The Rights of Man and Wrongs for Women in Postwar Britain: The Failure of Orwell, Koestler, and Russell’s 1946 League for the Rights of Man

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. 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. 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. 3