This item copies a post that appeared in reddit on the subreddit Red Pill, posted in June 9, 2013 by HumanSockPuppet.
Florence Nightingale [1820-1910] was a celebrated English
social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. She came
to prominence while serving as a nurse during the Crimean War, where she tended
to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after
her habit of making rounds at night. [Wikipedia]
Nightingale in these remarks contrasts Victorian stereotypes
about women’s superior capacity for sympathy to her extensive experience with
those persons whom she came across and worked with during her remarkable and famous career
serving the needy.
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From reddit: I’ve
been doing some reading on Florence Nightingale and I came across some
fascinating commentary she made [in a letter] to a fiction writer [Madame Mohl]
with regards to her misgivings about female nature.
Here are some choice quotes by Florence herself on the
nature of women:
I have read half your book thro’,
and am immensely charmed by it. But some things I disagree with and more I do
not understand. This does not apply to the characters, but your conclusions,
e.g. you say “women are more sympathetic than men”.
Now if I were to write a
book out of my experience, I should begin Women have no
sympathy. Yours is the tradition. Mine is the conviction of
experience.
Now look at my experience of men. A
statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century,
out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy - learns a science
the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration, as
far as it concerns the lives of men - not, as I learnt it, in the field from
stirring experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room by my sofa
with me. This is what I call real sympathy.
Another (Alexander, whom I made
Director-General) does very nearly the same thing. He is dead too. Clough, a
poet born if ever there was one, takes to nursing administration in the same
way, for me.
I only mention three whose whole
lives were remodeled by sympathy for me. But I could mention very many
others...
I have never found one woman
who altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions.
Now just look at the degree in
which women have sympathy - as far as my experience is concerned. And my
experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. I
have lived and slept in the same bed with English Countesses and Prussian
Bauerinnen. No [other woman] has ever had charge of women of the different
creeds that I have had. No woman has excited “passions” among women more than I
have. Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold
among women...and I attribute this to a want of sympathy.
It makes me mad, the Women’s Rights
talk about “the want of a field” for them - when I know that I would gladly
give £500 a year for a Woman Secretary. And two English Lady Superintendents
have told me the same. And we can’t get one ... they don’t know the
names of the Cabinet Ministers. They don’t know the offices at the Horse
Guards...Now I’m sure I did not know these things. When I went to the Crimea I
did not know a Colonel from a Corporal. But there are such things as Army Lists
and Almanacs. Yet I never could find a woman who, out of sympathy, would
consult one for my work.
I do believe I am “like a man,” as
Parthe says. But how? In having sympathy.
Women crave for
being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you
for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they
cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so...They cannot state a fact
accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it
to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?
I am sick with indignation at what
wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it
all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let
each person tell the truth from his own experience.”
Full
Google doc text available here. The quoted section begins at the bottom of
page 13. [Sir Edward Tyas Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale: in Two Volumes, Vol. II, 1862-1910,
MacMillan, 1914]
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Original post: Florence
Nightingale: “Women Have No Sympathy” (self.TheRedPill)
The Red Pill subreddit, submitted June 9, 2013, by HumanSockPuppet
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This post resulted from a suggestion by A Voice for Men editor TyphonBlue.
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[1863-11/21/21]
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