When researching into bad ass women from the area to feature in our profiles, we stumbled across Gertrude Bell - born in the 1860s in our region with quite the story behind her. We had only planned to share the lives of women from the present day, but this was too good to miss!
It is fair to say that Gertrude Bell is one of the most remarkable women to emerge from our town.
She spent the majority of her life as a pioneering women, breaking boundaries and creating history across the globe, but when it came to the Suffragette movement, Ms. Bell was on the wrong side of history.
The Bell family were the sixth richest in England, and Gertrude grew up at Red Barns mansion near Redcar.
Her father, Sir Hugh, ran the Teesside Steelworks and was the mayor of Middlesbrough three times, so Gertrude lived a privileged childhood.
She went on to receive a First class degree in Modern History from Oxford University and was the first person to climb all the peaks in the Engelhorner range in the Swiss Alps. She even has a mountain in the range named after her - the Gertrudespitz.
From her horse riding lessons on Redcar beach, she managed to ride 1,500 miles on a camel, making her the first woman to do a solo journey into the uncharted Arabian desert.
She became the first female Intelligence Officer employed by the British military and was a close adviser to Winston Churchill during the time of the First World War, making her one of the most powerful women in the British Empire at the time.
She is also the only woman from this area to create an entire country. She drew up the borders and boundaries of Iraq, installed their first King, Faisal, who made her his first Director of Antiquities, and campaigned for the rights of Muslim women living in the country.
Despite all of her work and her attitudes towards women and their stereotypical role in the era, she had an issue with the Suffragette movement.
She did not want British women to have the right to vote and even became the president of the northern section of the National Anti-Suffrage League.
She wrote a very strong-worded letter to The Times newspaper criticising “the extraordinary and regrettable programme” of the Suffragettes, and organised a petition, which was signed by 250,000 people, demanding that women should not get the vote.
She even wrote a piece in her diary about how she loved to get on the train in London, start a conversation with a woman beside her and then try to convert her to the anti-suffragist movement by the time the train pulled into Darlington.
It does make us wonder how a woman so ahead of her time could have an opinion that would be better suited in medieval times. However, her reasoning for her belief was that she thought that by giving women the right to vote, the British Empire would be weakened by the uprooting of the male-dominated order of society. She felt that a British woman's place was at the heart of the family, and their free time to volunteer in schools and community organisations would be diminished.
We wish that Gertrude was still around so that she could see the advancements that women have made, especially in our town, and we like to imagine that she would come round to the idea of women having the vote.
Her work and the fact that she broke barriers in an era where the world belonged to men is something that should be achieved, making her a true anti-feminist feminist icon.
While Gertrude is gone, we hope that she has some family still out there and that they know about the fierce blood that runs through their veins!
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