Gertrude Bell: The Feminist Paradox of Britain’s Empire

Image taken from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

Gertrude Bell’s life (1868-1926) as an archaeologist, traveller, diplomat and anti-suffragist offers a plethora of insights for historians analysing the significance of gender in twentieth-century Britain. To the Arabs, she was known as ‘Khatun’, which means ‘Lady of the Court’, and to others, she was ‘the maker of Iraq.’ Recent historiography portrays her life as somewhat of a dichotomy; it seems surprising that the first woman to achieve a First in Modern History at Oxford and the only woman to obtain an official posting within the British Diplomatic Corps in Iraq (1920s) was also a staunch anti-suffragist. This essay uses Bell’s career to explore how gender, race and class shaped access to power in twentieth-century Britain. To define ‘British history’, both the British Empire and Britain’s domestic context will be considered. It will explore how her intellect, wealth and race transgressed gender boundaries in both the East and West, whilst also considering how her view on race and of the ‘Other’ interacted with this theme.

Bell’s involvement in the Middle East suggests how some wealthy women could inform government policy during a time when they were mostly excluded from the public domain. Bell is famous for her role in the Arab states, where she published sketches, letters, and memoranda. Most significantly, her ‘Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia’ was published as a white paper in 1920, reflecting her direct involvement in implementing government strategies. Likewise, she was at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and at the 1921 Conference in Cairo with Churchill to help draw up Iraq’s borders. This illustrates growing female influence in politics since the 1918 Representation of Women and the Qualification of Women Act. However, Bell’s involvement can also be accounted for by her great wealth. The authority Bell exercised was fostered by her wealth, forming networks with officials in the East, which allowed her to travel with provisions of local guides and no monetary concerns. Hence, it is difficult to corroborate her experiences with most working-class women in Britain at the time.

Bell’s work further suggests the significance of how gender interacted with race in twentieth century British history. Whilst the unmarried Bell enjoyed freedom and rejected conventional ideas of religion and the family unit as the nucleus of British society, her views on race were primarily traditional. Blunt and Rose have convincingly argued that white racial superiority in the colonial realm allowed women to overcome the gender subjugation faced at home. This is crucial for Bell, where her race in the ‘Orient’ saw her transgressing gender boundaries, thus adhering to ideals of white supremacy that the empire propagated. Nevertheless, none of Bell’s ground-breaking achievements could transgress the staunch gender constructs of Britain’s twentieth century. Indeed, Letters from Baghdad highlights how, during Bell’s life, more people associated the Middle East with TE Lawrence than with her. Yet, during Hussein’s regime, her name provoked an image of a peaceful Baghdad. This displays how Bell’s life, recognition and legacy reflect the upwards trajectory of gender equality in British twentieth century history as her achievements increasingly came to the fore.

Bell’s work in the Middle East also reveals how perceptions of the ‘Other’ were shaped through gender. Much of the later debate about her legacy centres on Edward  Said, who devoted notable attention to Bell in his Orientalism. Postcolonial and feminist studies have criticised Said for not examining women’s roles in his work, yet his critical portrayal of Bell as exploitative for personal recognition in the East suggests that he aimed to both ostracise and undermine women. The fact that Bell became a target within this influential work, despite her death decades earlier, underscores her lasting presence in debates about empire and representation. However, I believe Said’s analysis of Bell as ‘despising’ the East appears flawed.  Bell’s Persian Pictures (1894) instead reveals her struggle to reconcile romanticised Victorian fantasies of the Orient with the political and social realities she encountered. Her initial fantasies of the East suggest the significance of how colonial discourse in Britain was heavily gendered, with it targeting British female consumers to purchase ‘oriental’ goods. At the same time, scholars such as Moallem show how the colonial ‘spectacle of labour’ depicted Eastern women as exploited by the Eastern patriarchy, a trope that allowed British audiences to view their own gender norms as comparatively progressive. Within this context, Bell’s ambivalent descriptions illustrate how gender, empire, and representations of the “Other” intersected in early twentieth-century Britain.

Bell’s attitudes toward Eastern women also illuminate how gender operated within British imperial thought. Despite her extraordinary achievements, she was not widely recognised as a female pioneer – a silence partly explained by how comfortably her writing fit within a male colonial gaze. Bell herself described appearing “too female for one sex and too male for the other,” capturing the androgynous position that enabled her to move through Middle Eastern political circles with unusual ease while making her difficult to categorise within Britain’s rigid gender norms. Her observations of Eastern women reflect similar contradictions. She described harems as neglected and confined, yet also expressed sympathy for the women who lived within them and even arranged for a female doctor to lecture in Baghdad. These tensions reveal the dual lens through which she viewed Eastern women: as “other,” yet also as subjects whose restricted lives elicited her genuine concern.

Bell’s leadership within the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League adds another layer to this paradox. Although renowned for her independence abroad, she rejected female suffrage at home. Wallach attributes this stance to Bell’s disapproval of suffragette militancy, suggesting she feared disorder might endanger the imperial project she valued deeply. Ramon offers a different explanation, arguing that Bell believed educated women already exercised considerable political influence and felt little obligation to campaign for those she considered “unprepared” for the vote – a view shared by many elite anti-suffragists, who gathered more than 400,000 signatures by 1910. For Bell personally, suffrage also threatened the exceptional position she occupied. Much of her authority in the Middle East was tied to the unusual freedom her gender afforded her; as Ramon notes, Arab leaders confided in her in ways they never would with male officials. Her power, then, emerged from being an anomaly, and universal suffrage risked erasing that uniqueness.

Historians can further use Bell’s life to suggest the significance of gender by comparing her experiences to those of women supporting Ward’s ‘Forward Policy’ of ‘constructive anti-suffragism.’ Like Bell, they sought greater influence in the public domain, even opposing male anti-suffragism at times, whilst deeming that women should not have the vote. They envisioned influence exercised through expertise, philanthropy, and social welfare rather than the ballot box. Bell’s ability to shape British policy in the Middle East while opposing votes for women echoes this wider strand of elite feminism without suffrage, even if her personal motives were not identical.

Taken together, Bell’s career highlights the paradoxical role of gender in twentieth-century British history. Whilst most men at the time viewed white women as ‘the ruin of the empire,’ Bell’s sex, race and genuine interest in the East allowed her to overcome gender constraints as she was a subject of intrigue for those she met. Contrastingly, in the West, it was her affluence, intellect and elevated social status which elicited her circumvention of the gender constraints faced by the majority of women and granted her access to the heart of the British establishment. She was therefore both exceptional and unrepresentative: her life cannot be read as typical of women’s experiences, yet it reveals how power, class, and empire structured gendered opportunity. Bell’s legacy remains an area of interest today. Herzog’s biographical drama (2015) ‘Queen of the Desert’, which notably foregrounds her romances over her political work, underscores the need to rewrite her into history not as a romantic heroine, but as a complex historical actor. Doing so helps recover a female voice that both challenged and upheld the norms of her time, and in the process, illuminates the deeper structures of gender in Britain’s imperial century.

This piece was written by Mahika Mehrotra and edited by Yilin Wang

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