A Woman in Arabia (7 page)

The glass speaks truth to them that understand.

Night is with child, hast thou not heard men say?

“Night is with child! what will she bring to birth?”

I sit and ask the stars when thou'rt away.

Oh come! and when the nightingale of mirth

Pipes in the Spring-awakened garden ground,

In Hafiz' heart shall ring a sweeter sound,

Diviner nightingales attune their lay.

The moral and intellectual debate of the age was female suffrage, and from the moment of being allowed to join the adults for meals, Gertrude heard the issue being discussed passionately from all points of view. Hugh and Florence were opposed to it for cogent reasons, but some of their friends were adamant in its support. All the Bells agreed with John Stuart Mill, the greatest proponent of women's emancipation of his time, that it was vital for a woman to be a “Person”: it became a family joke that the women seldom felt themselves to be quite enough of a Person.

It has gone down in history that Gertrude was an antifeminist. In 2004, London's National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition of pioneering women travelers called “Off the Beaten Track.” Gertrude's corner was accompanied by a four-line caption—all that was devoted to her—stating “Despite her own achievements she actively opposed British women being given the right to vote.” Technically correct, the statement is a crude assessment of her ultimate intentions and one that takes no account of the complex politics of the times, or her position as a daughter of the Industrial Revolution. This oversimplification is often leveled against her and has been partially responsible for the way in which her achievements have been undervalued.

While the Reform Bill of 1832 and its successors had increased voters from 500,000 to 5 million by 1884, the vote was still limited to men of property. Only one quarter of the men in Britain had the vote. While the franchise was denied to so many men, Parliament could not have contemplated giving the vote
to women. In discussions about giving the vote only to women of property, Parliament came up against an insuperable difficulty: the property laws. The possessions of wives automatically became their husbands' property on marriage. This was the law that led Gertrude's father to refuse her marriage to Henry Cadogan, known to be a gambler. So married women would be denied the vote, while much of the franchise would have been granted to widows, prostitutes, and spinsters. As independent and rational women such as Gertrude and Florence Nightingale felt, women's suffrage could not be addressed until the property laws were transformed.

Matters such as health, schooling, men's leisure activities, social services, the Poor Laws, subsistence benefit, and the workhouses and almshouses were dealt with by local government. In these issues Florence Bell and most of the women she knew were involved up to the hilt. Unfortunately, when they and other women across Britain achieved the local vote, men rioted in the streets of several towns. These women dreaded a reaction to the demands of the suffragists—who kept within the law—and the suffragettes—who broke it—that would bring retribution and destroy the advances that women had already made.

Whenever Gertrude stayed at home too long, she would be drawn into Florence's social work, summed up by Florence in her book
At the Works
. Factually exhaustive, exposing the suffering endured by the poorer working families and especially when they struck hard times, it poses no remedies. Capitalists and employers as the Bells were, Hugh saw no conflict between masters and men—he saw them as mutually dependent. He paid his men fairly according to the dictates of the day, he was active in Liberal politics, and he believed in the role of the new trade unions. As civic leaders and local benefactors, the Bells built assembly rooms, libraries, schools, and offices. They also opened a Middlesbrough center where exhausted workers could go and where Florence would play the piano and lead the songs.

At the time the vote, considered today to be a universal human right, was judged to be a serious business requiring
education and political acumen. The government of the day was concerned with such issues as defense, Irish Home Rule, free trade, penal reform, the Reform Bill, and political corruption. What could a wife with a houseful of children know of these issues, asked Florence, and how could she find the time to learn to read if she was illiterate?

If anything tipped Gertrude into action, other than family pressure, it was the militancy of Christabel Pankhurst, who by 1904 was leading women against what she called “the noxious character of male sexuality.” The suffragettes were engaged in a war against men, employing methods tantamount to terrorism. They denounced marriage as legalized prostitution, and they attacked property, smashing windows and train carriages and slashing paintings of nude women in galleries. They assaulted random men who happened to resemble Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. They sent packages of sulfuric acid to his successor, Lloyd George, later attempting to burn down his house.

Gertrude joined the movement against women's suffrage in 1908 and became a member of the Anti-Suffrage League. Being the person she was, she initially entered the fray with zest, and it was probably Gertrude who collected 250,000 signatures for the anti-suffrage petition of 1909; but soon her letters betrayed a lack of mission, which suggests she had taken on the work mostly to please Florence.

In Iraq, from 1915, she made few female friends. There were exceptions, but she made cutting remarks about the British wives of her colleagues in Baghdad. “A little woman” was one of her deadliest assessments. She conceded that her great friend Haji Naji, who regularly sent her fruit and vegetables from his garden, was “an odd substitute for a female friend but the best I can find.”

Later in life, her work for Muslim women would be considerable. In her earliest encounters with women of the harem, and particularly in Hayyil, Gertrude had heard their tragic stories and remained deeply impressed by their subjection. She heartily disliked the restrictions placed on Muslim women in the Islamic societies of the East and did what she could to help. She
organized a series of health lectures by a woman doctor, which were well attended by the Muslim wives. She helped found the first girls' school in Baghdad, and she led the fund-raising for a women's hospital. Her regular Tuesday tea parties for women put her on a friendly footing with the chief families of Baghdad.

Gertrude was to become a supremely civilized and able woman. With no husband or children to preoccupy her, her abilities spanned the spectrum from poetry to administration, from pioneering adventure and sportsmanship to archaeology. She possessed a rare grasp of world history and contemporary political debate alongside a love of gardening and pretty clothes. She was proficient in six languages. And all of this was well grounded in the gentler human qualities: a deep sense of family, of landscape and architecture, and a love of life itself. Few have rivaled her in the sheer range of her capabilities. As a Person she came to fulfill the highest aspirations that John Stuart Mill had imagined possible for women.

Mount Carmel, Haifa, March 30, 1902

I am much entertained to find that I am a Person in this country—they all think I am a Person! . . . Renown is not very difficult to acquire here.

Damascus, February 27, 1905

I find the Government here has been in an agony of nervousness all the time I was in the Jebel Druze! They had three telegrams a day from Salkhad about me. . . . The governor here has sent me a message to say would I honour him by coming to see him, so I've answered graciously. . . . An official lives in this hotel. He spent the evening talking to me and offering to place the whole of the organisation of Syria at my disposal. He also tried to find out all my views on Druze and Bedouin affairs, but he did not get much forrader there. I have become a Person in Syria!

95 Sloane Street, London, March 28, 1913

Last night I went to a delightful party at the Glenconners' and just before I arrived 4 suffragettes set on Asquith and seized hold of him. Whereupon Alec Laurence in fury seized 2 of them and twisted their arms till they shrieked. Then one of them bit him in the hand till he bled. When he told me the tale he was steeped in his own gore.

In 1917, Gertrude's friend Sheikh Fahd Beg ibn Hadhdhal came to Baghdad on a visit early in the British administration of Iraq and described the powerful effect on him produced by one of her letters. She wrote home of what he said to her colleagues in the secretariat.

June 1, 1917

“I summoned my sheikhs” he wound up (I feeling more and more of a Person as he proceeded). “I read them your letter and I said to them, Oh Sheikhs”—we hung upon his words—“This is a woman—what must the men be like!” This delicious peroration restored me to my true place in the twinkling of an eye.

Of Religious Leaders and the Veiling of Women

. . . Their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don't permit me to veil—I think I'm right there, for it would be a tacit admission of inferiority which would put our intercourse from the first out of focus. Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women—if the women were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other.
[March 14, 1920]

Of British Women Abroad

As for the wife, why she comes abroad I can't imagine for she has the meanest opinion of foreigners and their ways and their cooking. She dismisses the whole French cuisine at one blow:—they give you no potatoes.
[April 23, 1893]

. . . The devil take all inane women.
[September 6, 1917]

. . . A collection of more tiresome women I never encountered.
[September 27, 1920]

I'm left without any female I can trouble to be intimate with and it's a very great drawback.
[October 13, 1921]

Of Some of the Wives of Her Colleagues

These idle women . . . take no sort of interest in what's going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it's also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from the life of the town. I now begin to understand why British Government has come to grief in India, where our women do just the same thing.
[Baghdad, June 19, 1921]

But she made good friends with Aurelia Tod, and much regretted her absence when the Tods left Baghdad.

I miss her dreadfully. She is the only intimate friend I have here; there isn't one of the other women whom I care about or can talk to with complete frankness. It's such a comfort to have someone to whom you can say everything! And besides she adds very greatly to the pleasure of life by making a centre for us where we can meet cheerfully and agreeably.
[Baghdad, May
8, 1921]

Of Muslim Wives

They [the ladies of Baghdad] never see anything or go anywhere, think of it! Some of them remain quite human and cheerful but
a great many are hysterical and nerve-ridden. They look like plants reared in a cellar.
[Baghdad, May 4, 1918]

The poor thing never leaves the house or sees anyone. There are many families where the women are entirely secluded. I'm bound to say they hate it, and my heart aches with boredom when I think of them.
[Baghdad, December 27, 1918]

Last night I dined with Sir Aylmer
*
to meet Ja'far
*
and Nuri
*
and their wives! I doubted whether they would be bold enough to bring them, the wives I mean, but they were—it certainly is a great step forward. . . . They behaved perfectly, their complete absence of self-consciousness giving them a natural distinction which many great ladies might envy.
[December 8, 1921]

Of the First Women's Club Established in Baghdad

I'm wholly in favour of it—it's the first step in female emancipation here—and yet wholly against it because it's going to give me such a lot of trouble.

Aren't we advancing Moslem women? There's a quite considerable women's movement going on.

Of Reactions to a Lecture She Gave to an Audience of Muslim Women

I discoursed to them on the ancient history of Iraq and modern excavation. Some of them listened and some didn't—they haven't got the habit of attention. But they'll have to learn it.
[January 30, 1924]

Of Her First Meeting with King Faisal's Wife and Daughters

Just think of the life they've all led, imprisoned in the Mecca palace with a pack of women and slaves! Just to sit on their balcony and see the Tigris flowing must be wonderful to them.
[December 23, 1924 ]

Gertrude much admired a Muslim woman who refused to submit herself to the usual Islamic rules.

She is an intrepid woman, holds her own against her men folk and goes about in Najaf scarcely veiled. . . . [December 5, 1920]

She is really a very remarkable woman, speaks English as well as I do and French better, and is quite free of the veil though a good Moslem. [
October 12, 1922]

She wondered if the veiling of women might become a thing of the past, at least as a universal institution.

May 15, 1921

The women who have come back from Syria or Constantinople find the Baghdad social observances very trying. They have been accustomed to much greater freedom. As soon as we get our local institutions firmly established they will be bolder. They and their husbands are afraid that any steps taken now would set all the prejudiced old tongues wagging and jeopardize their future. Nevertheless these new men bring their wives to see me which is an unexpected departure from Baghdad customs, according to which a man would never go about with his wife. I welcome everything that tends in this direction but again one can do little but give sympathetic welcome to the woman. They must work out their own salvation and it wouldn't help them to be actively backed by an infidel, even if the infidel were I who am permitted many things here.