The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

Whereas almost all women there were (and most remain) truly oppressed, Bell manipulated, cajoled and badgered local sheiks and religious leaders for her own — and Britain’s — ends. She was held in great esteem and referred to as the “khatun,” a highly regarded and powerful woman. Wallach quotes David Hogarth, who worked in the office of intelligence in Cairo during the First World War, as saying that T. E. Lawrence’s “revolt in the desert” would not have been possi- ble without the intelligence provid- ed by Bell. At the same time, a woman of privilege and very traditional, she was against women’s suffrage. Most women didn’t have the required intelligence or experience to vote, she believed. In particular, she was the scourge of the Foreign Office wives, whom she perceived as empty-headed. Of the British wives in Baghdad, she lamented in anoth- er letter: “A collection of more tire- some women I never encountered. … I know I’m regrettably inelastic, but I simply can’t bear that sort. … These idle women here have noth- ing to do all day long. … [They] take no sort of interest in what’s going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (though it’s also a very second-rate) English soci- ety quite cut off from the life of the town. I now understand why British government has come to grief in India, where our women do just the same thing.” One becomes aware very quickly of the small world in which Bell moved. Through her family’s con- nections she gained entry to the Foreign Office and the Indian Civil Service — to a large extent starting when her father passed on her let- ters from the field to influential peo- ple in London. The same names crop up constantly. She first met T. E. Lawrence in 1909 when she was crossing northern Syria on her first trek into Mesopotamia, and he was a 19-year-old Oxford student excavating the ruins at Carchimesh. Later in Iraq she would work with St. John Philby, not always smoothly. The Indian Civil Service was also 46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Bell manipulated, cajoled and badgered local sheiks and religious leaders for her own — and Britain’s — ends.