Getting increasingly desperate, Florence wrote, “My present life is suicide. “It was as if I had said I wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she wrote.1 She told her parents that she wanted to be a nurse. She refused to be a subordinate to a husband she was bored with the trivial lives that upper class women led she had her destiny to fulfill. She wanted a higher calling she wanted to work to use her intellect, her skills, her moral passion and to make a difference in the world. Above all, young ladies were to prepare for making a “good” marriage with a man of high class and status.īut Florence was different. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE WAS born of wealthy parents who expected her to do all the things young ladies of her class did: to spend much of her time in the drawing room entertaining her sister or her friends to take occasional rides in carriages, to visit others to appear at parties and dinners and to be occupied with embroidery, playing the piano, and painting-but these activities were meant to be “charming” and not taken too seriously.
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