Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  Many people recorded what a pleasure it was to visit Miss Nightingale. Both her home and her hospitality were attractive in the then accepted sense of being “feminine”. Her passion for work never made her oblivious to her surroundings and she was always contemptuous of those who used work as an excuse for slovenliness. She was a superb housekeeper and an excellent hostess. She always had fresh flowers around her – even at the height of her powers when she was buried in correspondence she would find time to write to her mother detailing exactly which flowers she wished to be sent to her from Embley. She liked any room she was in to be neat and pretty and above all light, which, in the Victorian era of plush and velvet, of clutter and heavy drapes, was quite unusual. She had told her nurses not to forget that “the sun is a sculptor” and a painter and she never forgot it herself. Her windows were always open and, most revolutionary of all, uncurtained, except for “side curtains” of plain blue serge, which made more than one visitor feel naked and exposed. She showed the same marked taste for simplicity and style in her own clothing, refusing to wear fussy things, but loving lace and paying meticulous attention even to her nightgowns all those years she stayed in bed. When her mother sent her some new ones in 1863 she wrote that although they were very nice she would have liked them two inches longer and “a little sloped round the throat in front i.e. cut down in the neck.”43 Looks in everything were extremely important to her. Her dinners, her father wrote, were “perfect”. They looked appetizing and the quality of the food as well as the standard of cooking was superb. To the butcher she was as explicit as to any Minister at War (“a forequarter of your best small mutton . . . I prefer four year old mutton”)44 and to her cook equally exact (“Brisket of beef must be cooked with herbs, onions, carrots, celery in a light broth on the hot plates from 10 am to 9 pm”).45 Any idea that work was an excuse for letting the housework be the concern of the servants entirely was misplaced. Florence’s scorn for “bad mistresses” was deep. She was an overseer of her maids all the time – nothing escaped her vigilant eye. She wrote in March 1862, when she was overwhelmed with work, “I am going to try for a housemaid who will clean not dirty my house . . . You see I have three maids who know how to do literally nothing . . . Anne Clarke who was during her three months under me at Harley Street the brightest, cleanest girl I ever had is come back to me a dirty half witted slattern. So much for the mistresses of the present day. Anne Clarke will still do things excellently under my eye.”46

  All these facets to Florence Nightingale’s character make her as intensely “feminine” as her sister Parthe would have wished and there was also another quality she possessed in abundance which is little written about. She was a very tender-hearted person, with a deep compassion for suffering of any kind. Many of her more famous sayings sound brutal and cruel but they do her an injustice. She detested any doctor who was impervious to a patient’s agony and she stood at the side of many such men. Like Elizabeth Blackwell, she looked to women to be different, to have time to be sympathetic and realize what patients were going through, and above all not to be afraid to become involved if it would help. Parthe, who thought of herself as the epitome of tender-heartedness, was actually taken aback by evidence of Florence’s kindness and the lengths she would go to. On August 4th, 1856 she wrote with some distaste to Mrs Gaskell that “Some of Florence’s spoils of war have arrived – a one legged sailor boy who was 10 months in her hospitals, a little Russian prisoner who came into Hospital for a scald . . . a big Crimean puppy given her by the soldiers (who) was found in a hole in the rocks near Balaclava . . .”47 Florence had had them all brought back to England, received them in London herself and then when they were rested enough had them taken to Embley where she gave orders that they were to be looked after. Her nurses, too, were well aware of how real her kindness was. She was immensely concerned about any nurse who was ill and always offered her home for convalescence. She would send fruit and flowers to sick nurses and no Nightingale Nurse ever went to a new post without finding flowers there to welcome her.

  Nor was this anxiety for other people’s welfare confined to those she knew – she was equally concerned about the legions of “sick poor” and well aware of the conditions in which they were obliged to live. It distressed her that her own emphasis on personal cleanliness was not much good to the majority of the population – “it is impossible to many poor women – many can never have a bath in their lives,”48 she wrote and she was a great supporter of the scheme to initiate “penny baths” in public bathhouses. She loathed people who smiled and shrugged their shoulders philosophically and spoke about “fate” and “the wheel of fortune” in reference to the plight of the poor. “I own myself to be completely at a loss when people use such expressions . . . If I believed in indiscriminate fate I should go at once and hang myself.”49 She detested socialism, which she thought stopped people helping themselves (and it was the government’s duty to teach them how to do this) but she would not go along with any ideas about the sufferings of the poor being either “fate” or nobody else’s business. She was, she said, an advocate of Savonarola because he made everything that happened in a state or country the business of everyone in it. “I cry educate them to do better,” she wrote of the poor in 1850 to her father and added, “I think the Poor Law has been the ruin of England.”50 When she came to writing a pamphlet on training nurses for the sick poor she stressed that she wanted to foster “the spirit of work (not relief) in the district nurse and for her to foster the same in the sick poor.” If the district nurse began by giving relief then she would end up doing nothing but that and this was not the idea. “Philanthropy is the biggest humbug I know,” she wrote in 1867. “Philanthropy is to the love of Mankind what property is to Christianity – all parade.”51

  On August 5th, 1887, when she was sixty-seven years old, Florence wrote to her beloved Aunt Mai, “In this month 34 years ago you lodged me in Harley Street and in this month 31 years ago you returned me to England from Scutari. And in this month 30 years ago the first Royal Commission was finished . . . In this month 26 years ago Sidney Herbert died . . . And in this month 24 years ago the work of the second Royal Commission (India) was finished. And in this month, this year, my powers seem all to have failed and old age set in.”52 But not quite. There was one more battle she was to be engaged in which revived her flagging powers. In 1886 a proposal had been made that the trained nurse should, like the trained doctor, be registered. A committee of the Hospitals’ Association proposed that an examination, or series of examinations, should be taken by nurses and marked by an independent body of examiners and then, if passed, a nurse would be entitled to have her name placed on a state register. A standard of nursing would thus be established which would enhance the status of the whole profession. Florence Nightingale instantly sprang to the alert. She was not against registration itself but against the possibility of operating such a scheme. A register of nurses, she wrote, could be of two kinds: either a mere directory, or “a list published by authority”. The second was the only kind worth having but “the only way in which such a register can be usefully compiled is by the appointment of a number of officially qualified persons who shall have the time and the will to go minutely into the career of every applicant for registration . . .”53 What she wanted above all else was to avoid registration ever being automatic – “registration is not a matter of right but of selection.” Nurses were not engineers and nursing was not just a profession but a vocation too. She had not “raised nursing from the sink” to have it plunged back into it. But other people thought differently and, although they dreaded opposing Miss Nightingale, were prepared to do so.

  Mrs Bedford-Fenwick was one of them. She herself had been a Nightingale Nurse, progressing with great speed to become Matron of St Bartholomew’s at the age of twenty-four in 1878. She founded the British Nurses Association in the drawing room of her house after she had resigned as Matron because of her marriage. In addition, she edited the Nursing Record (from
1893) and was powerfully placed to speed the registration scheme she wholeheartedly advocated. She believed her idol Miss Nightingale had been wrong to try to make nursing into a religion and wanted it to be stripped of such mystical overtones. It was a profession like any other and ought to be organized accordingly without delay. In May 1893, after tremendous efforts by both sides, a special committee of the Privy Council announced its judgement: a Royal Charter was granted to Mrs Bedford-Fenwick’s association but the use of the word “register” was forbidden. The Charter allowed them only the right to have the “maintenance of a list of persons who may have applied to have their names entered thereon as nurses.” It looked like a victory for Miss Nightingale – and in fact the voluntary listing of nurses was indeed a failure – but Mrs Bedford-Fenwick only had to bide her time. She concentrated her efforts on Parliament and finally, in 1919, a bill was passed. Mrs Bedford-Fenwick herself became State Registered Nurse No. 1 on the new official register.

  But of course by then Florence Nightingale had been dead nine years. After 1896 she never left her house in South Street and was again immured in her bedroom for many years just as she had been once before. What was interesting about her extreme old age was that she never fell victim to wallowing in nostalgia. She continued to look to the future even when her own future was so clearly limited. She herself was intrigued by this outlook which she knew to be untypical. She had nursed many old people and she had observed their total lack of interest in anything or anyone new but she was always “eager to see successors” she wrote. Even more amazing was her rejection of flattery in any form and her instant recognition of sycophancy. She detested both. When she grew very old, in her late eighties, she saw how carefully people handled her and it irritated her. “Believe me dear Papa,” she had once written, “what success in life I have had is due to my not seeing double with my eyes as so many do.”54 She never saw double, nor put on rose-coloured spectacles. She was disgusted by the fuss made over the relics of the Crimean War which she had been persuaded to lend for the Victorian Era Exhibition to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. When the exhibition closed she wrote to her great-nephew, “Now I must ask you about my bust (Here I stop to utter a great many bad words not fit to put on paper. I also utter a pious wish that the bust may be smashed.) I should not have remembered it but that I am told somebody came every day to bedeck it with fresh flowers. I utter a pious wish that the person may be——saved . . .”55

  In 1901 she became almost blind which was a great blow, and began to lose her memory. The bestowal of the Order of Merit in 1907 (the first time it was given to a woman) and of the Freedom of the City of London the following year came too late for her to relish (or to utter any caustic comments). On August 13th, 1910, after six months during which she could not even speak, she finally died, leaving orders that her body should be used for dissection (which was not done). But another wish of hers – that there should be no national funeral or burial in Westminster Abbey – was deferred to. She was buried in the Nightingale family grave.

  * * *

  Florence Nightingale’s feminism was the most contorted variety available in the nineteenth century. It solved no problems for other women and created many new ones. Worst of all, it presented women with a whole new area of guilt to bear when they were already quite burdened enough. And yet, for all that, Florence Nightingale’s contribution to feminist history was of overriding importance.

  The corner-stone of Florence Nightingale’s feminism was her refusal to admit that women were discriminated against, that all that was wrong was women themselves. Should they choose to they could rise up everywhere at any time and fulfil themselves. She herself, she said, had never found her sex an obstacle – all that had ever got in her way was stupidity. This was a gigantic lie. It only needs the most cursory glance at the Nightingale Papers to see that it was her sex which made her life difficult from the very beginning and kept her from her work for so long. Once she was at work, her sex debarred her from a position of power in which she could act without having endlessly to work through the men who were in those positions. She should herself have served on the Royal Commissions not merely given advice to them. She should have been the Secretary, the Minister, the person responsible for decisions. Because she was so adept at pulling the strings behind the scenes, because she enjoyed that particular kind of power, she allowed herself to think that her sex had robbed her of nothing. Success blinded her to realities of the situation even though she was so proud of her clear-sightedness.

  There was also the point that she was an upper-class woman. She was listened to not only because of what she had proved she could do but because of who she was – friend of Sidney Herbert, friend of Palmerston, on dining-out terms with half the cabinet and related to some of the most influential families in England. She had received an extremely rare education which put her on a level with the most educated men. Long before her rise to fame, when she was in her twenties, she had sat next to Sir Henry de la Beche at one of her father’s dinner-parties and terrified him with her scholarship. “She began by drawing Sir Henry out on geology and charmed him with the boldness and breadth of her views which were not common then. She accidentally proceeded into regions of Latin and Greek . . .”56 Then she turned to her other neighbour at the table and discussed with him his speciality, Egyptian Inscriptions, quoting Lepsius to him in the original. It was hardly surprising that she never found men patronized her or spoke over her head.

  But her argument was never that all women could be like her. She was not so sheltered from the realities of the world that she could think that. It was that each woman had it within her grasp to alter her own particular world according to where she stood. What angered her was that those who would have found it easiest to do so were the least inclined. It was women of her own class who earned her greatest scorn. There are a hundred searing pages on this subject in Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Religious Truth among the Artizans of England. It was women like her mother and sister who enraged her in spite of her great love for them. They were typical of the kind of “femininity” which she thought did so much harm. While she herself worked so hard after the Crimean War “the whole occupation of Parthe and Mama was to lie on two sofas and tell each other not to get tired by putting flowers into water . . . I cannot describe the impression it made on me . . . It is a scene worthy of Moliere where two people in tolerable health lie on the sofa all day doing absolutely nothing and persuade themselves and others that they are victims of their self-devotion for another who is dying of overwork.”57

  What stirred her to even greater contempt was the way women like Parthe actually dared to imagine they knew anything at all. Without studying a document or analysing a report they made themselves utterly foolish by offering opinions upon matters totally beyond their comprehension. “When Mrs Herbert was setting forth to me her views upon hospital nursing,” Florence once wrote to her father, “I exclaimed quite involuntarily what can you know about it? . . . Does Parthe know more about my work than Mrs Herbert about hospitals? Where should I have been now in any part of my life’s work had I followed any part of her life’s advice?”58 It was these women who, she thought, needed no other privileges or rights. They had all of them under their own noses. All they had to do was examine their own lives and then put them right.

  Florence Nightingale found what she thought the truth unpalatable: too many women liked their “poor lives”. They revelled in them, they wanted no change. So she damned them. They were not worth helping. John Stuart Mill or anyone else was wasting his or her time in trying to get such women the vote. What she would not accept was that she, and others who were clear-sighted, had a duty to awaken women to the indignities of their sex even if they did not recognize them. She was prepared to cast them off and declare they were not worth bothering about if they could not help themselves. What she refused to admit was that it was not the fault of women like her mother and sister if they lived how they
lived – it was their fault in her opinion and therefore she could only blame them and not the system. But underlying her scorn there was also a good deal of unacknowledged blame for the system. “Our female schools are a disgrace to us,” she wrote to Cardinal Manning. “. . . the stupidity of our education is marvellous . . . It is the ignorance of our women which gets them into mischief – but what do our educated women know who profess to teach them? Nothing but music and French and a kind of literature which they had better not know . . .”59 That was blame for the system even if she would not allow it as an adequate excuse for Parthe at any rate (because she had been offered something else).

  At the beginning of her career Florence Nightingale had thought that once employment of a dignified and satisfying nature was offered to women they would take it enthusiastically. All that needed to be done was to open the floodgates and women would thankfully stream through them. She was sure there must be hordes and hordes like her just waiting for the opportunity. By the end of her active life she was bitterly disappointed. There were no hordes. Even worse, the calibre of those who came to nurse was not high. There were honourable exceptions but the rank and file did not impress her. They were soft, indolent, too interested in money and not dedicated enough to obliterate all memory of pleasure outside work. She could not understand it. Why could women not “marry” a career as she had done? Why did they continue to find marriage to a man and the bearing of children more tempting? The wastage in nursing appalled her especially after she had discovered it was not due to faulty selection. In the first ten years of the Nightingale School the fall-out rate was 30 to 40% and even after selection procedure was overhauled it remained as high as 20%. Nor were the numbers for those who gained their certificates astronomically high. Between 1860 and 1903 a total of 1,907 nurses got one-year certificates from the Nightingale School. Nursing, even after it had been made respectable and had become a properly structured career had not after all been the answer to the problem of what to do with all those surplus spinsters, especially the well-born ones.