Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses in the
Crimea, did not, as most people imagine, rise up and say, "I am a woman,
ignorant, but intuitive, with very little sense or information, but
exceedingly sublime aspirations; my strength lies in my weakness; I can
do all things without knowing anything about them." Not at all.
During ten years she had been in hard training for precisely such
services,--had visited all the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin,
Paris, Lyons, Rome, Brussels, and Berlin.--had studied under the Sisters
of Charity, and been twice a nurse in the Protestant Institution at
Kaiserswerth. Therefore she did not merely carry to the Crimea a
woman's heart, as her stock in trade, but she knew the alphabet of
her profession better than the men around her. Of course, genius and
enthusiasm are, for both sexes, elements unforeseen and incalculable;
but, as a general rule, great achievements imply great preparations and
favorable conditions.
To disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract and cruel in its
consequences. If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of ten
feet with the aid of a spring-board, it would be considered slightly
absurd to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is
precisely what society and the critics have always done. Training and
wages and social approbation are very elastic spring-boards, and the
whole course of history has seen these offered bounteously to one sex
and as sedulously withheld from the other.
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