The life of Florence Nightingale

by Sarah A. Tooley

A very impressive scene took place when Florence Nightingale left Kaiserswerth. The present head of the institution, Pastor Düsselhoff, tells me that his mother, the eldest daughter of Pastor Fliedner, vividly recalls the scene to-day. After bidding good-bye to the deaconesses, Miss Nightingale bent her head to the pastor and asked for his blessing. With hands resting on her head, and face upturned to heaven, he prayed that her sojourn at Kaiserswerth might bear precious fruit and her great powers be dedicated to the service of humanity. Then, repeating his usual formula—“May God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God, bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen”—he sent her forth dedicated to the service of the sick and suffering. Little did he think what the magnitude of that service was to be. Teacher and pupil were not destined to meet again, but the good pastor lived to hear the name of Florence Nightingale resound through the world.

After Miss Nightingale’s return home from her second sojourn at Kaiserswerth, she published in 1851 a booklet on the institution, and in the introduction gives some excellent advice to the girls of the time. Her remarks may seem a little out of date to-day, but are interesting as showing the desire for useful work which was beginning to actuate women of the leisured classes and which needed to be directed into fitting channels. There was then the great cry of the untrained. Women were longing for occupation, but few had received definite courses of training.

Miss Nightingale was at this period a pioneer of her sex and a decidedly “advanced” woman, but the desire for freedom of action was tempered by a naturally well-balanced nature. She put forward the plea on women’s behalf that they should be encouraged to seek occupation and properly trained for their work. In Kaiserswerth she deals more particularly with the vocation of a nurse or deaconess, but as a prelude to the little work she refers to the position of women in her own century. There is “an old legend,” she writes, “that the nineteenth century is to be the century of women,” but she thinks that up to the present (1851) it has not been theirs. She magnanimously exempts man from blame. The fault, has not been his, for “in no country has woman been given such freedom to cultivate her powers” as in England. “She [woman] is no longer called pedantic if her powers appear in conversation. The authoress is courted not shunned.” Women, she thinks, have made extraordinary intellectual development, but as human beings cannot move two feet at once, except they jump, so while the intellectual foot of woman has made a step in advance, the practical foot has remained behind. “Woman,” says Miss Nightingale, “stands askew. Her education for action has not kept pace with her education for acquirement. The woman of the eighteenth century was perhaps happier, when practice and theory were on a par, than her more cultivated sister of the nineteenth century. The latter wishes, but does not know how to do many things! The former, what she wished at least that she could do.”

It appears that when Miss Nightingale was a young woman, the fashion for extolling the single girl as against her sister who had entered the bonds of matrimony was coming into vogue, but on this point our heroine was racily sincere. “It has become of late the fashion,” she says, “to cry up ‘old maids,’ to inveigh against regarding marriage as the vocation of all women, to declare that a single life is as happy as a married one, if people would but think so. So is the air as good an element for fish as the water, if they did but know how to live in it. Show us how to be single and we will agree. But hitherto we have not found that young Englishwomen have been convinced. And we must confess that, in the present state of things, their horror of being ‘old maids’ seems justified ... a life without love, and an activity without an aim, is horrible in idea and wearisome in reality.”

Miss Nightingale does not touch on the point that the disparity between the numbers of the sexes makes singleness not a choice but a necessity to many women, and that in the interests of those who must remain unwed, training for a definite calling in life should be given to girls as well as to boys.

She goes on to speak of the longing of women for work and the ennui which results from the lack of it, and draws the picture of five or six daughters living in well-to-do houses with no other occupation than taking a class in a Sunday-school and of the middle-class girls who become burdensome to fathers and brothers.

She expends some characteristic witticisms on the young ladies who try to drive away ennui by a little parish visiting, and because of their want of knowledge only succeed in demoralising the poor. In evidence of this, Miss Nightingale tells the story that one day on entering a cottage which was usually neat and tidy she found everything upside down.

“La! now! why, miss,” said the cottage woman at her visitor’s look of astonishment, “when the district-visiting ladies comes, if we didn’t put everything topsy-turvy they would not give us anything.”

“To be able to visit well,” says Miss Nightingale, commenting upon the foregoing incident, “is one of the rarest accomplishments. But when attained, what a blessing to both visitors and visited!”

These remarks in regard to the work of women were by way of preliminary to introducing the subject of deaconesses. Miss Nightingale had returned from Kaiserswerth full of enthusiasm for the vocation of trained nurse and visitor to the poor, and was endeavouring to introduce the then highly novel subject to her young countrywomen as a way of getting rid of listlessness and ennui. That she felt the ground to be dangerous is shown by the detailed account of the connection of the office of a deaconess with the early Christian Church, which she deemed it necessary to give in order to allay the Protestant fear that a deaconess was a nun in disguise.