(3.) It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women
themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the
want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to
turn a woman into a good nurse.
This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be
schoolmaster because he was "past keeping the pigs."
Apply the above receipt for making a good nurse to making a good
servant. And the receipt will be found to fail.
Yet popular novelists of recent days have invented ladies disappointed
in love or fresh out of the drawing-room turning into the war-hospitals
to find their wounded lovers, and when found, forthwith abandoning their
sick-ward for their lover, as might be expected. Yet in the estimation
of the authors, these ladies were none the worse for that, but on the
contrary were heroines of nursing.
What cruel mistakes are sometimes made by benevolent men and women in
matters of business about which they can know nothing and think they
know a great deal.
The everyday management of a large ward, let alone of a hospital--the
knowing what are the laws of life and death for men, and what the laws
of health for wards--(and wards are healthy or unhealthy, mainly
according to the knowledge or ignorance of the nurse)--are not these
matters of sufficient importance and difficulty to require learning by
experience and careful inquiry, just as much as any other art? They do
not come by inspiration to the lady disappointed in love, nor to the
poor workhouse drudge hard up for a livelihood.
And terrible is the injury which has followed to the sick from such wild
notions!
In this respect (and why is it so?), in Roman Catholic countries, both
writers and workers are, in theory at least, far before ours. They would
never think of such a beginning for a good working Superior or Sister of
Charity. And many a Superior has refused to admit a _Postulant_ who
appeared to have no better "vocation" or reasons for offering herself
than these.
It is true _we_ make "no vows." But is a "vow" necessary to convince us
that the true spirit for learning any art, most especially an art of
charity, aright, is not a disgust to everything or something else? Do
we really place the love of our kind (and of nursing, as one branch of
it,) so low as this? What would the Mère Angélique of Port Royal, what
would our own Mrs. Fry have said to this?
NOTE.--I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the
jargons now current everywhere (for they _are_ equally jargons); of
the jargon, namely, about the "rights" of women, which urges women
to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions,
merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this _is_
the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to
do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be
"recalled to a sense of their duty as women," and because "this is
women's work," and "that is men's," and "these are things which
women should not do," which is all assertion and nothing more.
Surely woman should bring the best she has, _whatever_ that is, to
the work of God's world, without attending to either of these cries.
For what are they, both of them, the one _just_ as much as the
other, but listening to the "what people will say," to opinion, to
the "voices from without?" And as a wise man has said, no one has
ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from
without.
You do not want the effect of your good things to be, "How
wonderful for a _woman!_" nor would you be deterred from good
things, by hearing it said, "Yes, but she ought not to have done
this, because it is not suitable for a woman." But you want to do
the thing that is good, whether it is "suitable for a woman" or
not.
It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman
should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad,
which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done
by a woman.
Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God's work, in
simplicity and singleness of heart.