Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [21]
As she continued: “I don’t agree at all that a ‘woman has no reason—and not caring for anyone else—for not marrying a good man who asks her,’ and I don’t think Providence does either…. Some have every reason for not marrying, and…for these, it is much better to educate the children who are already in the world and can’t be got out of it, rather than to bring more into it.”
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