CHAPTER EIGHT
It would seem surprising, even ironic, that Gertrude Bell, an educated, well-read, well-informed woman who continually challenged herself with new experiences, was active in the anti-suffrage movement. And yet, for her and the women of England, the year 1908 marked a watershed.
For more than sixty years English women had been gaining the right to vote: first, for local boards administering money to the poor, then for school boards, municipal leaders, county councils; in effect, choosing the people who represented their interests as wives and mothers. Issues of local scope. That was enough. Demands for universal suffrage were brusquely turned aside. Queen Victoria herself had written in 1870, “This mad, wicked Folly of Women’s Rights … [is] a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself.”
In fact, a strong female current had been running against the right of women to vote in national elections. Led by Mrs. Humphrey Ward (oddly enough, long active in promoting women’s education at Oxford), they stated, in 1889, “The emancipating process has now reached the limit fixed by the physical constitution of women and by the fundamental difference which must always exist between their main occupations and those of men.” Women, said Mrs. Ward, can never provide the sound judgment to decide questions of “foreign or colonial policy, or grave constitutional change.” Those issues were not within the “necessary and normal experience” of women.
Still, the suffragist movement was gaining momentum. In 1903 Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, an organization pushing for universal suffrage. For five years, Mrs. Pankhurst struggled unsuccessfully. Then, in 1908, she tried more militant methods. With the help of her daughter Christabel, Mrs. Pankhurst led violent demonstrations: the suffragists burned more than a hundred buildings, set fires in hotels and churches, smashed store windows, bombed public areas, and besieged Parliament. “Votes for women!” they screamed as they chained themselves to the iron ledge of the Ladies’ Gallery.
But their shrieks created a backlash. The suffragists’ behavior shocked the public, especially people like Gertrude Bell, who valued tradition. To her, the harassment of public officials was nothing short of heresy. After all, they were among her closest friends and family.
The first committee meeting of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League took place in London during the summer of 1908. Gertrude, happy to lend her support, wrote to her mother that “all went well.” But demands on her time were not so pleasing. “We have Lady Jersey as chairman,” she said, and then went on, “I have been obliged to become honorary secretary which is most horrible.”
Nevertheless, she rallied to the cause. If it seemed odd for one who lived such an unconventional life to take such a conventional position, it was not: Gertrude’s independence only masked her roots. She was a daughter of the Victorian Age, bred in a world dominated by men concerned with nothing less than aggrandizing the Empire, raised in an era graced by women considered to be no less than the bearers and guardians of the English race. As boldly as she behaved in the East, at home she remained within the boundaries of tradition, and her tradition was that of the upper class, privileged, protected and not to be challenged by the impoverished, uneducated working class.
Gertrude had spent hours with Florence helping the wives and mothers of the Bell Brothers’ ironworkers. It only confirmed her view that, though women had the right to work in local government, they were not yet equipped to run the country. In the industrial town of Clarence she had spent mornings reading aloud to members of the magazine club, visiting one or another of the dingy row houses. A knock on the door was often answered by a woman of thirty who looked twice that age, her haggard face lined with years of drudgery, her thick figure ravaged by constant childbirth and miscarriages, her arms filled with infants crying for milk, while screaming toddlers crawled underfoot, the children only a few years away from being sent to work in the coal mines. In the squalor of the crowded flats, the odor of disease clotted the air, and thick soot from the factories coated everything from the bedclothes to the kitchen table. Every day was a struggle to exist. Exhausted and illiterate, these women and tens of thousands like them were in need of education to better their lives at home; they were hardly qualified to make decisions of state, the anti-suffragists said.
Gertrude saw herself as the equal of any man, but most women, she was firmly convinced, were not. Their votes would certainly be questionable; they could even prove to be dangerous. Like her mother Florence, or her father Hugh, or their friends Lord Curzon, Lord Cromer and Lord Robert Cecil, Gertrude argued that the female role was fundamentally different from that of the male: women were meant to rear children; men were meant to run the country. Furthermore, they all believed, only men had the sound judgment to rule the colonies, to determine foreign policy and to decide matters of the constitution; therefore, only men should have the right to cast a ballot. Rare was the woman knowledgeable enough to make a contribution to the affairs of state. Yet even as she promoted the agenda of the Anti-Suffrage League, Gertrude worked on her book about Byzantine Anatolia and yearned to penetrate the mysterious regions of the Arabian desert.