Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  This attack on the contemporary image of women continued in the description of how a nurse should behave. Dress, for example, should be simple. Any woman dressing fashionably for nursing was ridiculed . . . “the dress of women is daily more and more unfitting them for any ‘mission’ or usefulness at all . . . A man is now a more handy and far less objectionable being in a sickroom than a woman. Compelled by her dress every woman either shuffles or waddles . . . What is become of a woman’s light step?” Nor was the notion that nurses did specific jobs very useful – nurses must concern themselves with the whole environment of the patient and seek as far as possible to control it. Hurry and bustle was painful to the sick, gossiping in corners agony, irresolution of any kind harmful. Visitors must be carefully watched by the nurse so that their confounded “chattering hopes” did not prove upsetting.

  A nurse was an observer above all else and her observations might be vital. There was “a physiognomy of disease” they must learn which would help them to know which observations to report. “Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion. Remember, he is face to face with his enemy all the time internally wrestling with him, having long imaginary conversations with him. RID HIM OF HIS ADVERSARY QUICKLY.” The way to do this was to be decisive and always to let a patient know what was going to happen. But if this implied sticking to a rigid timetable it was wrong. Convenience must never be put first. If, for example, a patient had a dry mouth and could not masticate properly then a nurse must be prepared to sit with a teaspoon feeding him little by little. Nor should “fancies” be rejected, within reason. These should be indulged whereas any love of frippery in a sickroom should not. All carpets and wallpapers were an “abomination” because cleanliness was vital and all surfaces should be washable. It was a nurse’s job to see that they were.

  These Notes made quite a stir and were applauded by the majority of medical people who read them but they were not actually much use to the Council of the Nightingale Fund. They said nothing about procedure, nor did they prescribe an exact course of study. Doubtless Miss Nightingale had ideas on those too, which the secretary and committee of the Fund would have been glad to learn, but she was too busy with the British Army to contribute them. Meanwhile, it was being argued that there was nothing wrong with nursing as it was and there was no need to have any training other than formalizing what already existed – that is, nurses simply going on the wards and learning by experience (which was all Florence herself had done). Mr J. F. South, Senior Consulting Surgeon of St Thomas’s, the very hospital under whose roof the Fund intended to establish their school, also published a little book at this time entitled Facts relating to Hospital Nurses Also Observations on Training Establishments for Hospitals. In it he made cutting remarks about nurses being “in the position of housemaids” who only needed simple instructions on the spot (he implied they were incapable of understanding any others). There was, Mr South wrote, nothing wrong with this – all doctors in fact needed were efficient housemaids. The idea of “training” nurses, of instructing them in medical theory, was ridiculous and merely a ruse to snatch power from where it rightly belonged: in the hands of the doctors. The purpose of training nurses was, he said, to place the whole nursing establishment “in the hands of persons who will never be content till they become the executive of the hospitals and, as they have in the military hospitals, a constant source of annoyance to the medical and surgical officers.”

  Faced with this kind of internal hostility the committee had to step carefully. A memorandum from Miss Nightingale told them that she wanted the training school to be near enough to a big hospital to give the nurses practical experience. In fact, it was eventually located in St Thomas’s for the sake of economy and because in Mrs Wardroper, the Matron of St Thomas’s, Florence Nightingale thought she had an ideal head. She accepted the second job as superintendent of the Nightingale Fund School. In May 1860 applications were invited to train at the new Nightingale School but to everyone’s disappointment the response was discouraging. It seemed women were now daunted by what was required to become a probationer at the Nightingale School. They were asked to be paragons. A nurse was to be a nurse first and a woman afterwards. The fifteen finally enrolled for one year’s training were brave indeed. They took up residence in the “Home” – an upper floor of a wing in St Thomas’s – put on their brown uniforms and began trying to match up to Florence Nightingale’s standards. Their board, uniform and lodging were provided for out of the Fund and they received in addition £10 a year pocket-money. There was a formal record book in which each probationer’s character was detailed and criticized. Otherwise, the training rested in the hands of the Matron and was not categorically laid down by Miss Nightingale.

  What Mrs Wardroper gave the probationers was a thorough grounding in the handicraft of nursing which was straightforward and traditional: how to apply dressings and leeches, how to give enemas, make beds and so forth. But, in addition, there were supposed to be lectures and it was over these lectures – the academic part of training which Miss Nightingale so desired – that there was trouble. Partly no one quite knew what these lectures should contain nor what was their precise object but partly the trouble was also that the standard of education of most of the probationers was very low. Classes on reading and writing and not lectures on anatomy were obviously more necessary. The authorities muddled on, learning by trial and error and constantly changing the regulations and training specifications, but as far as the public was concerned Nightingale Nurses were a visible success. Without stopping to inquire precisely what they had been trained in and for, hospitals throughout the land clamoured for them. When a Nightingale Nurse became a Matron she took with her Nightingale notions of organization and discipline, not to mention dedication, which in many cases made her seem much more impressive than she actually was.

  Florence Nightingale herself was far from satisfied by the product her school turned out. Until 1868 she was far too absorbed in other more important work to take any real part in the affairs of the school but after that, when the accession of Gladstone put an end to her influence, she began to apply herself to its problems and was shocked by them. To start with, the fall-out rate was so high. This, she thought, must be due to faulty selection but when she began helping with that selecting she was driven to the further and much less attractive explanation that women found the life of a probationer too hard. They rebelled against the régime. They did not take kindly to being closely supervised, to only being allowed out in pairs, to not being able to raise their eyes in male company without being accused of flirting, to not being allowed to “chatter”, to having even their off-duty time and clothes scrutinized. Women, in short, were letting her down. Even the best of the nurses her school turned out were not good enough (with the honourable exception of perhaps half a dozen.) It made her furious to find. Nightingale Nurses resigning from, or refusing to take, important jobs because they were going to get married.

  There was, for example, the case of Miss Torrance, selected as Mrs Wardroper’s assistant and the organizer of the Highgate Workhouse Infirmary. When, in 1872, Florence Nightingale’s eyes were opened to Mrs Wardroper’s shortcomings she wrote of Miss Torrance, “She has been the most successful woman we ever had.”36 She was so pleased with Miss Torrance she invited her to stay at Lea Hurst. But then came the betrayal: Miss Torrance became engaged to Dr Thomas Dowse, the Medical Officer at Highgate. “She has poured out the whole of her story with that wretched little Dowse . . . in a moment of weakness she has engaged herself to him.”37 In spite of her engagement, Miss Torrance became first assistant Matron and head of the probationers’ home and did excellent work. Florence breathed easier and hoped the “weakness” over. But in January 1873 Miss Torrance left for good to get married. “The greatest shock one ever had in one’s life (not excepting Agnes Jones’ death) in this work”38 commented the heartbroken Florence. Women, even the best women, were not
measuring up to her expectations. Where were others like herself, willing to sacrifice everything to their work?

  She tried, in her annual addresses to the nurses in the Nightingale School, to raise standards. These addresses, often read for her, almost always had a text – either “Conceit and Nursing cannot exist in the same person” or “There is no real nursing without self-denial” or some such warning. In them, she forbade gossiping and noisy laughter. “This night,” she once advised, “if we are inclined to make a noise on the stairs or to linger in each other’s rooms, shall we go to bed alone with God?”39 Those who were not attracted by this idea had no place in nursing. But the addresses always emphasized sisterly solidarity. Nurses must support each other and she certainly did not intend her homilies about noise to be interpreted as meaning she was in favour of isolation. On the contrary “there is something not quite right in a woman who shuts up her heart from other women”40 – it was just that there was no place for levity. The fact was “a nurse is like a traveller . . . soldiers are sent everywhere and leave home and country for years; they think nothing of it because they go ‘on duty’. Shall we have less self-denial? . . .”41 She felt, as the years passed, that the answer, sadly, was “yes”. Women did not want to deny “self”, nor could they bury “self” in the way she could and find similar satisfaction. She had given them a choice and they were not making the right one but clinging, as ever, to marriage and motherhood.

  Parthe thought it absurd of Florence to expect so much. She told her she was more like a man than a woman. This was intended as a criticism but Florence chose to interpret it as a compliment. If being like a man meant she was strong, decisive, hard-working, disciplined and aware of a wider world than the domestic then she was glad she was like a man. If being womanly was synonymous with being meek, subservient, self-effacing and utterly absorbed in the home then she was glad she was not thought womanly. But Florence knew Parthe was talking nonsense. She did not feel in the least de-sexed by her sister’s accusation because she had confidence that her femininity resided in other aspects of her nature – it was merely society which equated womanliness with the virtues she herself despised. It was society which had to think again, not she. She felt she saw in her friend Hilary Bonham-Carter the perfect example of what striving to be feminine according to the dictates of society meant. Hilary died young in 1865 of cancer. She had been a fine artist but had never allowed herself to develop her talent. She was, wrote Florence, “unworked gold” and so great was the waste of her life, striving (as Florence had once striven) to behave as a girl should that it filled her with murderous rage. She was even glad Hilary died when she did rather than have to endure another thirty years subscribing to the norm. Until women stopped being terrified that they would be thought “like a man” their lives would go on being wasted and like Hilary they would live “a caricature of a life”.

  But there were times, as she grew older, when Florence saw the snags in her own kind of life. For twenty years her work more than fulfilled her – it overwhelmed her and those empty, useless days before she went to her first job almost became an attractive memory in contrast. But then, in her fifties, circumstances changed. She had felt, until 1872, that she was actually a Secretary of State running an office but when, as the result of political changes – the death one by one of the men in power she had used and directed behind the scenes – her influence came to an end, she discovered what it was like to be out of office and growing old. Facts and figures about Indian affairs, which had become her main preoccupation after the British Army’s health in general, were no longer sent to her. The new Governor General of India, Lord Northbrook, did not consult her. If she requested reports on India she was told that they were private. Her reaction verged on the panic-stricken. “1872. This year I go out of office,” she wrote. What was she to do without that feverish hard important work? What else was there in her life? At an age when women were enjoying the fruits after the labours of family life she had none. There was, of course, the Nightingale School and hospital reform but work for both lacked that sense of urgency which had always galvanized her into action. Adapting to anything less important than vital was difficult. There were suddenly yards of slack to take up. Then, just as she was beginning to make the necessary adjustment, both her parents and her sister (who had married at forty to Sir Harry Verney) fell ill. She fell victim to another of society’s little maxims: unmarried daughters in middle age had nothing else to do so could look after ailing parents. She was back where she had started, fulfilling “duties”, without the excuse of husband or children or what anyone would call “real” work. In 1873 she spent eight months immured in Embley caring for her father until he died in January 1874. The years after his death were, she wrote, the most miserable in her entire life. She took Fanny to Lea Hurst and looked after her until her death in 1880. At last, all those morally inescapable “duties” were over. She was free.

  She was also sixty years of age and very aware of her own vulnerability. Florence’s personality was such that she always seemed to observers entirely self-contained and self-sufficient. It would have seemed ridiculous to worry about her being on her own. And yet, after her mother’s death, Florence did begin to feel alone in a way she had never done before. She certainly was not going to cry out to be loved as she accused the female sex in general of doing but all the same the need for affection and companionship grew. All her closest friends were dead, including Sidney Herbert with whom she had had an intellectual relationship that meant so much to her. It may be true that she helped to hound him to his death through overwork but her grief after he died is pitiful to read. She wrote to her mother on March 7th, 1862 . . . “I have lost all. All the others have children . . . to live for. While I have lost husband and children and all . . . If Paget could amputate my left forequarter I am sure I would have sent for him in half an hour.”42 Twenty years later her feelings remained much the same. Nobody had taken Sidney Herbert’s place. In this situation Florence behaved with the same courage that characterized her whole life. She analyzed her position and vowed not to become an ogre in her old age, not to exact devotion from friends or family who had cause to be grateful to her or who felt a sense of duty. She saw that as a woman on her own she must make visiting her an attractive proposition and not a dreaded chore. She determined not to whine or try to arouse pity, not to go in for emotional blackmail. “Should there be anything in which I can be the least use, here I am” was a common ending to her letters to the young. She made herself interested in what she knew interested her visitors. She looked after their individual needs and gave as well as took. She was enthusiastic and entertaining and built a place for herself in the large Nightingale circle of younger people – nephews, nieces, cousins and the children of all of them. She became a trusted confidante and succeeded so well in her desire to be understanding and supportive that Margaret Verney (daughter-in-law of Parthe’s husband (Harry) could write in 1895, when Florence was seventy-five, “We are crazy with joy that you give us so blessed a hope of seeing you in November.”

  Florence’s old age was happy – happier by far than her tormented youth, happier even than her fulfilled middle age when she was driven mad by memories of the Crimean tragedy and by the incompetence of those who were in a position to make sure it did not happen again. People, for the first time, were more important than work or the desire to work. This was because she discovered that personal relationships need no longer clash with anything. At the height of her powers, and even before, love, affection or duty had always presented her with an unpleasant choice about how close she was to become to people. She never forgot that it was love for her parents that had kept her confined at home so long and ever after she took care to side-step love. This made her appear ruthless, as it made all feminists appear ruthless at that stage of feminism. Love of any personal sort was the great, cunning, insidious enemy. Fall in love with man or child and you were done for, sucked into that whirlpool of conjugal bliss in which y
ou would swirl dizzily around for the rest of your life. But after her sixtieth year Florence discovered that love was no longer going to ensnare her. On the contrary, personal, loving relationships could actually become her work. There was no need any longer to fear social intercourse, to dread those personal intimacies which always inevitably brought with them time-consuming responsibilities. Her bitterness about how other people, particularly women, always let her down faded.