Florence Nightingale Was Kind of a Dick About Women’s Rights

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Florence Nightingale is an oft celebrated figure of British history who is largely considered the founder of modern nursing as we know it today. She’s also seen by many as a feminist icon for the amount of sack she kicked in her life time, the thing is though, Nightingale’s actual thoughts about feminism and the suffrage movement made her sound like she’d be more at home in the comment section of Reddit. 

For starters, in her article, Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not Nightingale implored her fellow sister to ignore the “jargon” surrounding the issue of “rights” for women (She actually wrote it like that), stating that too many women were being urged to do all the things men do “without regard to whether this is the best that women can do“. A statement so casually misogynistic word processors automatically attribute it as a quote to Donald Trump or a big talking turd.

In essence, while Nightingale fundamentally agreed with the idea of women’s rights, she didn’t think this necessarily meant that women had to do everything that men did just because they could. In fact, during the Suffrage movement, Nightingale openly criticised women complaining about how there were no jobs available to them when there were plenty of secretary jobs available, which is sort of like telling a starving person not to complain because there’s a readily available source of pigeon meat nearby.

"Also women should smile more."
“Also women should smile more.” – Nightingale, probably.

Furthermore, when she was asked to sign her name to the suffragette movement in her advanced age, she declined, stating that she was already doing enough for women with her other work, which to be fair, she probably was. Then again, it seems like a bit of a dick move in retrospect for her to have refused to lend her name to a cause that directly affected her entire gender.

Speaking of dicks, despite working in a field traditionally associated with women, Nightingale was often critical of her female colleagues and had few, if any close female friends, mostly choosing to spend her time in the company of men. One of the reasons Nightingale consciously chose to spend more time with men is because she felt that men had done more to advance her career than women, once being quoted as saying, I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions. Again, this comes across as being unbelievably dickish when you realise the reason no woman could have as much of an impact on her career as a man is because of the deep-routed systematic oppression against women the suffragettes were campaigning against.

"Seriously, smile more, you'll look much cuter."
“Seriously, smile more, you’ll look much cuter.” – Nightingale again, probably.

Nightingale identified with the powerful men in her life so much that in her own letters and notes she commonly referred to herself in the masculine sense, calling herself amongst other things “a man of action” and “a man of business“.

Of course none of this should detract from the amazing work she did in her lifetime and the huge kick in the dick she gave the patriarchy in showing how competent and sassy a woman could be. It’s just worth keeping in mind that along with being an icon of feminist history, Florence Nightingale also once seriously suggested women should be happy being secretaries.