Diana E H Russell

Early years in South Africa

Diana E.H. Russell was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, the fourth of six children, to a South African father and a British mother. After completing her Bachelors from the University of Cape Town, at the age of 19, Russell left for Britain.

Education in Britain and the United States

In Britain, she enrolled in a Post Graduate Diploma in Social Science and Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1961, she passed the Diploma with Distinction and also received the prize for the best student in the program. She moved to the United States, in 1963 where she had been accepted into an interdisciplinary PhD program at Harvard University. Her research focused on sociology and the study of revolution.

Fighting apartheid in South Africa

Russell's research focus probably stems from her own involvement in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. In 1963, Russell had joined the Liberal Party of South Africa that had been founded by Alan Paton, the author of Cry the Beloved Country. While participating in a peaceful protest in Cape Town, Russell was arrested with other party members. She came to the conclusion that non-violent strategies were futile against the brutal violence and repression of the white Afrikaner police state. Thereafter, she joined the African Resistance Movement (ARM), an underground revolutionary movement fighting apartheid in South Africa. The principal strategy of the ARM was to bomb and sabotage government property, and though Russell was only a peripheral member of the ARM, she still risked a 10-year incarceration if caught.

Teaching feminism

In 1968, Russell married an American psychologist who taught at the University of California, San Francisco. Subsequently, she started teaching as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mills College in Oakland, California in 1969. Not only did she offer one of the first women's studies courses in the college, but it was also one of the earliest of such courses offered in the United States. During the 22 years she taught at Mills College, she developed many more courses in feminism and pushed for Feminism to emerge as a major field of study at the college.

Research and writings on rape and sexual abuse

Rape and other forms of sexual exploitation and abuse of women has been one of the primary focuses of Russell's research and writings. In her book, The Politics of Rape (1975) Russell suggested that rape was a display of socially defined perceptions of masculinity instead of deviant social behavior. Her other books in this area are Rape in Marriage(1982), Sexual Exploitation: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Workplace Harassment (1984). In 1986, Russell published the The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (1986). It was one of the first scientific research study of incestuous sexual abuse to be published. For it she received the C.Wright Mills Award in 1986. In 1993, she edited an anthology on pornography, Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography. Her 1994 book, Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm which includes 100 pornographic photos, was a study establishing how pornography encourages men to rape and leads to increased incidents of rape.

Organizing the First International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women

Russell lobbied other feminists for two years and eventually was successful in organizing the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels, Belgium in 1976. The conference which lasted for four days, in which individual women from different countries testified to their personal experiences of various forms of violence and oppressions because of their gender, was attended by 2,000 women from 40 countries. By the second day it had dissolved into disaster, as "radical activists were storming the stage one after another in an improvised free-for-fall".

Simone de Beauvoir in her introductory speech to the Tribunal said: "I salute the International Tribunal as the beginning of the radical decolonization of women." Later, Belgian feminist Nicole Van de Ven documented the event in a book, Crimes Against Women: The Proceedings of the International Tribunal (1976).

Redefining and politicizing "Femicide"

In 1976 Russell redefined ‘Femicide’, as "the killing of females by males because they are female." At the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, she testified to numerous examples of lethal forms of male violence against women and girls from different cultures around the world. Russell's intention was to politicize the term, and bring attention to the misogyny driving these lethal crimes against women, which she said gender-neutral terms like murder don’t do. Russell who is puzzled about the lack of response of women's groups in the United States to the use of the term 'Femicide' still continues to advocate the use of 'Femicide' to women's groups in the United States and around the world. She explains that in order to deal with these extreme crimes against women, it necessary to recognize that like race based hate crimes, "Femicides are [also] lethal hate crimes", and that most killings of women by men are "extreme manifestations of male dominance and sexism."

Feminist movements in many countries in South America, as in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Chile, and El Salvador among others, have adopted the use of Russell's politicized 'Femicide' and have successfully used it socially, politically and legally to address lethal violence against women in their respective countries. In 1992, she co-edited an anthology, Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing.

Books

Chapters in books