Bertrand Russell, Feminism, and Women Philosophers in his Circle

This book examines Bertrand Russell’s complicated relationships to the women around him, and to feminism more generally. The essays in this volume offer scholarly reassessments of these relationships and their import for the history of feminism and of analytic philosophy.

Russell is a founder of analytic philosophy. He has also been called a feminist due to his public, decades-long advocacy for women’s rights and equality of the sexes. But his private behavior towards wives and sexual partners, and his apparently dismissive (occasionally public) responses to some women philosophers, raises the question of what sort of feminist (or chauvinist) Russell actually was.

Focusing on women in Russell’s circle of acquaintance, including feminist activists and his philosophical interlocutors, this book casts new light on a timeless thinker’s feminism and the women who played critical roles in the making of analytic philosophy.

Landon D. C. Elkind is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Western Kentucky University. He currently directs the Principia Rewrite project, which has a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also has a new textual edition of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Alexander Klein is Canada Research Chair, Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre, and Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University. His work focuses on the histories of analytic philosophy and of pragmatism, with a special emphasis on naturalistic philosophy of mind in that historical context (i.e., late 19th and early 20th century). He has both a monograph and an edited book forthcoming with Oxford University Press.