Growing up, I at one point learned passingly of Florence Nightingale, of the selfless, caring nurse, the lady with a lamp in the Crimean war. I never learned much else or cared to—the florid name, the passivity and the niceness of it all seemed so uninteresting. A woman lauded once again for her saint-like caretaking, selflessly suffering in the face of suffering, sacrificing her own health for soldiers in wars that should never have happened.
Many years later, however, I came across this line in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own:
Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony.
And then the footnote:
Nightingale shrieking aloud is not something I had ever envisioned in the rosy-lantern-polite-lady-story I’d been given. I was intrigued.
Nightingale, born into an upper-class family in 1802, vehemently refused marriage—the imprisoning life that her mother and upper-class social inheritance would dictate. Myra Stark, in her introduction to Cassandra, writes:
Women were viewed as wives and mothers, as potential wives and mothers, or as failed wives and mothers. The woman who was neither wife nor mother was called ‘the odd woman’ or ‘the redundant woman.’
Nightingale saw firsthand what marriage did to women—the expectations of the private sphere that women were relegated to—and knew its confinement would drive her mad. Nightingale once wrote in a note:
I must strive after a better life for women…
In nineteenth-century London, married women were ideally freed from any labor, while those who worked were forced to perform every type of household drudgery and menial work. Nightingale was desperate to make a life for herself beyond these choices—one of her own real work, and she sought every way to do that. Still, it took nine years before her family finally agreed that she could leave home to train at a German institution for medicine. She was thirty-two.
When Nightingale returned to England, she gained her first post as Superintendent of an Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness in London. Soon after, the Crimean war began, and then her work—and legacy—began.
Nightingale’s essay Cassandra was written during the years of conflict with her family, when she despaired of gaining any type of life outside the home. It was written out of anger and despair, beginning with a cry of
suffering, sad, ‘female humanity!’
The essay is a tour de force, a polemic against Victorian ideals of womanhood. She demanded a life of substantive, contributive work. She wrote:
At present we live to impede each other’s satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don’t want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work.
She saved the best shriek aloud on the last page, an echoing cry of anger:
We live in the world, it is said, and must walk in its ways. Was Christ called a complainer against the world? Yet all these great teachers and preachers must have had a most deep and ingrained sense, a continual gnawing feeling of the miseries and wrongs of the world. Otherwise they would not have been impelled to devote life and death to redress them. Christ, Socrates, Howard, they must have had no ear for the joys, compared to that which they had for the sorrows of the world. They acted, however, and we complain…Christ, if He had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer. Peace be with the misanthropists!…The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ….To this will be answered that half the inmates of Bedlam begin this way, by fancying that they are ‘the Christ.’
Of course, in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the predominant population of lunatic asylums, like Bedlam, was women.
But Nightingale’s genius is not only in her determined feminist writing or her affinity for medicine and nursing. She was also a statistician, who created some of the first data visualizations to convey the need for sanitation and organization of soldiers in Crimea, and later, sanitation for the water supply of India. She saw the horror of the Crimean casualty numbers for what they truly reflected—the incompetence and negligence of the Army Medical Corps and the War Office. She led a reform movement with government commissions, providing evidence, ordinances, and reports. She convinced officials and reformed the Army Medical Office and the War Office. She oversaw hospital construction and sanitation for the living conditions of the Army, as well as for hospitals in India, that extended to sanitation and irrigation. While she never visited India, she advised on the purification of the Madras water system from her bedroom while she was ill. Myra Stark, again, writes:
As late as 1947, the Select Committee on Estimates, reporting on a cost-accounting system for the Army Medical Services, noted with surprise how well it worked: Florence Nightingale had devised it in 1861.
After the Crimean war and Nightingale’s work, public funds were raised so that she could found the Nightingale School and Home for Nurses in 1860. The following year she created the Training School for Midwives—creating a profession for women that was respectable and paid at a rate to support a single livelihood, at a time when few other opportunities were available to women.
With her knowledge and application of the ‘new science’ of statistics, she became the first female fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. During her work in Crimea, she had collected her own data on health and sanitary conditions and created visuals that deftly argued the consequences of poor sanitation and organization to convince the War Office of the need for reform.
Nightingale’s graphics engaged readers and officials in ways that the numbers alone could not. RJ Andrews writes of Nightingale’s graphics:
…Nightingale packaged her charts in attractive slim folios, integrating diagrams with witty prose. Her charts were accessible and punchy. Instead of building complex arguments that required heavy work from the audience, she focused her narrative lens on specific claims. It was more than data visualization—it was data storytelling.… Nightingale brilliantly framed army mortality by contrasting it with civilian mortality. She showed how, for example, peacetime soldiers living in army barracks died at higher rates than civilian men of similar ages. Her graphics made it impossible to deny the realities represented by the data: army administration needed dramatic reform.
The health reforms that Nightingale visualized and sought were adopted and eventually codified in the British Public Health Act of 1875, which established regulations for well-built sewers, clean running water, and standard building codes. The precedent that the law set, in combination with vaccines and boosted crop yields, led to the doubling of the average life span in the twentieth century.
Upon first meeting Nightingale, Queen Victoria reportedly said:
Such a head—I wish we had her at the War Office.
Nightingale, however, didn’t think much of Victoria. She refused the Queen’s offer of a suite at Kensington Palace for her work, believing there would be far too many visitors, and took a room at a low-rent London hotel. Of the Queen, Nightingale reportedly said after meeting her that:
She is the least self-reliant person I’ve ever known.
Both Woolf and Nightingale expected the future to hold a different outcome for the rights and role of women in society. Woolf wrote:
…in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex.…
And similarly, Nightingale wrote:
There is perhaps no century where the woman shows so meanly as in this. Because her education seems entirely to have parted company with her vocation; there is no longer unity between the woman as inwardly developed, and as outwardly manifested. In the last century it was not so. In the succeeding one let us hope that it will no longer be so.
I cringe in anger to think of what they would make of the world now, a century beyond the one Nightingale looked to. They both wrote with the assured expectation that women will no longer be unequal in society in the following century.
So much of what Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own laments the absence of women writers of Shakespeare’s day, or of the women whose voices have been silenced by having to conform to ideals of womanhood—for the lack of access to education, opportunity, and financial support. And yet what is also lamentable is how many women did break out of the roles prescribed for them—and yet society insisted on their silence, ignored their names, or sanitized who they were. Made to fit into the well-worn grooves of quiet, modest, demure womanhood—or be rendered invisible.
It simply isn’t the truth of what came before us.
Virginia Woolf wrote, as she perused the shelves of the British Library for women writers of the past and lamented the lack of evidence—
She never writes her own life and scarecely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought…is a mass of information…all these facts lie somewhere…
We need to collect those past names, works, and lives—of women, and also of other marginalized voices—and create some gorgeously designed visualizations, inspired by Nightingale. Maybe then we can show, in a way society cannot so easily ignore, how strong a tradition of writing and work exists, despite a history intent on keeping these voices in the absent margins.
Emily Dickinson wrote to a cousin, after moving their house, that she “was out with a lantern, looking for herself…”
I knew so little about Nightingale, what an incredible savant! Thank you so much for this amazing in depth work Freya.
This is fascinating and heartbreaking and rage-inducing and compelling all at once. Brilliant work, friend. Here's to every single "redundant woman" in the world.