Bachelor Girl (6 page)

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.

One of her younger sisters had died suddenly at twenty-two. Her older sister had married. Louisa felt she had no choice but to move back to Concord, where the family had resettled, to help her mother. As the more levelheaded of the two remaining daughters, Louisa and her mother shared the endless duties of running Orchard House. (The March family in
Little Women
would live in a fantasy version of her childhood Hillside; Louisa May would write it seated in Orchard House).

For an aspiring writer, it was a grueling, at times unbearable life—bak
ing, washing, mending, ironing, jobs that at the time could last for days. In 1858 she wrote to her married sister, “If I think of my woes, I fall into a vortex of debt, dishpans and despondency awful to see…so I say, every path has its puddle and I trust to play gaily as I can…in my puddle…while I wait for the lord to give me a lift.”

For “economic salvation” she considered marriage. She considered it all of one day, coming to the same conclusion that Susan B. Anthony reached on behalf of an undecided niece: “Marriage. It is an all absorbing profession.” Instead, she worked as a seamstress, a paid companion. She took teaching jobs at her father’s school and argued with him about his plans to leave her the school (she didn’t want it). As her mother aged, more of the housework fell to Louisa and her less-than-enthusiastic youngest sister. She had to get out. The Civil War was on, and she wrote in her diary: “November—30 years old. Decided I must go to Washington as a nurse, if I would find a place. Help is needed and I love nursing and MUST LET OUT MY PENT UP ENERGY in some way. I want new experiences…. So I’ve sent my name in if they will have me.”

In Washington she worked diligently as a nurse-in-training at the Union Hotel Hospital, where she treated thousands of injuries, witnessed terrifying operations and many deaths. For a woman who’d spent most of her life indoors, it was an astonishing experience and she afterward reworked her letters home into a book called
Hospital Sketches
(1868).

She never really went “home” after the war. Living but not slaving in Concord, she became the editor of a children’s magazine,
Merry’s Museum,
and worked continuously for the suffrage movement. (She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord after Massachusetts passed its state suffrage law.) She wrote ten novels and two volumes of nonfiction. When her youngest sister died, she adopted her niece, Lulu, who’d been named for her, and took her to Boston, where she established a new family compound.

Louisa May Alcott never married because she could not envision the latter half of her life, like the first part, trapped in a house that needed cleaning. As she put it: “The loss of liberty…and self-respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being Mrs. instead of Miss.”

Like Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, the youngest of five children, longed to escape from Massachusetts, once writing in her diary, “Have ye work, my brave countrymen, real work for me there?…Is there anything useful I can do?” She’d been working since age fifteen when, after tutoring her at home, the family sent her out as a teacher. For years she reported feeling nervous in these jobs, insecure, and always tired. She later worked to organize free schools in towns throughout New England—apparently still feeling very shy but not always quite so nervous. She was most proud of an experimental free school she had planned and opened in New Jersey. But when she learned that her male coworkers, even those beneath her in the hierarchy, were earning more than she was, she quit, “full of familiar uncertainty and queer sickness.”

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.