Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [24]
Through an acquaintance, Clara took a “real” job in the U.S. Patents Office in Washington—at just about the time wounded Civil War soldiers started appearing in the city. Although her only nursing experience had been the two years she spent tending a sick brother, she immediately began to organize relief efforts. Her quick, critical observation was that nurses were plentiful; supplies were short. She collected and advertised for food, blankets, and medicine and soon after founded an organization that would distribute goods to battle sites. The scheme was so efficiently executed that the U.S. Surgeon General granted her a pass to travel with army ambulances “for the purpose of distributing comforts for the sick and wounded, and nursing them.”
She was one of the only women on the front lines of the Civil War, appearing as if on schedule at every major battle and making sure there was enough of everything to go around. After the war she spent years working to find soldiers still missing in action. She also took her first trip to Europe and while there met with members of the International Red Cross. Immediately she envisioned an American branch, an organization that would function like a Clara Barton during the Civil War: getting supplies and other assistance to disaster sites. Despite complex political opposition, she opened the first chapter of the American Red Cross in 1881 and began training recruits in emergency procedures and a new concept she had devised called “first-aid skills.” Barton invented the first-aid kit. She wrote a book called The Women Who Went to the Field, a Civil War study that included Louisa May Alcott. She was present at many Red Cross interventions—fires, floods, tornados. As an older woman, she became one of the first female diplomats in U.S. history and spent six months as a substitute prison warden. She was the first woman ever to hold such a resolutely male post. It was often said—and this was a real first—that she was “very popular among the prisoners.”
Florence Nightingale’s story had a far stranger and more ambiguous ending. When the Crimean War ended, something in Florence, arguably the most famous woman in England, seemed to snap.
Whether it was battle fatigue, psychosomatic or genuine illness—she’d been exposed to hundreds of viruses—she retreated to bed, alone, refusing all requests to appear or speak. The quarantine lasted months, until she was named to a royal commission investigating health issues in the British army. She was also commissioned to write a monograph on the health of the British military in India. In 1860 she published Notes on Nursing, a guide that is still in print, and used the rest of her Crimean funds to open her own training hospital. But most of this activity, including her involvement in the Nightingale clinic, took place from her room. She communicated through letters and rarely spoke.
By age forty she had done it all—reached her professional peak and permanently won the war with her mother. It is hard to believe, but during the remaining fifty years of her life, Florence rarely left her flat. Now and then she heard or gave lectures, attended openings for hospitals, and had graduating students of the institute over for tea. But the majority of her time she spent in bed with a malady even she could not cure.
I’ve always thought that Charlotte Perkins Gilman had Florence in mind when she wrote her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), the tale of a woman confined to bedrest. (The diagnosis: nerves, neuritis, neuralgia—the vague ailments ascribed to uppity women—a version of which appeared on aspirin labels into the 1960s.) All day the woman stares at the wallpaper, until one day its shapes and patterns—yellow flowers, loops, and vines—start to undulate. Then one day a vine turns into a tiny struggling woman. Every day thereafter, she wakes to see tiny women crawling everywhere, trapped inside the yellow wallpaper, until the entire room is overtaken by a howling morass of fairy-size women.
Florence Nightingale is pictured