Florence Nightingale (1820–1910): Feminism and Hospital Reform

Abstract

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE WAS born of wealthy parents who expected her to do all the things young ladies of her class did: to spend much of her time in the drawing room entertaining her sister or her friends; to take occasional rides in carriages, to visit others; to appear at parties and dinners; and to be occupied with embroidery, playing the piano, and painting—but these activities were meant to be “charming” and not taken too seriously. Above all, young ladies were to prepare for making a “good” marriage with a man of high class and status. But Florence was different. She wanted a higher calling; she wanted to work; to use her intellect, her skills, her moral passion; and to make a difference in the world. She refused to be a subordinate to a husband; she was bored with the trivial lives that upper class women led; she had her destiny to fulfill. She told her parents that she wanted to be a nurse. They were horrified. “It was as if I had said I wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she wrote.1 Getting increasingly desperate, Florence wrote, “My present life is suicide. My God what will become of me?”2(p58) Through the writing of the angry essay, Cassandra, in 1852, despair was transformed into rebellion.2(p63) The essay begins with a cry of anguish for “suffering, sad, ‘female humanity!’” It goes on to present the life of the middle- and upper-class Victorian woman as a chronicle of waste and frustration, as a death in life.3 At last, after 9 years of struggle, Florence's parents reluctantly allowed her to leave home for training at the Institution for Deaconesses at Kaiserwerth in Germany. On her return, she accepted her first post as superintendent of an Establishment for Gentlewomen During Illness, on Harley Street in London. In 1853, her father gave her 5 hundred pounds a year, making her financially independent. One year later, the Crimean War began. Nightingale organized a group of thirty-eight nurses to serve in the military hospital in Scutari. Conditions were ghastly. Nightingale promptly set her nurses to work cleaning up the place and tending to the sick and wounded. With a large amount of private money, she purchased badly needed supplies. The death rate in the hospital fell by two thirds. After the war, Nightingale returned to England, became an invalid and remained bed-ridden well into her sixties. From her bed, she produced over 2 hundred books, pamphlets, and reports, and over twelve thousand letters, mostly related in one way or another to her work. It was only when her mother died that Nightingale got out of bed and reentered the world. Freed at last from the suffocating influence of her family, she focused all her energy on her work. She reformed civilian hospitals, reorganized the War Office, founded the Nightingale School for the training of nurses, and brought public health and sanitation to India. After accomplishing an amazing amount, Nightingale died at the age of ninety in 1910. This is the centennial of her death.