Page 95 - Life of Gertrude Bell

Durbar

The rigid Victorian society in which Gertrude grew to maturity
threw into sharp relief the aims and activities of those women who
were intelligent and intrepid enough to seek recognition in a
world designed by men; a world in which the place of women
was clearly defined. She was not alone in her determination to
break through the barriers of nineteenth-century convention, but
she did not have to try as hard as many of her sex. Her family was,
by the standards of the age, enlightened, and it had the means to
provide her with opportunities which in any age would seem
generous. Gertrude did not regard her own liberated existence
as anything more than a natural expression of her own ability and
enterprise. She was no early feminist; indeed she distrusted and
disliked her own sex, seldom missing an opportunity to comment
on their ineptness or their unfitness to engage in those activities
which were better left to men. If she found an equal footing on
mountains and in deserts, or in academic life, it was not because
she demanded any special ‘rights’ or fought any battles of emanci­
pation, but because in her own view she merited the freedoms
that were accorded her. She both acknowledged and breached the
conventions of her age. She distrusted the notion of equality but
it would have been a brave man who denied her the right to an
equal place in his midst. By the time she was thirty, she was
remarkably well travelled, yet she persistendy asked her father’s
permission to proceed from one place to another, even in later
years. She travelled alone or with male companions in deserts and
on mountains, but she never went out in London without a
chaperone. She would rationalise opposite positions with con­
viction. Politically she was emphatic, and sometimes equivocal.
When she wrote to Chirol at the time of Maurice’s departure to