Read Online A Woman in Arabia by Gertrude Bell - Free Book Online

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 requiringeducation 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. Sheorganized 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