Free Feminism by Margaret Walters

woman to do worsted work and drive out everyday in a carriage?’ ‘Why should we laugh if we were to see 49
    a parcel of men sitting around a drawing-room table in the morning and think it all right if they were women?’
    Nightingale seems to developed her interest in nursing after undertaking some typically female duties – looking after her grandmother and her old nurse. But her growing interest in the work led to vocal disapproval, and to constant demands on her time from her mother and her sister Parthenope. In 1844, the family flatly refused to let her spend time at Salisbury Infirmary. ‘There is nothing like the tyranny of a good English family’, Nightingale once remarked bitterly, claiming that most women ‘have no God, no country, no duty to them at all except family’. But in 1849 she managed a visit to Kaiserwerth in Germany, an orphan asylum and hospital run by Lutheran deaconesses. Though she was critical of its standard of nursing and hygiene, she admitted that ‘I find the deepest interest in everything here and am so well in body and mind’. But at the age of 37, she was still asking bitterly, in a fragment of a novel which she called Cassandra , ‘Why have women minism
    passion, intellect, moral activity – these three – and a place in Fe
    society where no one of the three can be exercised?’
    Her life changed when, in 1853, her father decided, against his wife’s strongly expressed wishes, to allow Florence £500 a year. She was finally freed from domestic tyranny, and in August of that year, she became resident superintendent of the Invalid Gentlewoman’s Institution in Harley Street. She had already determinedly set about learning everything she could about nursing, and regularly rose at dawn to study Government Blue Books, though she was still occasionally plagued by worries about whether it was ‘unsuitable and unbecoming’ for a woman to devote herself to ‘works of charity in hospitals and elsewhere’. In 1854 she worked at the Middlesex Hospital in London during an outbreak of cholera.
    Nightingale had established enough of a reputation to be invited to go to Scutari with a group of nurses during the Crimean War; she soon became a national heroine. Ironically, at the time she was hailed, 50

    4. Florence Nightingale was a national heroine – the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ – often, as here, celebrated for her compassion and womanly tenderness towards the wounded soldiers in the Crimea, rather than for her truly remarkable talent for administration and organization.
    sentimentally, as a truly ‘feminine’ woman – indeed, a ministering angel – who had renounced a life of luxury and high fashion to bring comfort to wounded soldiers in the Crimea. Images of the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ were widely circulated, icons that celebrated her compassion, but also her delicate refinement, her gentility, and her ladylike grace. Nightingale certainly had great concern for her patients and sympathy with the ordinary soldier. But her greatest contribution, perhaps, lay in the fact that she was such a superbly efficient and clear-headed administrator. ‘I am now clothing the British army’, she wrote at the time, ‘I am really cook, housekeeper, scavenger . . . washerwoman, general dealer, storekeeper.’ The years during and following the Crimean War were undoubtedly the most satisfying, in every way the happiest, period of her life.
    For she refused to stop when the war ended, instead undertaking an ambitious investigation into the health of the British Army. When, later in her life, she retired to bed for long periods – a habit that made a parody of fashionably ‘feminine’ fragility – it was simply in minism
    order to have time to work more effectively, undisturbed by the Fe
    demands of her mother and sister. She remains an intriguing paradox: on the surface, and by reputation, the archetype of
    ‘feminine’ self-sacrifice and devotion to others; in fact, a model of determined,