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Authors: Gertrude Bell
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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 countryâthey 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 Iâve 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 Glenconnersâ 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, Gertrudeâs 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
âI summoned my sheikhsâ he wound up (I feeling more and more of a Person as he proceeded). âI read them your letter and I said to them, Oh Sheikhsââwe hung upon his wordsââThis is a womanâwhat must the men be like!â 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 donât permit me to veilâI think Iâm 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 womenâif 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 canât imagine for she has the meanest opinion of foreigners and their ways and their cooking. She dismisses the whole French cuisine at one blow:âthey 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]
Iâm left without any female I can trouble to be intimate with and itâs a very great drawback. [October 13, 1921]
Of Some of the Wives of Her Colleagues
These idle women . . . take no sort of interest in whatâs going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (itâs also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from the life of the town. I
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 countryâthey 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 Iâve 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 Glenconnersâ 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, Gertrudeâs 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
âI summoned my sheikhsâ he wound up (I feeling more and more of a Person as he proceeded). âI read them your letter and I said to them, Oh Sheikhsââwe hung upon his wordsââThis is a womanâwhat must the men be like!â 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 donât permit me to veilâI think Iâm 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 womenâif 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 canât imagine for she has the meanest opinion of foreigners and their ways and their cooking. She dismisses the whole French cuisine at one blow:âthey 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]
Iâm left without any female I can trouble to be intimate with and itâs a very great drawback. [October 13, 1921]
Of Some of the Wives of Her Colleagues
These idle women . . . take no sort of interest in whatâs going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (itâs also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from the life of the town. I
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