Cassandra and Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale
Editor: Mary Poovey
Pickering Women's Classics
978 1 85196 022 4: 234x156mm: £40.00
Availability: America: New York University Press
Suggestions for Thought (1860) containing the text Cassandra is central to nineteenth- century feminist thought. Nightingale argued that work was the means by which every individual could achieve self-fulfilment and serve God.
Most modern readers associate Florence Nightingale with the creation of modern nursing. But she was also heavily allied to social reform movements and to the feminist protest against the enforced idleness of middle-class women.
Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth Among the Artizans of England, which Nightingale had privately published, is reprinted here for the first time. It includes her only known attempt at a novel, Cassandra, which draws on Nightingale's central conviction - that work is the only true path to self-fulfilment and the advancement of God's purpose. Suggestions for Thought confronts the religious controversies in an attempt to redefine social and moral roles for the church and identify the ways social reform could be undertaken.
From this and from her own experience of middle-class life Nightingale goes on to challenge the 'natural order' in which women were seen as having a God-given role only in the domestic sphere and argues that women living idleness are forced to squander opportunities to work for God in the larger family of society.