High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Illness made her a recluse, old before her years. However, from her house off Park Lane (provided by her father) she led a movement to reform not just healthcare, but also the very standards of living among the most vulnerable in Britain. She became obsessional about health statistics, but her methods of interpreting them were soon widely taken up as more accurate and serviceable: one of the by-products of massive change had been the propensity for bureaucrats and private individuals to assemble statistics, and for those who sought evidence to underpin calls for further change to take them seriously, whether in matters of health, sanitary reform or education. Nightingale was consulted by the great and good whenever they sought to establish or modernise a hospital about how to do it, and how to raise standards of nursing there. However, in 1860, aged just forty, she suffered another complete collapse. Again she recovered, but was left feeling sick and depressed, and began another long period as an invalid. Her illness, for which the doctors recommended complete rest, gave her an excuse to leave society and to concentrate on improving healthcare.

  She became a ferocious letter-writer: the British Library groans with her correspondence. Refusing to visit anyone because of illness, she used that excuse – and that of her fame – to summon them to her bed or couch-side in Park Lane. This was all part of her dictatorialism: she was enormously effective on any subject of which she had specific knowledge (whether nursing, sanitation or the Army) provided she could be in charge of coordinating the response to any problem on that subject. The Nightingale School of Nursing opened in 1860, and was her next great achievement: but in its early stages she was too ill to have much to do with it, and the men she had appointed as chairman and secretary respectively – Herbert and Clough – were both dead by the end of 1861. Luckily, other prominent members of her extended family took up the reins: her cousin Henry Bonham-Carter succeeded Clough, and her brother-in-law – Pop eventually married in her late thirties – Sir Harry Verney, a Liberal MP, became chairman.

  One of her intellectual heroes was Mill, an accolade he bore with gentility and respect, even though he at least could see that theirs was not a meeting of minds. Mill had an extensive correspondence with her, in which she described herself as ‘one of your most faithful adherents’ and told him ‘your “logic” – especially as regards “law”, “free will” and “necessity” has been the forming influence of it [an article on religion she had written and sent him] and of “me”.’142 Nightingale wrote a monograph on a form of religious belief that entailed doing God’s work without the trappings of conventional worship and faith. Writing about this to Mill in 1860 – they had not met, because of her reclusiveness, but she had been put in touch with him by Edwin Chadwick – Nightingale said that ‘Many years ago, I had a large and very curious acquaintance among the artisans of the north of England and of London. I learnt then that they were without any religion whatever, though diligently seeking after one, principally in Comte and his school. Any return to what is called Christianity appeared impossible.’143 Mill agreed to be consulted on Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth ‘since I probably stand as much in need of conversion as those to whom it is addressed.’144

  Once he had read a substantial extract from what he called her ‘treatise’, Mill told Nightingale, as tactfully as he could, of his own shortcomings in the matter of religious faith: ‘I tried what I could do with that hypothesis many years ago; that a Perfect Being could do everything except make another perfect being – that the next thing to it was to make a perfectible one – and that perfection could only be achieved by a struggle against evil.’145 He had to admit: ‘I confess that no religious theory seems to me consistent with the facts of the universe, except (in some form or other) the old one of the two principles. There are many signs, in the structure of the Universe, of an intelligent Power, wishing well to men and other sentient creatures. I could however shew, not so many perhaps, but quite as decided indications of an intelligent Power or Powers with the contrary perpetuity. But (not to insist on this) the will of the benevolent Power must find, within its own incompleteness, or in some external circumstances, very serious obstacles to the entire fulfilment of the benevolent purpose.’146 Crucial to his secularism, Mill added that ‘another point in which I cannot agree with you, is the opinion that Law, in the sense in which we predicate it of the arrangements of Nature, can only emanate from a Will . . . it is much more natural to the human mind to see a divine will in those events in which it has not yet recognised inflexible constancy of sequence, than in those in which it has.’147

  Mill made attempts to radicalise Nightingale, telling her in 1867: ‘Political power is the only security against every form of oppression’.148 He also told her, with a view to her becoming involved in the feminist movement, that ‘there are a great number of people, particularly women, who from want of the habit of reflecting on politics, are quite incapable of realizing the enormous power of politics, that is to say, of legislation, to confer happiness and also to influence the opinion and the moral nature of the governed.’149 He continued: ‘I am convinced that this power is by far the greatest that it is possible to wield for human happiness, I can neither approve of women who decline the responsibility of wielding it, nor of men who would shut out women from the right to wield it.’

  Mill hardly knew how radical she already was. She noted in 1868: ‘Labour should be made to pay better than thieving. At present, it pays worse. What is the cause of pauperism in England? Unlimited liberty and the Poor Law.’150 She wrote a paper on pauperism and sent it to Froude, ‘although unable to claim the honour of your acquaintance . . . to ask you whether you can do anything with it.’151 Froude, whose own solution to pauperism included wanting Canada made part of England for resettlement purposes, found it ‘most useful and interesting’.

  Nightingale then found a new challenge: sanitary reform in that most insanitary of British possessions, India. Soldiers of the Queen died in peace just as much as in war, usually because of the military authorities’ inability, or lack of will, to deal with cholera. She became an expert on India, summoning other authorities to Park Lane to brief her, immersing herself in statistics, and arguing, above all, for a supply of clean water. She befriended viceroys and governors general, all of whom deferred to her expertise on the subject, even though she had never set foot in the country. She began to bombard great men such as Gladstone with entreaties about how better sanitary principles might be applied to the soldiery there and, eventually, the natives (‘In Lower Bengal also the people are crying out for an Act to enable the villagers to do their own sanitary work’).152

  In 1864 she wrote to Gladstone, sending him a pamphlet on the sufferings of the cholera-ridden soldiery in India, warning him that what she had written was merely the start: ‘I have been prevented [from full disclosure] because these things are contained in private official documents.’153 Writing to any public figure was a chance for Flo to project herself. Gladstone had made a speech about the travails of the industrial classes, and she wrote to him: ‘I have been myself for the last ten years of my life under the sentence of hard labour, quite as much as (or more than) any working man – and with the addition of constant pain and illness, which make the intervals between work and work only one of “unnatural endurance”. Few men can sympathise with what you said as I do.’

  Nightingale was demanding and exceptionally tiresome, but her demands and tiresomeness were rarely made from self-interest. Her divine mission to heal the sick, or to prevent people from becoming sick, was her life’s purpose. Her autocratic style and the imposition of her will on others were exercised in that cause, and in the interests of rectifying a scandalous state of affairs that did not need to exist. During the 1860s more and more nurses were trained in her name, in her school, and in her methods.

  Perhaps most significantly, she led a movement to improve workhouse infirmaries, in some of which there were conditions hardly better than those she had found in Scutari. This led t
o the passing of the Metropolitan Poor Law Act in 1867, legislation on which she was consulted, and the first step towards the creation of district hospitals once a new structure of local government was established in 1888. She also championed and assisted in the training of district nursing to look after the indigent invalid at home. In the twenty years after her return from the Crimea she led a revolution in the healthcare of the lower classes that signalled, for perhaps the first time, that their lives were no less dispensable than those of their superiors.

  X

  After more than twenty years of serious feminist projects in education, civil rights and the professions, a philosophical underpinning was at last provided for the movement. Mill published The Subjection of Women in 1869. He had written it nearly a decade earlier but decided to publish ‘at the time when it should seem likely to be most useful’.154 He now thought the time was right, following the Reform Act and the growth in parliamentary support for universal suffrage, to share his thoughts with the world. His unswerving belief in female equality was informed partly by his rationalist beliefs and partly by the experience of his long association with, and short marriage to, Harriet Taylor. Mrs Taylor, whom he married in 1851 after her husband’s death and who herself died in 1858, was an educated woman of strong opinions. Mill claimed that ‘all that is most striking and profound’ about his tract was down to his wife. His belief in equality preceded his association with Mrs Taylor, and had he said been the result of the application of his logical mind to the question. He also believed that her initial interest in him, two decades before they married, was because of his feminism. What had been so important for Mill in her was that:

  until I knew her, the opinion was in my mind little more than an abstract principle. I saw no more reason why women should be held in legal subjection to other people, than why men should . . . but that perception of the vast practical bearings of women’s disabilities which found expression in the book on the ‘Subjection of Women’ was acquired mainly through her teaching. But for her rare knowledge of human nature and comprehension of moral and social influences, though I should doubtless have held my present opinions, I should have had a very insufficient perception of the mode in which the consequences of the inferior position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society and with all the difficulties of human improvement.155

  Mill viewed the denial of rights to women as an outrage, and his tract compares it frequently with slavery. However, he also had a further, less obvious inspiration: the second part of Nightingale’s religious treatise, which he had read in manuscript in 1860. It included a description of the lives of middle-class women in mid-Victorian England that had begun its life as a thinly disguised autobiographical novel. In the work she spoke of how ‘the accumulation of nervous energy . . . makes them feel . . . when they go to bed, as if they were going mad.’156 The family had become an institution for the oppression of women, in her view. This deeply affected Mill, for as he read Nightingale he was working on The Subjection of Women, and he was confronted by evidence of precisely the problem he had identified. He paid tribute to Nightingale for the inspiration she had given him about the tyranny of the conventional family over daughters, and mentioned how ‘a celebrated woman, in a work which I hope will some day be published, remarks truly that everything a woman does is done at odd times.’157

  Yet his commitment to what in the twentieth century became known as feminism was prompted not just by humanitarianism, but by utilitarianism. The greatest happiness of the greatest number would, he asserted, be achieved by the liberation of women from their form of slavery; not just because they would enjoy and benefit from their liberation, but because society generally would be improved by it. ‘The legal subordination of one sex to another’, he wrote, ‘is now wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.’158 He took the specific example of the bar on women sitting in the House of Commons. ‘Any limitation in the field of selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent.’159 He also wrote that allowing women to participate fully in society would double ‘the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity’. Mill had contempt for his fellow man for his active participation in the exploitation of women, and therefore his condoning the retardation of progress, and expressed it in terms that also echoed his cynicism about religion: ‘We daily see how their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by the contemplation of their fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so merciful as he has to themselves.’160

  Mill, writing four years after the abolition of slavery in America, claimed the condition of women in Britain was ‘the primitive state of slavery lasting on’; and while he admitted it had been mitigated and softened, the ‘taint of its brutal origin’ lived on.161 He understood that resistance to the idea of women’s rights would come from those who described subjection as ‘natural’, just as until recently slave-owners in the Southern states had regarded what they did as ‘natural’.162 He argued that the position of women was actually worse than that of a slave. ‘The wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law. Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else. She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers, even by inheritance, it becomes ipso facto his. In this respect the wife’s position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many countries.’163

  Even Uncle Tom, Mill argues, had his own life in his cabin: whereas a woman was her husband’s chattel. A female slave in Christian societies had the right to refuse her master what Mill euphemistically calls ‘the last familiarity’: a wife had no such right. Her husband ‘can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.’164 And any children who arrived as a result of this bestiality – or even after an act of love – were their father’s property, and he alone had rights over them. In the event of the father’s death the mother was not even automatically the children’s legal guardian, unless such an appointment had been specified in the father’s will. This cruelty was similar to that of the near-impossibility of divorce, which Mill also likened to slavery. ‘In some slave codes the slave could, under certain circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him. But no amount of ill-usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.’165

  In a society where men made the rules, those rules discriminated against women: but they did so, Mill argued, without ever understanding or getting an estimate of the true nature of women, because their rules distorted and suppressed that true nature. This could not prevail much longer. As well as wanting the vote, ‘the claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more urgent.’166 Mischievously, he added: ‘Women who read, much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or a domestic servant.’167 The genie was out of the bottle. Mill urged women to follow the example of their sisters in America, and in parts of continental Europe, and organise themselves to ensure their displeasure was relayed more keenly to the male-dominated authorities.

  A new middle class of self-made men was becoming more economically and politically important, and their social mobility was a further impetus to women to improve their standing. Religious disabilities had largely disappea
red in the preceding quarter-century. Only an accident of birth now disadvantaged half the human race. This was ‘a single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing of most universal interest.’168 It was a force preventing the world from being properly modern, and increasingly at odds with the rise in social mobility. ‘The law of servitude in marriage’, he wrote, ‘is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the person subjected to it . . . there remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.’169 As in the rest of Mill’s philosophy, he believed competition between men and women would ensure the best rose to the top. He did not seek what would now be called ‘positive discrimination’ for women: just for them to have the same rights as men.

  Mill knew why so many professions barred women. ‘I believe that their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were it not for that, I think that almost every one, in the existing state of opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the injustice of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative occupations, and from almost all high social functions; ordaining from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by any possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the stupidest and basest of the other sex.’170 Those who connived in this justified themselves as serving the interests of society, ‘by which they meant the interests of men’. He added: ‘It cannot be inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a Beethoven, because no woman has yet actually produced works comparable to theirs in any of those lines of excellence . . . But it is quite certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth, or a Deborah, or a Joan of Arc.’171 Men simply could not know what women were like: ‘They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised: and no-one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves.’172 Those who believed women were intellectually inferior because they had produced no great works of philosophical or scientific thought were wrong, because they had been denied the education to allow them to advance in such fields.