Gertrude Bell

Raised with money and an Oxford education, Bell turned early travels into a second life: mountain climbing, archaeological digs, years riding through Arabia and Mesopotamia when few Westerners could. By 1914 she'd mapped regions, learned languages, built a network of contacts across the Arab world. War pulled her into intelligence work with T. E. Lawrence in Cairo, then into British administration in occupied Mesopotamia as the lone woman holding senior political rank in the Empire. She believed Arab nationalism inevitable and pushed for independent Hashemite states rather than direct colonial rule, shaping the partition of the Ottoman Empire at Paris and Cairo. The rest of her years went to Baghdad: advisor to King Faisal, founder of the Iraq Museum, cataloguer of antiquities, advocate for Iraqi women's education. By the mid-1920s politics had moved past her, and Faisal gave her archaeology again. She died there in 1926, sleeping pills, possibly by choice, possibly just worn through.