When most people think of Florence Nightingale, the image usually comes to mind of a woman who completely emodies the traditional male idea of what a woman should be (kind of an uber-mommy figure, selflessly and tirelessly nurturing and caring for those around her).
The true Florence Nightingale is ever so much more complex, and so not the embodiment of the ideal female (as far as traditional male views go anyway).
I used to think Florence Nightingale was all about nursing too. That was until a couple of years ago when I took an epidemiology course, and during one class we watched a film about Florence. It is true that her main claim to fame was nursing British soldiers during the Crimean War. What most people don't know however, is that disease during that war killed 10 times more soldiers than the war itself. Florence, who had been endowed with a love of mathematics and epidemiology by her father, noticed that there were correlations between the sanitation and ventilation of the soldiers' quarters and the rates of disease. After the war she and a colleague prepared a lengthy statistical report which was presented to the British government and was instrumental in resulting in improvments to sanitation in the army, hospitals, etc. Her work was one of the first uses of applied statistics towards a concrete end. And what an end it was...literally millions upon millions of lives have been saved by the statistical studies into hygeine and sanitation that she began.
Florence came from a very well heeled upper class family. To the distress of her parents, Florence never married (but had several open love affairs). In fact, it appears she may have decided to enter nursing (a decidedly low-brow profession at the time) in part just to piss her parents off. I admire her spirit that time and time again made her buck the conventional ideas of how people around her thought she should be living her life.
When her parents died, she was heir to quite a large fortune. Later in life, in the 1890's, she decided that applied statistics was so important a field to humanity that it should be a subject taught in mainstream academia. She thus approached Oxford and proposed giving them a large endowment to create a chair in applied statistics. Such a professorship had never existed before anywhere.
Lots of web sites/publications can be found that mention that Florence donated the money to Oxford for the establishment of this pioneering professorship; however what virtually none of the publications mentions is that Oxford was dead set against having a chair in applied statistics. Instead, they wanted the money to go to a chair in theoretical statistics. Because what did Florence know about statistics academia, being the stupid female she was??? The white male establishment at Oxford was going to decide how that money was going to be spent, without any interference from some idiot female (even if that idiot female was footing the bill), thank you very much. Applied statistics indeed...who had ever heard of such a stupid thing being taught at a university?
When Oxford insisted that the chair simply had to be theoretical statistics instead of applied, Florence, being the so very not stupid female she was, told them to kiss her *ss, and said that if they wanted a chair in theoretical statistics, they could get someone else to endow it. Suddenly Oxford became much more amenable to the idea of having a chair in applied statistics.
They were the first university to do so, and today have one of the premier applied statistics departments in the world. Thanks to the study of applied statistics, we have things like clinical drug trials that tell us whether or not drugs are truly effective (well, that is the idea anyway...things tend to get skewed when people with a monetary interest in the marketing of the drug do the studies). We have epidemiological studies that show the best way to prevent disease, and/or mitigate its spread. I could go on and on and on about how applied statistics affects our lives and has saved and/or bettered the lives of literally billions of people. And Florence Nightingale was the nucleus of the field of applied statistics entering mainstream academia. Can you think of the actions of anyone in the past 150 years that has affected the lives of so many people?
She was smart, she did what she wanted, and she let no man tell her what to do, and because she stood up for what she believed in, all of our of lives have been affected in a multitude of ways. She is my absolute #1 feminist hero, and she should be on your hero list too.
