Florence Nightingale Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! === Literature and the women's movement === Historian of science [[I. Bernard Cohen]] argues: {{cquote| Nightingale's achievements are all the more impressive when they are considered against the background of social restraints on women in Victorian England. Her father, William Edward Nightingale, was an extremely wealthy landowner, and the family moved in the highest circles of English society. In those days, women of Nightingale's class did not attend universities and did not pursue professional careers; their purpose in life was to marry and bear children. Nightingale was fortunate. Her father believed women should be educated, and he personally taught her Italian, Latin, Greek, philosophy, history, and β most unusual of all for women of the time β writing and mathematics.<ref name=Cohen1984/>{{rp|page=98}} }} [[Lytton Strachey]] was famous for his book debunking 19th-century heroes, ''[[Eminent Victorians]]'' (1918). Nightingale gets a full chapter, but instead of debunking her, Strachey praised her in a way that raised her national reputation and made her an icon for English feminists of the 1920s and 1930s.<ref>James Southern, [https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article-abstract/28/1/1/2525313 "A Lady 'in Proper Proportions'? Feminism, Lytton Strachey, and Florence Nightingale's Reputation, 1918β39"]. ''Twentieth Century British History'' 28.1 (March 2017): 1β28. {{doi|10.1093/tcbh/hww047}}. {{PMID|28922795}}.</ref> While better known for her contributions in the nursing and mathematical fields, Nightingale is also an important link in the study of English [[feminism]]. She wrote some 200 books, pamphlets and articles throughout her life.<ref name="Express"/> During 1850 and 1852, she was struggling with her self-definition and the expectations of an upper-class marriage from her family. As she sorted out her thoughts, she wrote ''Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth''. This was an 829-page, three-volume work, which Nightingale had printed privately in 1860, but which until recently was never published in its entirety.<ref name=Calabria&Macrae1994>{{cite book |year=1994 |author=Nightingale, Florence |editor1=Calabria, Michael D. |editor2=MacRae, Janet A. |title=Suggestions for Thought: Selections and Commentaries |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |isbn=978-0-8122-1501-4 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CHcm-2Zm5DQC&q=%22suggestions+for+thought%22 |access-date=6 July 2010 |archive-date=10 March 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210310015556/https://books.google.com/books?id=CHcm-2Zm5DQC&q=%22suggestions+for+thought%22 |url-status=live }}</ref> An effort to correct this was made with a 2008 publication by [[Wilfrid Laurier University]], as volume 11<ref name=McDonald2008>{{cite book |year=2008 |orig-year=1860 |editor-last=McDonald |editor-first=Lynn |first=Florence |last=Nightingale |title=Suggestions for Thought |series=Collected Works of Florence Nightingale |volume=11 |place=Ontario, Canada |publisher=Wilfrid Laurier University Press |isbn=978-0-88920-465-2 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Mle5Sjixa0cC&q=McDonald++%22suggestions+for+thought%22 |access-date=6 July 2010 |archive-date=10 March 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210310015555/https://books.google.com/books?id=Mle5Sjixa0cC&q=McDonald++%22suggestions+for+thought%22 |url-status=live }}</ref> of a 16 volume project, the ''Collected Works of Florence Nightingale''.<ref name=WLUPress>{{cite book |title=Collected Works of Florence Nightingale |publisher=Wilfrid Laurier University Press |url=http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Series/CWFN.shtml |access-date=6 July 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110927174908/http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Series/CWFN.shtml |archive-date=27 September 2011}}</ref> The best known of these essays, called "Cassandra", was previously published by [[Ray Strachey]] in 1928. Strachey included it in ''The Cause'', a history of the women's movement. Apparently, the writing served its original purpose of sorting out thoughts; Nightingale left soon after to train at the Institute for deaconesses at [[Kaiserswerth]]. "Cassandra" protests the over-feminisation of women into near helplessness, such as Nightingale saw in her mother's and older sister's lethargic lifestyle, despite their education. She rejected their life of thoughtless comfort for the world of social service. The work also reflects her fear of her ideas being ineffective, as were [[Cassandra]]'s. Cassandra was a princess of [[Troy]] who served as a priestess in the temple of [[Apollo]] during the [[Trojan War]]. The god gave her the gift of [[prophecy]]; when she refused his advances, he cursed her so that her prophetic warnings would go unheeded. [[Elaine Showalter]] called Nightingale's writing "a major text of English feminism, a link between [[Mary Wollstonecraft|Wollstonecraft]] and [[Virginia Woolf|Woolf]]".<ref>Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Florence Nightingale". ''The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English''. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 836β837.</ref> Nightingale was initially reluctant to join the Women's [[Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom|Suffrage Society]] when asked by [[John Stuart Mill]], but through [[Josephine Butler]] was convinced 'that women's enfranchisement is absolutely essential to a nation if moral and social progress is to be made'.<ref>{{Cite news|date=27 August 1910|title=Miss Nightingale β Suffragist|page=207|work=The Vote|url=https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:muj439pan/read/single#page/2/mode/1up|access-date=14 April 2021}}</ref> In 1972, the poet [[Eleanor Ross Taylor]] wrote "Welcome Eumenides", a poem written in Nightingale's voice and quoting frequently from Nightingale's writings.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Taylor |first1=Eleanor Ross |title=Welcome, Eumenides |url=https://archive.org/details/welcomeeumenides00elea |url-access=registration |year=1972 |publisher=George Braziller |location=New York|isbn=9780807606445 }}</ref> [[Adrienne Rich]] wrote that "Eleanor Taylor has brought together the waste of women in society and the waste of men in wars and twisted them inseparably."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Rich |first1=Adrienne |title=On Lies, Secrets, and Silence |url=https://archive.org/details/onliessecretssil00rich |url-access=registration |year=1979 |publisher=W. W. Norton|location=New York |page=[https://archive.org/details/onliessecretssil00rich/page/87 87]|isbn=9780393012330 }}</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page