Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [22]
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).