She worked for the UK-government-funded Moscow newspaper British Ally, and in 1958 she led the "Women's Peace Caravan" across Europe during the Cold War.

Dora Winifred Black was born at 1 Mount Villas, Luna Road, Thornton Heath, Croydon, in Surrey, into an English upper-middle-class family, the second of four children.

[1] Her father, Sir Frederick Black, worked his way up in the Civil Service and laid great store by his children's education, regardless of their gender.

[3] Russell supported Rose Witcop and Guy Aldred and who were prosecuted for publishing Margaret Sanger's Family Limitation which was a guide to contraception.

[5] Russell,[6] her husband and John Maynard Keynes, paid the legal costs of the unsuccessful appeal.

[11] Public male ally H. G. Wells refused to support her campaign which he believed was only of appeal to women.

[11] In 1929 Russell organised the World League for Sexual Reform's highly successful Congress in London with the Australian-born birth control campaigner Norman Haire.

Instead, Russell espoused scientific, libertarian and progressive education,[14] with one former student reminiscing: "One of my fondest memories is of the Natural History lessons with Dora, based on the study of that great tome ‘The Science of Life’ (by H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley & G. P.Wells).

Dora encouraged us to question, to follow our curiosity […] into all sorts of highways & bye-ways of phenomena of life; to speculate; to wonder […] I remember sheer fascination and a sense of the infinity of the field of knowledge that was waiting to be explored.

[17] After the war, she became an advocate of the peace movement and was one of the founding members of the CND, in which she joined with other prominent leftists (Bertrand Russell, J.

– With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression.

Russell was unimpressed by Vladimir Lenin, but Black, like many English socialists at the time, saw a vision of a future ideal civilisation.

Implicit was her conviction that both men and women were polygamous by nature and should therefore be free, whether married or not, to engage in sexual relationships that were based on mutual love.

[21] The prologue explains why she chose the title:[21] "Hypatia was a university lecturer denounced by Church dignitaries and torn to pieces by Christians.