Betsy Israel - Bachelor Girl

When she was seventeen and out for a walk in the garden, Florence received what she referred to as her “calling.” The voice of God told her plainly that she was to do good works, although he did not specify exactly which ones. She had always been interested in “social conditions,” and much to her mother’s horror, Florence began visiting poor, sick neighbors near the family’s summer estate in Derbyshire and near the winter manor at Hampshire. Through a friend of her father’s, she arranged to tour local hospitals, and as a teenager she first posed the question she’d spend the rest of her life attempting to answer: How can any person get well in such depressing and horrible places? She started reading, often secretly by candlelight, about nursing technique and hospital administration. Soon she was the only London belle to have extensive knowledge of bedsores, sutures, and the average number of patients stored like animals in underlit institutional rooms.

This “dank obsession” (her mother’s words) mortified her family. Nursing at that point ranked close to servant’s work—dirty, unsuitable, and just possibly, not that one would say it, involving what we would call bedpans. The fights between Florence and her mother gradually escalated. Florence assured her she did indeed find herself pretty and that, yes, she did like attention but that she wanted to do something useful. She wanted—-and she was sorry to hurt them—but she wanted to train to be a nurse. At that point several of her relatives, including possibly her sister, began to moan, literally throwing themselves on the ground at the thought of Florence near sick people. After long years of subterfuge, argument, and many crying fits, the Nightingales sent Florence on a chaperoned tour of the world.

In letters home, the chaperones described Florence as moody and adamant in visiting not museums but hospitals. At important social situations, she fell into odd muttering trances; at other times she remained silent for so long she seemed catatonic. Silence had become her refuge, a trick she had taught herself to persevere. Many Victorian women, trapped between the desire for work and family duty, famously became ill. But Florence Nightingale brought the conflict, and its torments, to new highs. She was silent, indisposed, bizarre in public, but always, even in the midst of fits, scheming a new life for herself. Unlike most of her neurasthenic peers, she had decided to “serve,” and as a first step she had decided to “avoid at all costs marriage.” As she told her journal: “Marriage… is often an initiation into the meaning of that inexorable word never ; which does not deprive us, it is true, of what at their festivals the idle and inconsiderate call ‘life,’ but which brings in reality the end of our lives, and the chill of death with it.”

On their way back to England, her traveling party passed through Germany and stopped at a school renowned for its teaching hospital. Florence felt she’d at last found a place. Ignoring extreme disapproval, she announced her intent to take a three-month nursing course at the German facility and promptly left, convinced her entire life was about to change. When she triumphantly finished, she returned home to find that it hadn’t. There were invitations and calling cards, outings and theater—an engagement calendar that seemed to be full for several years.

As she later wrote, “I… dragged out my twenties. Somehow, I don’t know how.” Locked in her room, she tore at the world in her journals: “Why,” she asked at age thirty-two, “are women given passion, intellect, moral activity… and a place in society where no one of the three may be exercised?”

During this time she channeled her rage into an unusual novel called Cassandra, a series of monologues delivered by numerous characters who, like the prophetess, could see the future, discourse with great fury for hours (and pages), then suffer outrage when no one believes a word. It was published in 1860, once Florence was famous, but for her parents it was, even in an unfinished state, a baffling and embarrassing enterprise.

In 1853 she got her first real job, as superintendent of the London Establishment for Gentlewomen During Illness. More significant, that same year, at the age of thirty-three, she took a London flat of her own, a move so shocking her mother is said to have fainted. Florence was never able to confront her mother directly, but in a journal she addressed her and the situation this way: “Well, my dear, you don’t imagine that with all my talents… that I’m to stay dangling about [your] drawing room all my life!… You must look at me as your vagabond son… you were willing enough to part with me to be married… and I should have cost you a great deal more.”

In 1854 her “calling” at last seemed to materialize. The Minister of War, a social acquaintance greatly impressed with her work, called on her to recruit nurses and to help organize the field hospitals in the Crimea, where Britain, France, and Turkey were fighting Russia. The tricky part was that no women had ever before served as battle nurses. Florence gathered thirty-eight nurses and went off, with a secret allowance from her father, into the war at Scutari.

The female nurses at first were scorned, dismissed from operating rooms, jeered at, served dinner hours after the male staff. But the work so absorbed Florence—she was the lone woman to assist at amputations—that people came to respect her for her stoicism, her amazing speed, and her genuine empathy. As “the lady in chief,” she acted as the soldiers’ friend. She learned their names, sat with each one, read to them or wrote letters for them and made sure they were mailed. She also took care of their finances, sending home checks and corresponding with wives who needed money. And she taught the squeamish by example. Florence was known around camp for her friendship with a man who had half a face.

At the war’s end Florence returned home famous, a woman adventurer and living saint. Some also saw her as a genius. In the Crimean War she used statistical calculations to determine how many men could be kept alive if rooms were sanitized according to her specifications. She was credited with inventing the pie graph to demonstrate her estimates—how many would live, how many die according to conditions—and she was usually right. The British government created a fund so that Florence could organize civil hospitals along the same lines as she had in the Crimea. At thirty-five, the raging girl locked in her room now had a rare and meaningful life before her.

Louisa May Alcott, author most famously of Little Women, likewise spent much of her young life tied to her family, but not as a hothouse society belle. She was more like an itinerant family coordinator. Her father, Bronson, founder of free-form progressive schools in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, was never fully able to keep the family—his wife, Abigail, Louisa, and her three sisters—solvent and moved them frequently. They lived in a house, Hillside, in Concord, where Louisa would recall taking nature walks with Henry David Thoreau. For a while they lived in a communal village in Harvard called Fruitlands. (She wrote about their life there years later, in Transcendental Wild Oats.) They lived in New Hampshire and recurrently in Boston, in each place the Alcott girls spending much of their time trying to earn extra money to help their father. When Louisa was in her twenties, she published a novel, Flower Fables (her first novel, written at seventeen, would not be published for decades). And the next time her father announced a move, Louisa said no; she was staying in Boston to pursue her literary career, seamstressing on the side. Alone for the first time, she began to work on a series of stories called “Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy,” the characters who would become the March sisters of Little Women . Ultimately, when her publishers demanded, she would complete the novel in two and a half months. But for a time she put it aside.