How Did Gender Roles Respond To The Non-Progression Of Women?

Due to the lack of adequate hospital care at the time, Florence Nightingale became famous for organizing a group of tenacious nurses to aid the wounded soldiers in the military hospital during the Crimean War. Born in Florence, Italy in 1820, to middle-upper class family, she was expected to grow up like all the other girls and participate in society’s activities allotted for women. During this time era, it was expected for young ladies to spend their days doing mundane activities such as entertain others, ride in carriages, or take up simple hobbies, like embroidering. But Florence was not the average young lady. Mary Garofalo and Elizabeth Fee remark how she wanted a “higher calling” and she wanted to work and believed she had a “destiny
In their ideals, they came to the understanding that men were superior to women. Holliday and Parker discussed how, “… it was generally agreed on the law that men were superior to women mentally, physically, and morally: therefore education would be wasted on women and make them ill” (Holiday and Parker 484). Society leading individuals to the mindset that women were were weak and fragile, only encouraged the non-progression of women. If individuals could look at women as a whole in a new light they would see the truth that women, if allowed, are fully capable of so much more. Unfortunately this was not the case in Florence Nightingale’s era. Therefore, several individuals used the fact that she was a woman, as a justification as to why she could not pursue nursing. This created a critical problem for Florence, a problem she was eager to destroy. This in led to her question the patriarchal system in in order to prove her point. In “Cassandra” she asked the prominent question, “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity — these three — and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised” (qtd. in Greenblatt 1627). She could not understand why if women had these characteristics, why individuals in society insisted that women be inferior to men. Were they not the same? Both men and women are fully capable of exercising imagination, intellect, passion, and self-actualization. More importantly, Nightingale could not understand why these ideas had to apply to her. She did not directly fight for the equal treatment of women, but took more of a self-centered approach, and fought zealously so that she could achieve her own goal of becoming a nurse. All she wanted was to have a purpose, to have something larger to be a part of, something that would change the world for the better, not waste time. Eventually she did become who she wanted to, even though at