woman, and had a “blazing row” with her about it in front of Mamaine, and (3) Russell initially turned a blind eye to his wife’s dangerous entanglement with Koestler and subsequently made an unwanted “pass” at Mamaine, which effectively ended their couples’ dates, and contributed to his acrimonious divorce from Peter.Footnote 23
This archival approach to the study of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell collaboration led to another, prima facie paradoxical and ironic, finding: despite the abusive culture toward women behind the failure to launch the new League for the Rights of Man in 1946, it was women who ensured the limited human rights legacies of the collaborative manifesto. A group of socialist and liberal women (Mamaine Koestler, Celia Kirwan, Peter Russell, Katharine Stewart-Murray, and Ruth Fischer) countered the abusive culture from within their left-leaning intellectual network by contributing to the organization, drafting, dissemination, or preservation of the documents related to the league. While the conflicted sexual dynamics of their circle undermined Orwell, Koestler, and Russell’s professed commitments to equal rights and socialist democracy in the immediate postwar era, it was women’s work that ensured what little influence the manifesto had on two other human rights and anticommunist organizations from 1946 through at least 1950.
This article proceeds in three parts, supplemented by figures and an appendix that contains the first complete and annotated transcriptions of the manifesto and petition. The next section presents for the first time the parallel timelines of the formation and dissolution of the new League for the Rights of Man and the culture of abuse toward women in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle. Although the timeline in itself does not prove a causal relationship between the abusive culture on the one hand, and the failure to launch the new league on the other, the concatenation of ties between the events on either side of the timeline allows the reasonable inference of a strong correlation between them. The cascade of recorded incidents of abuse of women in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle ran parallel to the major crisis points in their collaboration on the manifesto and petition projects from January to June 1946.
The third section sets forth two focused case studies with new comparative textual and handwriting analyses that identify the particular interventions of Orwell, Koestler, and Peter Russell in the drafting of the manifesto and petition. The identification of these handwritten interventions traces the evidence of the circle’s culture of abuse toward women and neglect of women’s rights in the very drafts of the manifesto and petition themselves. This close textual analysis supports the wider contextual inference that the abusive culture toward women backfired on the men insofar as it informed their failure to launch the new League for the Rights of Man. The men’s disregard for women’s rights triggered a series of conflicts that ended their envisioned international organization before they could finalize their democratic manifesto and related petition to the British government on cultural exchange and peace.
The conclusion explores the political implications of the finding that it was the women of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle who ensured the few human rights legacies of the aborted manifesto. Contributing to a trend in scholarship on recovering the history of women’s forgotten contributions to international relations, political philosophy, and political literature, this article exposes the culture of abuse at the heart of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle in order to recentre the women who were working behind the scenes, often without compensation, recognition, or even safety, to embody and promote the human rights ideals that the men only partly supported and ultimately failed to realize.Footnote 24 Orwell, Koestler, and Russell’s disregard for women’s rights was the fatal flaw in their short-lived effort to found a new League for the Rights of Man, at the same time as women’s often exploited or unrecognized work enabled their aborted manifesto to shape at least two human rights documents and anticommunist organizations between 1946 and 1950. By exposing a culture of abuse toward women as the best explanation for the failure of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell League for the Rights of Man, this archival case study underscores the wider significance of women’s leadership and women’s rights for successful human rights manifestos and organizations.
A culture of abuse toward women, and the 1946 League for the Rights of Man
This section documents a culture of abuse toward women within the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle during their 1946 collaboration on the failed League for the Rights of Man. This abusive culture primarily involved (1) “indecent assault” (now known as “sexual assault”), if not also rape, and (2) other disregard for women’s rights (now known as “sex discrimination” or “gender discrimination”), including exploitation of their labor.Footnote 25 Examples of the latter category of abuse can be tracked through examination of documents for evidence of discrimination toward women and their rights relative to men (i.e., treatment of women as inferior relative to men, expectation of women’s unpaid, unrecognized, or otherwise unfair labor). Indecent assault and rape, however, require further definition in their legal context before their more hidden impact on the failure of the league can be revealed through a timeline of events.
In 1946, Britain’s legal system followed the Offences against the Person Act of 1861, which criminalized “any indecent assault upon any female,” or any aggressive, non-penetrative sexual act against a girl or woman.Footnote 26 The maximum penalty was two years’ imprisonment. In 1880, the Criminal Law Amendment Act added that children under thirteen were incapable of freely consenting to sex acts. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1922 raised the age of sexual consent to sixteen, except in the case of married people. In 1929, the Age of Marriage Act raised the age of consent for marriage to sixteen.Footnote 27
Given the legal emphasis in the early twentieth century on consent as the marker of a free sexual encounter versus a forced one, the lack of evidence of consent by any purported adult female victim became the final measure by which the crime of indecent assault or the more serious crime of (penetrative) rape was determined. A woman’s consent or its appearance became the crucial factor in determining whether any sexual act that intruded on the body of the female was punishable as a (non-penetrative) indecent assault or as a (penetrative) rape, or whether it was rather a freely accepted (and thus socially acceptable) attempt at seduction. It was not until 1956 that Britain’s Sexual Offences Act codified this view under the legal language of “sexual offence”—thus paving the way for modern law regarding “sexual assault.”Footnote 28
There were a series of probable, yet unprosecuted, indecent assaults against women, and perhaps also a rape, in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle that correlate with both the men’s wider disregard for women’s rights and the demise of their proposed new League for the Rights of Man. Although letters and diaries often recorded evidence of the lack of sexual consent from women in the circle, the group—especially the men—typically failed to recognize or report these events as criminal offences such as indecent assault or rape. Rather, Orwell, Koestler, and Russell tacitly accepted or actively perpetrated what feminists have called a “patriarchal,” “androcentric,” or men-dominant culture of abuse of the women’s work ethic and sexual freedom, often under the pretext of their shared socialist and liberal values.Footnote 29 Despite their support of British socialist ideas of “social justice” or more “proportionate” distribution of social and economic goods across classes, and “free love” or polyamorous sexual freedom for men and women beyond the bonds of traditional marriage, Orwell, Koestler, and Russell did not apply these egalitarian principles to women in their own circle as evenly as they did in some of their writings and recorded conversations.Footnote 30
The circle left ample evidence of the uneven and unfair balance of power in its sexual relations, especially in the family papers of the Paget sisters. Mamaine entered into a violent free-love “ménage” with the married Koestler, despite his “drinking and fighting” and his written declaration to her that “without an element of initial rape there is no delight”—a statement he made soon after his self-described “swinish,” “uneasy” “seduction” of her around April 1944.Footnote 31 Also in spring 1944, Koestler made a “terrific pass” at her twin Celia, who turned him down; later, when the sisters confided in each other, Mamaine said that Koestler “was the same with me last night and I slept with him.”Footnote 32 These personal records together suggest that Koestler attempted to initiate sex with each of the twins with attempted rapes or other nonconsensual, aggressive, indecent acts.
Likewise, the 1941 diary of Inez Holden, the first cousin of the Paget sisters, contains evidence of the married Orwell’s seemingly nonconsensual initiation of sex when he “more or less ‘pounced’” on her to initiate their brief affair.Footnote 33 Although Russell did not appear to contribute to this culture of sexual assault to the same extreme, Mamaine recorded that he made a “sort of pass” at her in August 1946.Footnote 34 Alongside the aftermath of Koestler’s probable rape of Peter Russell in April 1946, it effectively ended the dates between the couples and contributed to their divorces.Footnote 35
Although they had varying degrees of culpability with regard to indecent assault and other sexual violence, Orwell, Koestler, and Russell actively or passively exploited the labor of women in their collaboration to their collective benefit. The exploitation included not only (1) women’s secretarial and intellectual work without adequate recognition or compensation, but also (2) women’s participation in an uneven culture of free love that permitted greater sexual freedom to men than to women, and conversely exposed women to greater threat of harm and violence from sexual activity with men. The combination of these two forms of exploitation of women’s work and sexual freedom contributed to a culture of abuse that helped to provoke Orwell’s retreat from the project as well as two explosive conflicts between the Koestlers and the Russells that had ended the drafting of the manifesto and petition by June 1946 and their entire collaboration in August of that year.
The rise and fall of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle: a narrative timeline
Soon after Christmas 1945, Orwell composed the first draft of the manifesto and sent it to Koestler on 2 January 1946.Footnote 36 His inspiration was conversations with Koestler and the Paget twins, Mamaine and Celia, with whom the men had just spent the holidays in Wales.Footnote 37 Koestler arranged the rendezvous between Celia and Orwell, whom he thought would have made an excellent “brother-in-law.”Footnote 38 In an October 1945 letter to Orwell, Koestler betrayed the patriarchal bias of his “ménage” with Mamaine, by promising the widower two women’s attention and child care over the holidays.Footnote 39
In the isolated setting of Bwlch Ocyn, the conversation turned to the group’s shared socialist and liberal-democratic values, and the threats to freedom and peace that they believed had emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. Principal among them was the fear of a new, Nazi-like political enemy: the totalitarian, imperial Soviet superpower, with the ambition to develop atomic weapons to rival the US. Another anxiety was that many of their peers on the left seemed blind to the dangers of the Stalinist regime due to their socialist ideological affinities with the Marxist values of the Soviet Union. A collective sense emerged that something should be done.
Their first act was to have Orwell compose the first “draft” of the manifesto, as a starting point for discussions with their liberal and leftist friends about forming a new League for the Rights of Man. In his 2 January 1946 letter to Koestler, Orwell described the “draft” as “a rough one and not well expressed.”Footnote 40 Koestler sent Orwell’s “draft” to the physical chemist and political economist Michael Polanyi, who lost it.Footnote 41 This lost “draft” still inspired at least two extant versions of the manifesto and two surviving draft fragments between 2 January and 28 April 1946.Footnote 42
On 10 January, the Koestlers hosted the Russells—who lived nearby in Llan Ffestiniog—for dinner in Bwlch Ocyn. The Russells had recently moved to Wales for Peter to recover from an attempted suicide stemming from her husband’s family conflicts and ongoing affair.Footnote 43 After their dinner party, Mamaine recorded in her diary: “K discussed with Russell his project for a new League … Russell seemed to agree with K’s ideas, though he didn’t want to be involved and said he thought the first step should be a conference of any 12 people with special qualifications, who should discuss what to do to prevent an atomic war.”Footnote 44 By 20 January, the Russells had written to their friend the philosopher Rupert Crawshay-Williams about sending Koestler a copy of Bertrand’s essay on the global threat of the atomic bomb, forthcoming in Polemic.Footnote 45 In the same letter, Peter reported her failure to get Margaret Storm Jameson—the head of the London branch of the PEN association for writers and freedom of the press—to speak at the planned conference. By relaying that she was “still chasing speakers,” Peter signaled her organizational role in the conference plans envisioned by her husband.Footnote 46 By 18 January, Orwell had arranged with Russell to meet him in London on 12 February to gather his skeptical input on Koestler’s “premature” views on the league.Footnote 47
Mamaine had left Wales by the last week of January for a solo trip to Switzerland. She planned this escape when Koestler had a series of drunken “rows” with her over the holidays.Footnote 48 She would not return to London until 9 March.Footnote 49 Before her departure, she and Koestler processed the receipt of Russell’s essay on the atomic bomb on 21 January. They incorporated a quote about nuclear war for a cover page for the manifesto, titled “S.O.S. League,” which Mamaine likely typed. The epigraph stated, “The difficulty to-day is to persuade the human race to acquiesce in its own survival.”Footnote 50
Ignazio Silone—the Italian democratic socialist, ex-communist, and antifascist—had dinner with Orwell in London in January, and Koestler encouraged Orwell to get his feedback on the league.Footnote 51 On 23 January, Mamaine recorded Silone’s critical view when she traveled with him and Pietro Nenni, the Italian minister for foreign affairs, by ship to Europe.Footnote 52 She diplomatically summarized it for Koestler on 25 January: “S is not in favour of any bloc or League which wd, in the present circs, appear aggressive towards Russia.”Footnote 53 Koestler remained anti-Russian in his vision for the league.
In January, Kirwan had been visiting Orwell at his London flat to help care for his son.Footnote 54 Orwell proposed in writing to her, in a “four-page handwritten letter postmarked 31 January.”Footnote 55 In the same letter, he appeared to apologize for a recent, awkward, even “reprehensible & undesirable,” profession of “love” he made sometime after he “began to want you physically when I saw you walking upstairs in front of me.”Footnote 56 She deflected his apparently indecent sexual advance or assault (and rejected his proposal “to marry me or sleep with me”) because she felt conflicted about the relationship despite how fond she was of him and his son.Footnote 57
As his romantic relationship with Kirwan dissolved, Orwell had produced the first extant manifesto by 27 February, with input from Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot.Footnote 58 On 11 February, Orwell told Koestler that he would seek Russell’s input the next day, and that Foot had suggested “two alterations”: cut the terms “the masses” and “victims of aggression.”Footnote 59 Koestler circulated the 27 February version (without these terms in it) for further revision, at least until 14 March, when he asked Rodney Phillips, publisher of Polemic, to make copies of it for the conference.Footnote 60 By 19 March, however, the conference plans had collapsed. Humphrey Slater, the ex-communist editor of Polemic, canceled plans to publish the manifesto when Phillips withdrew financial support for the conference.Footnote 61
On 23 March, Koestler informed Orwell of Polemic’s cancelation of the conference. Koestler wanted either Orwell’s socialist publisher Victor Gollancz or Edward Hulton, conservative publisher of World Review and Picture Post, to sponsor it instead. Koestler’s most urgent concern, however, was to get a “secretary and a typewriter” to keep the project afloat.Footnote 62
Orwell’s involvement in the manifesto project dwindled between 27 February (when he mailed the first extant manifesto) and 23 March (when Koestler informed him about the canceled conference). Orwell shifted focus to Jura, whence he intended to write his next novel and recoup his health. Additionally, in early March 1946, Orwell courted Anne Popham, the future editor of the diaries of Virginia Woolf.Footnote 63 Popham lived below Orwell’s cramped flat in Canonbury Square. The older, famous writer invited her to tea in his sitting room or bedsit; he cornered her on the bed, suddenly embracing and kissing her, but she fended off his unwelcome advances in “shock.”Footnote 64 On 15 March, he wrote to her, wondering if she was “angry or surprised when I sort of made advances to you” a “fortnight” earlier.Footnote 65 On 18 April, he apologized for committing “a sort of crime” in approaching her in a “way” that was “scandalous”—especially for “a person like me” to “make advances to a person like you.” Orwell then proposed that she become his wife, secretary, editor, and literary executor. If she visited him in Jura, he promised to not “force” her to “make love” to him.Footnote 66 Like Kirwan, Popham dismissed the proposal. In the wake of these botched proposals and apparently indecent encounters, Orwell lost focus as the leader behind the manifesto when the wider project lost momentum.
By early April 1946, Kirwan was dating the philosopher Freddie (A. J.) Ayer. On 6 April, Koestler and Mamaine had Kirwan and Ayer to stay at their house in Wales.Footnote 67 On 8 April, the Russells, alongside Ayer and Kirwan, dined with the Koestlers.Footnote 68 On 14 April, Mamaine recorded in her diary that she and Koestler “drafted a Petition” in the six days following the 8 April dinner with the Russells, her sister, and Ayer. She wrote, “K. has hatched a new plot to save the world from the Russians; Russell agreed to it so we (K & I) drafted a Petition about it.”Footnote 69 On 16 April, Mamaine sent Russell a “preliminary” draft of the petition, noting that the couples would dine together tomorrow.Footnote 70
The petition’s driving ideas derive from Koestler’s March 1946 New York Times Magazine essay on his concept of “psychological disarmament” in the face of nuclear war.Footnote 71 By psychological disarmament, Koestler meant the reverse of nuclear disarmament. Rather than focusing on removing the weapons that might cause mass destruction, Koestler sought to remove obstacles to cross-cultural interaction between Soviet Russia and the Western bloc. He recommended that freedom of the pen, the press, expression, and travel should be encouraged across Russia and the West, to realize “genuine world cooperation.” He argued, “World peace can only become a reality if suspicions are abolished,” and suspicions could only be eliminated by reducing obstacles to cultural interactions across borders and nations.Footnote 72 Nuclear disarmament would only happen if psychological disarmament happened first.
Although the Russells disagreed with Koestler’s view of psychological disarmament, they still worked with him and Mamaine on the petition. On 23 April, Mamaine relayed to Kirwan that she and Koestler dined with the Russells “the other night.” She repeated Russell’s story of how a “scandal” over his divorce and remarriage erupted in the US, much like his father had endured in England in 1868. Mamaine approved Russell’s view that “divorce and adultery should not be frowned on quite as much.” Then the letter took a darker turn. She informed Kirwan that, “after dinner last night (Russell has gone back to Cambridge),” Peter “came in” and “left in a huff after five minutes” after having a “blazing row” with Koestler.Footnote 73 Although Mamaine did not disclose the reasons for this “blazing row,” there is evidence that sexual violence was behind it, alongside their differences on the petition.Footnote 74
The Russell home stood within a short distance of the Koestler cottage in Wales, so there could have been unrecorded or unobserved meetings between Koestler and Peter during their collaboration on the petition project between 8 and 22 April, when Peter acted as the authorized representative or “plenipotentiary” of Russell.Footnote 75 Travel between the cottages of the Russells and the Koestlers was accessible by a 2.2-mile walk and did not require a car (although Arthur Koestler had a car in his garage in Bwlch Ocyn).Footnote 76 After Russell departed for Cambridge to visit a mistress, and before the “blazing row,” Koestler could have sexually assaulted Peter at the Russell home, unbeknownst to their partners.Footnote 77 Upon their reunion, Peter reportedly told Russell twice that Koestler had “tried to rape” or had “raped” her—allegations which Russell supposedly dismissed as a duplicitous reaction to his unapproved affair.Footnote 78
Koestler kept working on the petition, overworking Mamaine. This led to a costly clerical error. By 26 April 1946, Koestler had directed Mamaine to send an “emended” version of the petition to Russell for his review and hopeful approval.Footnote 79 This version recorded the suggested revisions of the Russells, mainly in Peter’s hand, concerning their joint critique of Koestler’s concept of “psychological disarmament.” Koestler also instructed Mamaine to send a “final draft” of the petition, with the Koestlers’ edits incorporated but not the Russells’ suggestions, to Gollancz.Footnote 80 Koestler wanted Gollancz’s approval so that his publishing house might financially support the project. Mamaine made the unintended error of sending the Gollancz packet (with the final draft) to Russell and the Russell packet (with the emended version) to Gollancz.
Meanwhile, Koestler forged ahead with the manifesto without consulting Russell or Orwell. On 28 April, he sent his only fair copy of the final extant manifesto to Stewart-Murray to make fifty copies for circulation.Footnote 81 Without yet knowing of Mamaine’s clerical error, Peter sent Koestler further revisions for the emended petition on 29 April. The same letter expressed her anger at Koestler for his “pathological desire to dominate” and her regret for not walking out “sooner” from their collaboration in Wales upon the rise of his “ominous mood.”Footnote 82
On 30 April, Gollancz noticed the clerical error and had his secretary send Russell the packet intended for him.Footnote 83 Upon comparison of the packets, Russell realized that Koestler had been lying about the nature of their collaboration. Although Mamaine preserved Peter’s handwritten edits in the margins of the emended petition, Koestler had not instructed her to incorporate them into the typescript of his “final draft” for Gollancz.
In his 26 April letter to Gollancz, mistakenly delivered to Russell, Koestler explained the “idea” of the “Petition” as “containing concrete proposals to the British government,” “signed by at least a hundred names representative of all fields (M.P.s of all Parties, scientists, philosophers, artists, clergy, etc.),” and sharply distinguished it from “a manifesto to the world at large.”Footnote 84 Koestler’s distinction between this national-level petition and any global “manifesto” may have further offended the Russells. The Russells joined the petition project only when the conference plans for the league broke down. At no point did the Russells divorce themselves from the manifesto, which continued to circulate among prospective supporters and coauthors. Koestler’s distinction between an effective national-level petition and the empty gesture of issuing a global manifesto implied that their collaboration on a new League for the Rights of Man was utopian, in his personal view, and therefore pointless.
On 3 May, Russell wrote to Koestler, charging him with mistreatment of his wife and mismanagement of the petition.Footnote 85 The next day, Mamaine apologized to Russell, saying how “horrified” she was about the clerical error.Footnote 86 She also relayed, “We rang up Peter and found she had just left for Cambridge. I had no idea she was leaving so soon.”Footnote 87 This admission indicates that Peter’s 29 April letter to Koestler, which opened by saying that she was returning to Cambridge to see her husband, had only been read by the addressee, not his secretary. By the end of May, Mamaine blamed Peter for the demise of the petition project. In a letter to Kirwan, she turned her initial guilt for the clerical error into contempt for her female peer: “Peter Russell seems to have completely bitched up (a) our relations with Russell and (b) Arthur’s world-saving scheme, in which at first Russell expressed great willingness to cooperate.”Footnote 88
On 6 May, Koestler wrote to Russell to confront the fallout between the couples and dismissed the “complications of a personal order” between them as irrelevant to the “urgent” matter of their work on the petition.Footnote 89 Without mentioning his “blazing row” with Peter or her angry letter to him, Koestler informed Russell, “before I had your letter I believed that it was all just a momentary ‘Misstimmung’, and the less it was made into an “incident” the sooner it would be forgotten.”Footnote 90 Koestler’s indirect, euphemistic writing—including his use of quotation marks and a feminine German noun meaning “bad mood”—deflated the so-called “incident” with Peter as a mere emotional misunderstanding that should pass if the men ignored it. And yet Koestler’s language reinforced Peter’s use of the term “mood” in her 29 April letter to him, in which she regretted not leaving when his attitude turned ominous.
On 13 May, Russell wrote to Koestler to formally end their collaboration on the petition, and implicitly, the manifesto for the league.Footnote 91 Peter then wrote to Koestler on 17 May, calling for a “truce” between them.Footnote 92 By the end of the month, Orwell had moved to Jura, abandoning his leadership of the manifesto project.Footnote 93
Although the original manifesto and petition collaborations ended in May 1946, when Russell withdrew and Orwell moved, Koestler pushed forward the plans for a new League for the Rights of Man for about a month, with copious help from Mamaine. On 5 June, he thanked Stewart-Murray for sending fifty copies of the “final draft” of the manifesto.Footnote 94 On 12 June, Mamaine wrote to Kirwan to complain of the brutal work environment under Koestler: “K has been in an absolutely fiendish temper … so life has hardly been worth living.”Footnote 95 The same day, Koestler had his overworked secretary send Orwell, Gollancz, and Hulton copies of the manifesto.Footnote 96
The Koestlers and the Russells briefly resumed socializing in Wales in August 1946, when Peter “provoked” Arthur into “haranguing against women,” and Russell talked to Mamaine “most of the time.” Mamaine confided in a 4 August letter to Kirwan that “Arthur said this was because he [Russell] has a crush on me.”Footnote 97 On 16 August, Mamaine informed Kirwan that they went “out to dinner” again “with the Russells … and Russell made a sort of pass at me, which was pretty awful, though it only consisted of holding my hand and making fine speeches.”Footnote 98 Also at this dinner were Richard Crossman, Labour MP, and his wife Zita.Footnote 99 Crossman later said that Koestler was “a hell of a raper” and had given his wife a “terrible time.”Footnote 100 The Russells and the Koestlers ceased to socialize soon after this date. Russell, however, failed to condemn Koestler’s reputed sexualized dominance of women in their overlapping social circles, including Peter, whom he divorced in 1949 in part for a suspected affair with Koestler.Footnote 101
Soon after Mamaine legally married Koestler in 1950, she confronted her husband about the rumor that he “made love” to Peter.Footnote 102 Koestler responded with coded language, saying that Mamaine knew his “taste and allergies” with regard to women—and suggesting that “made love” was by then a shared euphemism for sex with an “initial rape,” as he had described his sexual taste to her in 1944.Footnote 103 In 1951, Mamaine separated from, then divorced, Koestler.Footnote 104 In 1952, Koestler raped Jill Craigie, the wife of Michael Foot, the Labour politician who collaborated with Orwell on the first extant manifesto.Footnote 105 Mamaine died young of lung disease in 1954, following Orwell, who faced the same end in 1950, just months after he sent Fischer a copy of his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Koestler sent her a copy of the final extant manifesto.Footnote 106
When condensed into a dual timeline, this chronological narrative of the rise and fall of the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle can visually capture a correlation between the dissolution of its league, manifesto, and petition projects and its culture of abuse of women. Figure 1 represents this dual timeline of events. The left column lists vertically the pivotal events in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle’s collaboration on the manifesto and petition projects and their aftermath. The right column lists vertically the known or probable instances of a culture of abuse of women in their circle. The parallel crisis points elucidated between the two columns indicate the correspondence of the culture of abuse on the one hand with the breakdown of the manifesto and petition projects on the other.
The fall of the 1946 League for the Rights of Man, and a culture of abuse of women: a correlated timeline.
Figure 1 Long description
The table has three columns: a date column on the left, a column headed ′Pivotal Events in Collaborations′ in the center and a column headed ′Known or Probable Evidence of a Culture of Abuse against Women′ on the right. Rows are organized chronologically by date, with dates formatted as month and year or as a range. Each row contains a text entry in one or both columns. Not all rows have entries in both columns; some rows carry an entry only in the collaboration column, others only in the abuse column and some carry entries in both.
How the culture of abuse in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle informed their manifesto and petition drafts
This correlated timeline of events (Figure 1) enables two focused case studies of how the culture of abuse in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle informed the drafting of their unpublished and ultimately aborted manifesto and petition projects. The first focused case study shows how Orwell introduced a sexually discriminatory clause into the manifesto that excluded women from the leadership of the proposed new League for the Rights of Man. The second focused case study shows how Peter Russell critically and philosophically responded to Koestler’s sexually discriminatory and tyrannical behavior toward her by superadding a critique of his concept of “psychological disarmament” to the emended petition and echoing this same critique in her angry letter to him on 29 April 1946, soon after his probable indecent assault or rape of her. These two case studies—rooted in close textual and handwriting analysis of all extant versions of the manifesto and petition and related manuscripts—help to document how a culture of abuse of women affected the composition of these projects. While Orwell’s case illustrates how his patriarchal views about leadership shaped the arguments of the manifesto drafts without contestation from his main coauthors, Peter Russell’s case shows how her philosophical contribution to the petition was part of her feminist resistance to Koestler’s “browbeating” and “bullying” behavior and its sexist implication that she was “too stupid to understand” her “husband’s opinions,” let alone represent them in the drafting process.Footnote 107
Orwell’s introduction of the “men of standing” clause into the manifesto
Orwell’s introduction of sexually discriminatory language into the Manifesto provides a focused case study of how the wider culture of abuse of women in his circle infiltrated the drafting of the documents intended to found the new, but never launched, League for the Rights of Man. In the first extant manifesto, dating to between 2 January and 27 February 1946, there is clear evidence of Orwell and Koestler’s authorial contributions, with their distinctive, handwritten edits still decipherable in the margins of the typed pages. Its title—“L.F.D.M. League for the Freedom and Dignity of Man”—appears to be in Koestler’s hand.Footnote 108 Since no other extant fragments or versions of the manifesto feature a title, it may have been superimposed by Koestler upon the first extant manifesto after Orwell had made a few handwritten edits on the typescript and sent it to Koestler on 27 February. The four-page document is divided into four Roman-numeraled parts. Part I describes the political impetus for the league, Part II sets forth the purpose of the league, Part III distinguishes the league from other international organizations, and Part IV envisions its leadership.
In Part I, the opening paragraphs call for the advancement of a new, postwar iteration of the modern international order that pairs liberal democratic ideas with economic egalitarianism in the name of preventing “war” between “the Western Powers” (led by “America and England”) and the “third great power, Russia.” Amid the tensions of the immediate postwar nuclear crisis, the first extant manifesto boldly proposes that democracy itself must be redefined. It identifies the root of the conflict between Russia and the West as a political-economic dispute over the meaning of democracy itself: “Politically this conflict finds expression in the two dia-metrically opposed interpretations of the word ‘democracy’ which thus loses all practical meaning.” After defining the Russian model of democracy as “Autocracy plus national planning” and the model of the “U.S.A. and pre-Labour Britain” as “Democracy plus laisser faire,” the first extant manifesto swiftly moves to propose a synthesis of these two prevailing political-economic visions of democracy in a new form of national-level government—“Democracy plus national planning”—which it claims exists “nowhere” yet in the world.
In Part II, the first extant manifesto transitions to define the purpose of the league as the defence of democracy, but not without editorial evidence of the group’s contestation of the very definition of democracy itself: “The aim of the League is to fight for the preservation of political democracy ^ Western [ILLEGIBLE] [ILLEGIBLE] and for its rejuvenation in the sense indi-cated above. The programme of the Rights of Man has to be restated in the light of developments since the French Revolution.” The crossing out of “political democracy” and the handwritten insertion of “Western,” likely in Orwell’s hand, and two more illegible words after it, indicate that the group was not in agreement about what terminology would succinctly describe their political ideal articulated in Part I, “Democracy plus national planning.”
Pragmatically abandoning such attempts at technical definitions, Part II moves on with rhetorical flourish to contend that “[t]he tenet that ‘all men are born equal’ has to be developed int/o the tenet that all men should be born with equal opportunities to develop their individual potentialities.” To articulate this truly egalitarian interpretation of the human birthright to equal opportunity, Part II enlists the “State” as the main guarantor of legally mandated and enforceable equal rights for individuals. “The main function of the State,” it posits, “is to protect the individual against exploitation by individuals or groups, against the misappropriation by individuals or groups of his creative faculties and achievements.”
Part III turns abruptly to distinguishing the league from “voluntary organisations of men of good-will” such as “Quakers, committees, leagues etc.” These have failed due to either their lack of “clarified fundamental ideas,” at one extreme, or their abundance of “theorists without practical activities,” at the other. It mentions the “League for the Rights of Man” as an example of the first problem. It asserts that the LDH was “captured by the Communists” due to its “lack of a clear theoretical platform.” It implies that the “proposed League” should rectify this problem with its manifesto, but again dissolves into contention, with editorial crossings out breaking up its initially concerted vision that the “proposed League should unify a maximum of theoretical soundness and clarity with a maximum of noise.” It recovers its clarity of vision, however, by arguing that the League “has to make xxx itself an advocate of victims of infringements against the principles outlined above in any part of the wprld [sic], whether in the British Colonial Empire or in Russian occupied territory.” The legalistic term “victims of infringements” may have been adopted due to Foot’s suggestion that the phrase “victims of aggression” be eliminated. Foot’s other suggestion, to eliminate the rhetorically elitist term “the masses,” seems to have also been implemented; it exists nowhere in the extant manifestos or fragments.Footnote 109
Part IV envisions the organizational structure of the proposed League. It argues, “The committee of founders should theoretically include men of renown standing and integrity who subscribe to the basic platform of the movement.” The editorial strike-out of “renown” for “standing” appears to be in Orwell’s hand (Figure 2).
Orwell’s handwritten edits in the manifesto, including the “men of standing” phrase. Image credit: Orwell Archive, University College London.
Orwell, known for his “plebeian” advocacy of “common decency” toward the “common man,” may have wanted to temper the elitist implication that famous men would most effectively fulfill the role of founder.Footnote 110 However, the resulting phrase—“men of standing and integrity”—still reflects Orwell’s “old-Etonian,” elitist and patriarchal biases concerning the value of the well-educated, “decent fellow” for filling important leadership positions in society.Footnote 111 The first extant manifesto concludes with examples of its ideal spectrum of founders—from “Orwell” himself to the anarchist literary critic Herbert “Read” on the “Left,” to the antitotalitarian, neo-Tory journalist Frederick “Voigt” on the “Right.” Although these examples were meant to represent the liberal, open-minded, supposedly nonpartisan character of the proposed international organization, they betray the actual founders’ elitist and patriarchal biases in naming renowned “men” of “standing and integrity” as their ideal intellectual leaders who could reasonably disagree on partisan political matters yet diplomatically concur on basic principles for defending the rights of man and democracy worldwide. Since the first extant manifesto uses third-person voice to name Orwell as an example of an ideal left-wing founder and man “of standing,” either it suggests that he may not have authored the final section by himself, or it betrays his old-Etonian and patriarchal biases still further.
All extant later versions of the manifesto incorporate the phrase “men of standing and integrity,” which Orwell had corrected from “men of renown and integrity” by introducing “standing” in his own hand. Fragment I adds a further qualification of nonpartisanship for those men who constitute the “central body” of the league: “men of standing and integrity who cannot be regarded as the sevants of any sectional interest.” In Fragment II, the wider sentence remains the same, except the word “sevants” has been corrected to “servants,” and an opening distinction has been made between the “Founders” and the “Central body” of the organization: “The Comite of Founders and the Central body of the League should consist of men of standing and integrity who cannot be regarded as servants of any sectional interest.” In the final extant manifesto, the only change to this sentence is the correction of the shorthand “Comite” to “committee.” This iterative series of revisions suggests that Section IV of the first extant manifesto, with its discussion of the qualifications of the league’s ideal founders, was a launching point for the drafting and revision of these fragments and the final extant manifesto.
The gendered and classed implication of Orwell’s original “men of standing and integrity” clause was that elite, well-regarded men would be the ideal founders of the league. Fragments I and II and the final extant manifesto make this implication stronger by suggesting that women belong in the membership but not in the leadership of the organization. Fragment I specifies that its “central body” should “consist of men of standing and integrity who cannot be regarded as the sevants of any sectional interest.” Fragment II adds that both “The Comite of Founders” and “the Central body of the League” should “consist of men of standing and integrity who cannot be regarded as servants of any sectional interest.” Fragment II goes on, in the next sentence, to imply that while women were not the ideal founders or leaders of the organization, they should not be excluded from the general membership: “The League should be open to xxx men and women of all parties races and creeds who suscribe to the principles outlined above, and closed to all those who, for whatever ideological motives, condone xxxxinfringemen ts.” This membership nondiscrimination clause is a revision of the final line of Fragment I, which stated more crudely, in borderline racist and stereotypical terms, that the league “should not allow itself to be known as an anti-Russian organization, but should make it clear from the start that ti will defend the rights of Jews, Indians, Negroes or any persecuted person whatsoever.” Also notable in this first draft of a nondiscrimination clause for the final extant manifesto is the lack of any reference to women as a historically oppressed or otherwise “persecuted” group.
In sum, fragment II introduces the right of “women” to be members while rhetorically reinforcing that only “men of standing and integrity” should constitute the founders and the central body of leaders. These partial and men-biased attempts at drafting nondiscrimination clauses in fragments I and II lead to the final extant manifesto’s failure to fully integrate women’s rights into the “rights of man”—such as habeas corpus—that it professes to globally defend against “infringements.” Ironically, given the wider culture of sexual assault in the authors’ circle, the final extant manifesto preserves this masculine-biased distinction between the “men of standing” who found and lead the organization, and the “men and women of all parties, races, and creeds” who have the right to constitute its membership as long as they do not “condone infringements” of the rights of man and democracy as codified in the manifesto itself. The resulting contradiction is that the manifesto’s “defence of the individual” against “all … violations of democratic rights” did not apply in full to women, in the text of the drafts or in the process of drafting them. This contradiction backfired on the male leaders of the manifesto project insofar as the culture of abuse of women in their circle corresponded with their failure to launch the new League for the Rights of Man.
Peter Russell’s philosophical response to Koestler in the petition
Peter Russell’s written confrontations with Koestler in and about the petition drafts provide a case study of how the culture of abuse of women in their circle provoked her philosophical rebuttal of his nationalistic and patriarchal views, sparking the dissolution of their collaboration. Her enraged 29 April 1946 letter to Koestler provides crucial evidence of a recent, highly charged, sexualized conflict between them during the petition-drafting process in Wales. “[E]ven if you had not been so rude to me,” she wrote, “personally discussion would have been [eventually] useless. I ought to have walked out sooner—as soon as I saw the mood you were in.”Footnote 112 The letter goes on to demonstrate her substantive intellectual role in the revisions evident on the emended petition.
The emended petition had been corrected heavily in the hands of Mamaine, Koestler, and Peter, presumably with the goal of Bertrand Russell’s later review and approval of the suggested line edits. The most substantial of the suggestions were in Peter’s hand, in some discursive notes added to the end of the emended petition, after the seemingly superadded, slanted, handwritten heading “U.S.A” (Figure 3):
Since psychological disarmament
[option?] applied to Russia, doesn’t
exist with other countries — term
too absolute—it may be asked
why make such a demand of
Russia only.
Peter Russell’s handwritten intervention in the emended petition. Image credit: Bertrand Russell Papers, McMaster University, Canada.
A parallel passage in Peter’s 29 April letter to Koestler allowed the identification of this sharp philosophical question as hers. The handwriting in the above passage at the end of the emended petition matches her outraged comment to Koestler about the “futility of discussing the psychological disarmament of nations with an individual armed cap a pied [head to toe] like a hedgehog.”Footnote 113 She exposed the potentially dangerous political contradiction at the heart of Koestler’s divisive idea. Psychological disarmament—or the elimination of the cultural and intellectual conditions of suspicion between Russia and the Western bloc—did not apply evenly to all nations. It rather targeted the threats that the totalitarian Soviet Union posed to the postwar international order, especially the spread of disinformation and fear as Russia strove to develop atomic weaponry equal to or greater than that of the current nuclear superpower, the “U.S.A.” This imbalance in the application of the idea of psychological disarmament would only seem to exacerbate the conflicts between the Western bloc nations, including Britain, and the USSR.
On 30 April, the very next day after Peter sent her righteous letter to Koestler, Gollancz also wrote to him, reporting that he had already sent “the wad of stuff” to Russell.Footnote 114 The socialist publisher’s well-meaning attempt at rectifying Mamaine’s clerical error led Russell to write to Koestler on 3 May. In addition to protesting Koestler’s derogatory treatment of Peter, who was meant to serve as his equal and representative in the petition-drafting process, Russell charged Koestler with ignoring the specific
objections which I had asked my wife to communicate to you. This was especially the case in regard to Article 8, to which I had two main objections: a. that the preamble still suggested the possibility of using psychological disarmament as a quid pro quo for territorial concessions. B. that the section about Reuter and Tass appeared to be unworkable.”Footnote 115
The Russells were jointly concerned that if promoting a culture of psychological disarmament between Russia and the West came at the expense of Britain’s concession of territorial land grabs and imperial conquests to Russia, then the petition would not contribute to either the long-term ideal of world peace or even the shorter-term practical aim of reducing the present threat of nuclear war. The “Reuter and Tass” clause in section (c) of Article 8 had proposed to ask the London-based Reuters and Russian government TASS news agencies to each compile “a news summary of 500–1000 words per day which the other Agency undertakes to distribute for internal consumption.” The Russells believed that this ideal of international freedom of information was “unworkable” amid the Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the Western bloc.
Peter Russell’s handwritten intervention at the end of the emended petition suggests that she insisted on including a substantive critique of Koestler’s idea of “psychological disarmament” in its draft form, as a reminder that the Russells would not sign on to the document if the divisive concept was not nuanced or eliminated. Mamaine, as secretary of the project, preserved in good faith this handwritten intervention in the margins of the emended petition. Ironically, this secretarial action spurred the breakdown of the collaboration between the couples when Bertrand realized that Koestler had not incorporated the edits of his wife into the final draft—even as he reportedly doubted her claims that Koestler either had “tried to rape” or had “raped” her.Footnote 116
Peter’s edits show her philosophical contributions to the group’s debate over the international scope and purpose of the petition to the British government, her resistance to nationalism and anti-Russian prejudice, and her bravery in standing her ground in argument with Koestler around the time when he likely indecently assaulted or raped her. While Orwell’s edits to the manifesto reveal his patriarchal prejudices with regard to women, rights, and leadership, Peter’s edits to the petition demonstrate her philosophical convictions and her principled feminist response to “browbeating” by a man who thought her “too stupid” to be his equal in the collaboration.Footnote 117 These focused case studies indicate, through textual evidence, that the Orwell–Koestler–Russell “league” ultimately fell apart as a result of the men’s collective inability to fully defend, in theory and in practice, the rights of women.
Conclusion: the rights of men have little value without the rights of women
This archival study has shown that an abusive culture toward women in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle informed the composition and decomposition of their plans for a new League for the Rights of Man. The systematic analysis of manuscripts and unpublished papers has led to a seemingly paradoxical and ironic finding about the unsung work of women in the circle. Despite the abusive culture, Mamaine Koestler, Celia Kirwan, Peter Russell, and Katharine Stewart-Murray helped to create and preserve texts that have enabled the study and use of the manifesto and petition to the present. Stewart-Murray and Ruth Fischer also ensured the two known political legacies of the manifesto. Stewart-Murray “plagiarized” its language concerning “the rights of individuals” in her 1946 charter for the British League for European Freedom, an anticommunist “human rights” organization that advocated for the rights of people under Soviet occupation.Footnote 118 Fischer used her copy of the final extant manifesto, which Koestler sent to her in 1949, to lead the drafting of the 1950 Manifesto for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This CIA-sponsored, anticommunist manifesto echoed many of the themes of the 1946 manifesto and petition, including the roles of cultural exchange and intellectual freedom in the preservation of peace, democracy, and human rights in the Cold War international order.Footnote 119 After Russell refused to join Fischer’s project when Koestler approached him, he collaborated with Albert Einstein on a “manifesto” for nuclear disarmament without resemblance to the 1946 manifesto or petition.Footnote 120
Despite its women-led legacies for two human rights manifestos and anticommunist organizations in the postwar era, the 1946 manifesto faced neglect until the American sociologist David Smith found the copy in Fischer’s papers and published a transcript.Footnote 121 The lack of uptake of the manifesto (and the far more neglected petition) was best explained by Gollancz in June 1946. The committed socialist critiqued the manifesto for asserting that “democratic rights have little value” without conditions of equal economic opportunity.Footnote 122 He suggested that the line should be rephrased to avoid the appearance of disparaging the value of the equal rights that the manifesto should protect and advance for all. Rights always had “potential” value, Gollancz insisted, for those individuals who did not enjoy them yet.Footnote 123
Gollancz’s conclusion meshes with twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist political theories and histories of international relations and organizations, especially the view that the promulgation of the rights of man has had little value without formal inclusion of, and cultural attention to, the rights of woman.Footnote 124 This archival study helps to rectify the gendered injustice of the neglect of women’s rights in human rights advocacy and organizations, both in history understood as the “past” and in the process of writing “history.” We have modeled some ways in which the intellectual history of women in politics—especially when focused on the intersection of human rights and sexual violence—can shed light on hidden and abusive dimensions of women’s political lives that have been filed away or ignored, typically, as “private” matters without “public” relevance.Footnote 125 By explaining how Orwell, Koestler, and Russell’s disregard for women’s rights derailed their international organization—at the same time as the woman-led UDHR and its six-woman Commission on the Status of Women took off—we have provided further historical support for a foundational plank of 1940s feminist internationalism. This is the political view that human rights organizations and manifestos are unworkable without the full integration of women’s leadership and women’s rights. By exposing a culture of abuse of women and disregard for women’s rights in the Orwell–Koestler–Russell circle, we elucidated the best explanation for the failure of their proposed new League for the Rights of Man. Conversely, we also shed light on the foundational importance of the integration of women’s rights and women’s leadership within successful human rights manifestos and organizations since the postwar era.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244326100900.
Acknowledgments
We thank the commentators on our paper at the 2024 American Political Science Association Meeting, David Armitage and Matthew Cole, as well as the editors of Modern Intellectual History, especially Duncan Kelly, and the anonymous reviewers. We are also grateful for the supportive and insightful feedback of Duncan Bell, Sadie Blanchard, Sam Bray, Shana Scogin, and the late Dione Venables. Our archival research at the University of Edinburgh Library and the Orwell Archive at University College London was supported by the Franco Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The curators and archivists for the Bertrand Russell Archives at the McMaster University Library and the Papers of Sir Victor Gollancz at the University of Warwick Library supplied us with essential scans of documents that enabled our research from afar. We dedicate this article to the memory of the women whose words made it possible, especially Mamaine Paget Koestler, Celia Paget Kirwan Goodman, Patricia “Peter” Russell (Marjorie Helen Spence), Anne Olivier Bell (Anne Popham), and Jill Craigie.
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