section_path: Contributions/Literature and the women's movement
section_name: Literature and the women's movement
paragraph_text: Literature and the women's movement
  
  Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen argues:
  
  Nightingale's achievements are all the more impressive when they are considered against the background of social restraints on women in Victorian England. Her father, William Edward Nightingale, was an extremely wealthy landowner, and the family moved in the highest circles of English society. In those days, women of Nightingale's class did not attend universities and did not pursue professional careers; their purpose in life was to marry and bear children. Nightingale was fortunate. Her father believed women should be educated, and he personally taught her Italian, Latin, Greek, philosophy, history, and – most unusual of all for women of the time – writing and mathematics.
  
  Lytton Strachey was famous for his book debunking 19th-century heroes, Eminent Victorians (1918). Nightingale gets a full chapter, but instead of debunking her, Strachey praised her in a way that raised her national reputation and made her an icon for English feminists of the 1920s and 1930s.
  
  While better known for her contributions in the nursing and mathematical fields, Nightingale is also an important link in the study of English feminism. She wrote some 200 books, pamphlets and articles throughout her life. During 1850 and 1852, she was struggling with her self-definition and the expectations of an upper-class marriage from her family. As she sorted out her thoughts, she wrote Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. This was an 829-page, three-volume work, which Nightingale had printed privately in 1860, but which until recently was never published in its entirety. An effort to correct this was made with a 2008 publication by Wilfrid Laurier University, as volume 11 of a 16 volume project, the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. The best known of these essays, called "Cassandra", was previously published by Ray Strachey in 1928. Strachey included it in The Cause, a history of the women's movement. Apparently, the writing served its original purpose of sorting out thoughts; Nightingale left soon after to train at the Institute for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth.
  
  "Cassandra" protests the over-feminisation of women into near helplessness, such as Nightingale saw in her mother's and older sister's lethargic lifestyle, despite their education. She rejected their life of thoughtless comfort for the world of social service. The work also reflects her fear of her ideas being ineffective, as were Cassandra 's. Cassandra was a princess of Troy who served as a priestess in the temple of Apollo during the Trojan War. The god gave her the gift of prophecy; when she refused his advances, he cursed her so that her prophetic warnings would go unheeded. Elaine Showalter called Nightingale's writing "a major text of English feminism, a link between Wollstonecraft and Woolf ". Nightingale was initially reluctant to join the Women's Suffrage Society when asked by John Stuart Mill, but through Josephine Butler was convinced 'that women's enfranchisement is absolutely essential to a nation if moral and social progress is to be made'.
  
  In 1972, the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor wrote "Welcome Eumenides", a poem written in Nightingale's voice and quoting frequently from Nightingale's writings. Adrienne Rich wrote that "Eleanor Taylor has brought together the waste of women in society and the waste of men in wars and twisted them inseparably."