Florence Nightingale, who became a national heroine after the Crimean War, was the most popular subject in hagiographical collective biographies of women during the mid- and late-1850s. However, her life can be regarded as a resolute resistance to conformity with the ideal of womanhood in the Victorian era. She recognised the chasm between her popularity and reality:

This statement implies the resistance to the misrepresentation of her, which is indicative of her inner struggle to search for a means to express her vision.

Suffering the tedium of women's domestic days, Nightingale in her autobiographical novella, Cassandra, represented women's deprivation of intellectual stimulation as mental starvation:

This forceful condemnation of the idleness and vagueness inherent in the lives of upper-middle class women was written as a response to her family's opposition to her aspiration to enter the nursing profession. Cassandra rejects the internalisation of femininity and possesses the masculine desire for public participation. Projecting her own depression onto the heroine, Nightingale dealt with the social polemic of the constraints upon women. As a consequence, writing the novella provided her with a palliative remedy for her mental deprivation.

The act of writing was the only mental stimulus and nourishment available to Nightingale before, and even after, the Crimean War. Her Crimean experience taught her how difficult it was for women to enter a male-oriented realm such as the army. She faced immense hostility and antagonism from the medical and military authorities, and she also witnessed the military and governmental disarray and petty politics. Nightingale, through this experience, recognised writing as her strategy of survival in a male-centred public arena to reconcile her political aspiration with the socially determined female roles. After her return from Crimea, under the pretext of her weakness, she preferred to live the life of a sort of recluse and to create her own space away from the public gaze, but even after that she never ceased writing. She stated the significance of words in the following way: “truly all this generation is Words, words, words” (Private note quoting Hamlet in 1857; Ever Yours 177). Thus, she chose writing as a means of disseminating her private vision into the public arena, through which she sought to fulfil her political aspiration.

Nightingale's actual and verbal pursuits of her political aspirations began with an investigation of the British Army methods of sanitation and hygiene in India during the late 1850s. She, for the following decades, devoted her considerable energy to writing books and articles on the introduction of public health and reform of the landholding system in India. However, Nightingale's contribution to social and cultural reform in India has been neglected by the public, with the exception of an Indian scholar, Jharna Gourlay.Footnote ¹ While she considers Nightingale's initial involvement in the sanitary reform of the British Army in India to be imperialistic (27), she argues that Nightingale's empathy for the Indians stood in sharp contrast to the imperialistic attitudes of nineteenth-century Britain, seeing her as one of the most outstanding and influential spokespersons for ordinary Indians (268). This view corresponds with the assessment made by Edward Cook, a contemporary biographer of Nightingale, who celebrates her liberal viewpoint in terms of the political scenario of nineteenth-century England; “She became, in short, an Indian Reformer, or an Indian Agitator, at large” (2: 285). Most recently, Gérard Vallée argues that Nightingale's political liberalism made her an advocate for Indian self-government (2–7).

Nightingale's sincerity as a saviour of the impoverished Indians was clearly expressed in her question, “Have we no voice for these voiceless millions?” (193) at the beginning of her article entitled “The People of India” (1878). She courageously took on the responsibility of speaking to a British audience on behalf of the millions of voiceless Indians. However, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says about the catachresis of representational practice in her “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” was it really possible for Nightingale to reproduce the voice of the downtrodden people within the metropolis? Moreover, the question of whether Nightingale's narratives about India could be free from the nineteenth-century British imperial project is still open. The reconsideration of these questions requires the examination of the power relationship and “the other” represented in her narratives in relation to a larger context of women's involvement in British colonial enterprises.

Gourlay's greatest contribution to Nightingale scholarship is her exploration of the neglected aspects of her works on reform of army sanitation, land tenure, and women's education in India. However, Gourlay's claim that Nightingale was an advocate of power sharing with Indians seems to underestimate her ambivalent positionality towards Indians as well as the patriarchal authority inherent in the British Empire. Where my reading of Nightingale's works on social and cultural reforms in India differs from Gourlay's is that I find imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political language in Nightingale's writings. Rather than a spokesperson for ordinary Indians (Gourlay 268), I find Nightingale to be a moral guardian of the British Empire. This is because her writings, in which she tried to connect the moral power of British women and their public responsibility, revealed the interrelatedness of domestic and imperial concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamism of Nightingale's writing which provided the basis for her participation in the political and ideological debates over the nation and the Empire. The following two sections will examine Nightingale's concept of a “healthy” nation in her writings on public health in Britain and India. The fourth section will explore her representation of others as well as her political vision of a “healthy” rule over the colony in her proposal on the reforms of the landholding system and education in India. Further, Nightingale's promotion of British women's involvement in the amelioration of Indian women will be discussed in the fifth section. Through examining her political writings, the final section will discuss the ambivalence displayed in her works, which show both feminine/radical and subordinate/subversive aspects.

Construction of a Healthy Nation: “Every woman is a nurse”

Nightingale's service in the Crimea earned her the image of a “ministering angel” or the “lady with the lamp” in Britain. The consecration of the Crimean heroine was attributed to the occupation associated with a paragon of virtue: to care for and shed the light of hope on others. Despite her abhorrence of her public image, Nightingale rather strategically utilised it when she initiated sanitary reforms in the private sphere. Focusing on her advice on sanitation, this section examines her designs of involving British women in the construction of a morally healthy nation.

Nightingale, through her experiences of nursing soldiers and her own illness, arrived at the conviction that the afflictions of the sick were caused by not merely the disease itself but also by other factors such as uncleanness or an unhealthy life style. Notes on Nursing (1860), through which she gained an extremely diverse readership, was based on her assumption that an improvement of living conditions could prevent the contraction of disease. An anonymous reviewer of Notes and Queries comments that her work may have exceeded her services in the Crimean War (qtd. in Bishop and Goldie 18). Harriet Martineau, in her unsigned review published in the Quarterly Review, considers Nightingale's book “a work of genius” and appraises it as a “signal addition to the benefits Miss Nightingale has rendered to her generation and her country” (392–93). The success and acclaim received immediately after the publication of the book was ascribed to Nightingale's focus on domestic women who cared for family members. She clearly states the objective of Notes on Nursing in the preface:

Nightingale evidently perceived “every woman” in England as a collaborator in her attempts to improve the health of the nation and demonstrate practical methods in her advice manual on sanitation. Her scheme for public health reform should begin within each house, where domestic women were assigned to care for the physical and mental health of their family.

Nightingale made some revisions and additions to Notes on Nursing and republished it as Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes (1861) to extend her readership to include working-class women. This was precisely the realization of her aim of promoting health throughout the country. In her Suggestions for Thought, which was printed and circulated privately in 1860, she argued that “In fact, in almost every family, one sees a keeper, or two or three keepers, and a lunatic” (137). Although home was the central concern in these works, she considered home to be a place of confinement or a hotbed of disease, which was opposed to the Victorian myth that home was a sacred refuge. Therefore, her illustration of an effective means to eliminate the causes of disease aimed to transform every home in England into a sanitary and healthier space.

Nightingale's draft notes on the principles of Poor Law reform indicated her initial concept that the improvement of sanitary conditions in the community – especially in the dwellings of the poor – should be developed under the administration of a central authority (McDonald 338). Prior to the amendment of the Public Health Act in 1872, however, the task of improving sanitary conditions was entrusted to the voluntary contributions of each individual family to the community. Nightingale's focus on homes in Notes on Nursing and Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes appears to be the reflection of the social background. Due to epidemic outbreaks such as cholera and typhus, unsanitary dwellings caused social unrest, as Friedrich Engels describes in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):

The slums were, to the middle class, detestable places associated with threat and death, and hence an unsanitary state was synonymous with disorder, while households with a high degree of sanitation became a metaphor for morals and orderliness and they rhetorically functioned as a means of expulsion of social disorder and unrest. Thus, nineteenth-century public health was, in one sense, a modern state apparatus for the surveillance and maintenance of the social body. When local reports on sanitary conditions and disease maps of towns were published under the Public Health Act in the late 1840s, the authorities commenced inspection and supervision of the health and lifestyles of the lower social orders (Gilbert 29, 40–41). On one hand, the sanitary reform movement encouraged the formation of a better society through individual identification with meaningful community members who contributed to the promotion of the health and morals of their neighbourhood. On the other hand, the slums where the poor lived required constant surveillance and discipline.

It was middle-class women who subjectively initiated the task of monitoring and disciplining the moral state of the lower class. The cleanliness of the lower social order was also under their governance, as part of the fulfilment of their desire to do something for others and to become part of a wider community. Several articles concerning their sanitary activities were carried in the feminist periodical the English Woman's Journal in 1859. In April of that year, an article entitled “The Ladies’ Sanitary Association,” while reporting on these activities, recommended that middle-class women should visit the poor in their vicinity to provide women of the lower social order with the conception of hygiene. In addition, the article proposed the circulation of a sanitary manual to provide a practical way in which domestic women could monitor the health of their own families (82–84). In June, another article entitled “The Details of Woman's Work in Sanitary Reform” introduced the activities of the Workhouse Visiting Society. The following passage reveals that the function of the organisation was not only instruction to the lower social order on physical cleanliness but also on morals.

This argument for cleanliness associated with Christianity can be read as the narrative construction of the national superiority, by which women's social participation was facilitated through religious and philanthropic activities.

An August article entitled “Second Annual Report of the Ladies’ National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge” actually reveals its adherence to the superiority of the British. The author boldly proclaims the following view with regard to British men:

Despite the emphasis on the imperfect living conditions, the author goes on to argue the physical beauty of “the wives and daughters of our London shopkeepers” and “the vitality of the English race,” proclaiming “we have the less excuse if we do allow English people to grow up puny, stunted, and diseased” (386). Based on this assumption that the British were healthy, energetic and beautiful, which was the reflection of the axiom of imperialism, middle-class British women carried out their task of transforming the unhealthy working-class people into worthy members of the superior race. In their activities, Sarah Ellis's “moral superiority of women” was transformed into the sense of a mission or a drive for women's supervision and regeneration of society.

Nightingale, through the act of writing, sought to exemplify the moral influence of women and to claim the right of women to participate in the political arena. Notes on Nursing was her direct response to the sanitary movement in which middle-class women called for a manual on sanitary guidelines for homes. In fact, Nightingale specifically offered advice in simple words on the necessity of ventilation and cleaning, the importance of light in houses, and proper nutrition of the sick. Light, in her theory, signified civilisation, as she claimed, “[w]here there is sun there is thought” (86). Her hypothesis that living in dimly lit rooms caused mental and physical degeneration of the lower social order developed into the scheme of transforming houses into spaces to foster healthy bodies and minds of the British. Thus, the maintenance of sanitation and the prevention of disease in the private domain correlated with the public contribution of women, as Nightingale claimed “[o]n women we must depend, first and last, for personal and household hygiene – for preventing the race from degenerating in as far as these things are concerned” (140). She saw the role of women as being significant in shaping the national identity, and she demanded new kinds of moral discipline, courage, and authority for women.

Nightingale's scheme of the construction of a healthy nation needed the dynamic force of women's moral influence. Suggesting “district nurse” as a new profession for women in On Trained Nursing for the Sick Poor (1876), Nightingale made a claim for the power of a nurse to purify the people belonging to the lower social order who had accustomed themselves to living in unhygienic environments. Nightingale reveals her intention to disseminate the concept of cleanliness throughout society in the following expression:

Nightingale represented social anxiety with the word “black” and expressed admiration for the nurse's power of cleansing by citing the boy's remark as a compliment to the nurse who had cleansed his filthy body. This was an illustration of the Nightingale's conviction that alleviation of social anxiety would require women's intervention in public surveillance, control, and purification.

Nightingale's representation of the industrial cities of Northern England as diseased places was contrasted with the optimistic view on the physical superiority of the lower social order in the article carried in the English Woman's Journal. Examination of the high death rate of infants and the large number of sickly children in the cities of Northern England convinced her that the cause was not heredity but customary negligence. This prompted her to append a new chapter, “Minding Baby,” to Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes in which she gave guidelines for nursing babies and small children to working-class mothers and young girls. Nightingale's emphasis on the onus of maintaining the health of the British resting with women was reiterated in her essay entitled “Sick-Nursing and Health-Nursing.”Footnote ² Nightingale wrote her perspective, “Upon womankind the national health, as far as the household goes, depends” (356), articulating the importance of systematic teaching methods of caring for babies as “the most important function to make a healthy nation” (356–57). She incorporated private maternal roles into the public responsibility of women on the grounds of their moral power.

She partially shared the belief with Sarah Ellis in terms of women as the national moral regenerator. In Notes on Nursing, for instance, Nightingale defines the “confidential” nurse as follows:

She emphasised the virtue of women and the feminine quality of their observation, rather than the professionalism assigned to both domestic women and professional nurses. Nightingale, while emphasising domesticity, also stressed the wider moral responsibilities of women concerning the national interest such as the creation of a healthy national character. If the construction of the image of racial superiority as the national character required a sanitary movement, as postulated by Anne McClintock from the advertisements of Pears soap in her Imperial Leather, the obsession of cleanliness could ideally mediate between the cult of domesticity and imperialism (208). As shown in articles in the English Woman's Journal, the narratives of women's participation in sanitary activities developed their own nationalist and imperialist rhetoric, incorporating the colonial enterprise of a civilised Britain ruling and enlightening other, uncivilised, countries.

Introduction of Sanitation in India: “Creating India anew”

Nightingale was involved in the reform of public health in India, which was part of her role as an exemplary guardian of the moral cleanliness of Britain. In fact, prior to the establishment of the Royal Commission for India in 1859, she had already begun investigating the sanitary conditions of the British army in India since the Great Revolt of 1857 (The Indian Mutiny). She found, during the process of her statistical analysis of the mortality rates of the British army, that the major cause of death was disease due to the unhealthy lives of soldiers.

Nightingale published, based on her investigation, a report entitled Observations on the Evidence Contained in the Stational Reports Submitted to Her by the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India (1863), in which she argued for the improvement of sanitation in barracks, and proposed the construction of hospitals in the cantonments.Footnote ³ She also drew attention to the “uncivilised” elements in the soldiers’ lifestyle, such as the overcrowded barracks, habitual alcohol consumption, and lack of exercise. Thus, her suggestion of providing a coffee room, a theatre, a gymnasium, and a reading room in the barracks was an attempt to transform the soldiers’ lives into healthy, moral, and cultural ones.

Extension of her interest to the lives of the Indian people can be seen in How People May Live and Not Die in India (1863),Footnote ⁴ a shorter version of Observations. Nightingale included India and its people among her patients requiring purification, referring to Indians as “the subjects of our beloved Queen as any one of us” (10). She considered the introduction of sanitation in India to be the moral obligation of the ruling country, which signified the virtue of British culture and the imperial mission. She stated, moreover, that successful achievement of this task “would be creating India anew” (10), whereby her assertion of the bold denial of Indian culture and history was legitimised as imperial responsibility.

Her grand scheme for “creating India anew” is more clearly described in Life or Death in India (1874), in which she labelled the Indian climate as a “bugbear” (6) to be “tamed” or “conquered” because of the primary cause of epidemic diseases. Outbreaks of cholera resulted in many deaths and devastation of the slums in London from 1832 to the 1860s. Cholera was regarded as endemic in India and its spread was traced from the East to the West by the nineteenth-century medical discourses (O'Connor 21–29). The debate over the arrival of the epidemic was mirrored by Nightingale's concern that cholera would not merely take the lives of British soldiers in India but would also invade Britain to damage its prosperity and social order. Her desire for regulation of India and Indians was heightened further by riots in India, such as the Great Revolt of 1857, which impressed the British with the “disorder” and “savageness” of Indians and revealed the fragility of British rule. Therefore, her writings on sanitary reform in India involved twofold significance, first in the protection of the life of the British as well as Indians, and second in the manifestation of the Britain's moral responsibility towards the Empire.

If Nightingale imagined India as a British annexe, the relationship between Britain and India could be equated to that between the sanitary houses of England's middle-class and the filthy slums of lower social order. Thus, her detailed account of the introduction of public health in India centred on the moral regulation of the country and the elimination of the causes of epidemics. In Life or Death in India, she suggested that clean water was a principal factor to prevent outbreaks of epidemics and to eliminate discontent among the poor, thereby she emphasized the necessity of introducing “irrigation, combined with drainage works” (21). Furthermore, in “The People of India” Nightingale condemned the indifference of the British towards the chronic starvation and deaths in India caused by preventable diseases. Although her perspective on the Empire was altruistic, it was also explicitly founded on the feminist discourse that sought to wield “moral influence” towards male-oriented colonial politics. Nightingale, energetically lobbying the Government, called for the moral and political integrity of the relationship between metropolis and Empire. However, the tardiness of Government response to her appeals and the lack of funds for sanitary reform schemes in India resulted in Nightingale's resolution to employ other means, i.e., self help among the Indian people,Footnote ⁵ because British sanitary reform had been mainly developed through voluntary work in the domestic domain. In fact, Nightingale's schemes in India emulated the methods that she had adopted in England. Thus, she proposed the appointment and dispatch of “health missioners” whose role was to disseminate the basic principles of hygiene in schools and homes in Indian villages.

Pamela K. Gilbert argues that in the 1830s India was regarded as London's double and an imaginary space possessing some power in the definition of the metropolis (141–42). In Nightingale's works, India played a significant role in the modification and intensification of Britain's identity. Interestingly, Nightingale did not always claim British superiority over India. Her remarks, in Life or Death in India, that “Calcutta in 1871 was more salubrious than Manchester or Liverpool” (14) virtually demanded the revision of sanitary reform and national character in Britain. In her paper entitled “Health Teaching in Towns and Villages” (1894), which was originally read out at the Conference of Women Workers held at Leeds in November 1893, Nightingale also campaigned for the reconsideration of sanitary reform in England, saying “Let not England lag behind,” after the discussion of the health missioners’ scheme in India (379). She considered cottages to be “the most important of the homes of any class” in England (386). Her description of unsanitary dwellings in the villages established that circumstances similar to those in India also existed in England; overcrowding, lack of personal hygiene, and foul smells produced by discarded waste around livestock pens (382–84). Nightingale admitted “otherness” in England as she wrote, “Rural mothers are like Hindus: they say nothing but what they think we shall like to hear and that they don't know how to express” in her letter (23 June 1893) to her nephew Frederick Verney, who was an ardent supporter of her activities (McDonald 602). From the perspective that “every woman is a nurse,” the mothers of rural England were also her collaborators in the construction of a healthier nation, and so the health missioners’ instructions focused on methods to transform houses into places where children's “clean minds, and clean bodies, and clean skins” could be fostered (“Health Teaching” 386). In short, the mission of the health missioners was defined as their public contribution to the construction of the moral minds and healthier bodies of the succeeding generations in England. Thus, English villagers who possessed otherness were, within the health missioners’ schemes, to be monitored and transfigured into ideal figures, “healthy and moral” villagers, as part of the ruling nation.

Nightingale displayed her awareness of this cultural conflict in the discussion of health missioners’ activities in India. In her article “Health Lectures for Indian Villages” published in the monthly journal titled India Footnote ⁶ (October 1893), she introduced her plan of dispatching health missioners to Indian villages. Their task was to instruct villagers on practical ways of improving their living conditions to help prevent disease; conservation of clean drinking water, disposal of refuse, and fewer overcrowded rooms (306). Although she tentatively admitted the Indians’ fear of weakening their national identity through Western sanitation, she offered careful proposals to avoid cultural conflict; “villagers would listen more readily if addressed by those who are of their own race and religion, and who exercise no authority” (305).

Nightingale further provided an example of successful sanitary improvement among Indian peasants who were impervious to sanitation in her article “Health Missioners for Rural India” carried in India (December 1896). She defines their roles as follows:

Relying on the premise of a sympathetic relationship between health missioners and villagers, Nightingale made an implicit connection between the moral function of the health missioners and the consequent consolidation of British cultural power in India. This strategy, on one hand, substantially accorded with the British policy of rule in India after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Robert Johnson discusses the alteration in the character of British imperialism after the Mutiny: the introduction of strict military control, the modernisation of Indian customs, and the Anglicisation of education (36–38) served to consolidate British political and cultural power.Footnote ⁸ Nightingale's development of sanitary networks through health missioners’ projects appears to have contributed to the reinforcement of British rule in India by means of the civilisation of Indians’ lifestyle. Her strategy in Indian sanitary reform was aligned with nineteenth-century imperialism in which a civilised country justified itself in dominating lands and cultures in uncivilised countries.

However, her writings revealed a radical ambivalence about the racial, moral, and cultural “superiority” of the British, and also suggested both imperialist and anti-imperialist activism. Nightingale, in her later work “Our Indian Stewardship” (1883), envisaged the realisation of the scheme of local self-government pursued by Lord Ripon “in accordance with the instructions of successive Secretaries of State, with the Acts and policy of successive Parliaments” (338). This affirmation of the political empowerment of Indian citizens “with due guidance” (338) from British officialdom especially indicated ambivalent political attitudes, which were grounded in her unconsciousness, towards the tensions between liberalism and imperialism at a particular historical moment. The voice of her liberatory conscience resonated with her desire to fulfil her duty as a British moral guardian.

The Justification of Colonial Rule: “Our own safety”

Nightingale's initial interest in sanitary reform in India developed into an involvement in the landholding and educational systems in the country. In other words, Nightingale broadened the scope of her mission to realise the purification of India. Gourlay reads her purpose of interceding in land tenancy issues as solely the protection of lives of Indian peasants (139). However, close attention to the representation of peasants in Nightingale's works suggests more complex aspects of her intercession in the system of landholding on their behalf. While I agree with Gourlay's observation about Nightingale's efforts, I am unhappy with her one-sided emphasis on Nightingale's proposals on the reformation of land tenure. This section will reconsider Nightingale's discussions on systems of landholding and education in tandem with her great concerns over the financial and social situation in India by focusing on her representation of Indian peasants.

In Life or Death in India, Nightingale declared the necessity of reform of its landholding system as well as its sanitary system. Since Britain had initiated colonial rule in India, the Government promoted the reformulation of different forms of landholding systems that existed in each district with the purpose of not only gaining revenues from land tax but also creating a societal order that could contribute to the stability of the British rule (Roy 36–42). Nightingale criticised the injustice of the Zemindari, the system of land holding in the Bengal Presidency; this system allowed the zemindar (landlord) to possess lands in exchange for a permanent payment of tax on the lands:

The Permanent Settlement of 1793, the land revenue system in Bengal, permitted landlords to be as privileged as mini-monarchs within the realms of their estates, thus reinforcing the landlord–tenant–labourer hierarchy. Peasants, cultivators or ryots, earned only a small reward for their labour under the Zemindari. Nightingale, discussing peasants’ abject povertyFootnote ⁹ and their social and physical vulnerability, regarded the reformation of the landholding system, along with public health and irrigation, as the most effective means of improving the plight of the peasantry.

Nightingale reiterated the importance of the protection of agricultural labourers as follows:

Suggesting the dignity of an agricultural labourer's life, she illustrated their substantial contributions to imperial prosperity. Her claim of an urgent need to reform the landholding system was made to articulate the imperial responsibility of providing protection for the impoverished peasants from exploitation by landlords.

Nightingale strategically aligned the reform of Zemindari with the reinforcement of the British rule in India. In 1883, she published an article entitled “The Dumb Shall Speak, and the Deaf Shall Hear; or, the Ryot, the Zemindar and the Government” in the Anglo-Indian periodical, Journal of the East India Association. She attributed the difficulties in Britain's colonisation of India to the Zemindari, focusing on the fragile framework of British rule in the sub-continent. Although the Bengal Rent Act of 1859 permitted the cultivators’ rights to occupy lands, the ryots still remained slaves to the zemindars. Even more critically, Nightingale argued for the responsibility of the British government to control the zemindars’ despotism; “We seem to have ‘confiscated’ the zemindar's duties, while confirming and enlarging his (so-called) rights” (181).Footnote ¹⁰ But these remarks, which she addressed righteously for the impoverished ryots, served to maintain the prosperity and stability of the British rule in India because she focused on the resolution of the financial and social problems.

Nightingale's studies on financial records of the Bengal Presidency showed a slight increase of governmental revenue from the Permanent Settlement of 1793 when the assessment of land tax was fixed to the 1870s. On the other hand, huge increase of zemindar's income during the same period provided evidence for Nightingale's argument that the government lost huge amounts of revenue due to its lenient policy towards the zemindars.

The Permanent Settlement legislated for a fixed payment from the zemindars to the government, but they were nevertheless able to extract more profit from the land because of the increase in its value thanks to the introduction of railways and irrigation. Nightingale, exploring the deficient financial administration of the government, demanded the restoration of the Zemindari.

The other disadvantage to British rule of the Zemindari was the deterioration of law and order in Bengal. Based on an analysis of the Administration Reports of Bengal after 1873, Nightingale described frequent occurrence of riots and murders as a consequence of the conflict between the zemindars and the ryots. She referred to the government as “the true friend of the zemindars” (194) because it permitted the expansion of their self-interests as well as their despotism. However, as civil disorder created by the ryots would threaten the consolidation of the British rule, Nightingale proposed that the “true friend” of Britain should be the ryot.

Quoting the remarks of the ryot, Nightingale appealed to the government for the recognition of the impoverished life of the ryots, and suggested that the successful reform of the landholding system would reinforce their loyalty towards British rule. She effectively stated that the significance of modifications to the complex system was to safeguard “our own safety,” which makes her objective manifest. Caring for the downtrodden people, she tried to eliminate factors that led to disorder or chaos for her grand scheme of the establishment of a healthy Empire.

Nightingale's subsequent article on the same subject, “The United Empire and the Indian Peasant,” in which she positioned herself as the defender of peasants, was published in the monthly magazine Journal of the National Indian Association (July 1878).Footnote ¹¹ This article depicted the chronic starvation of the peasants owing to their exploitation by landlords (232) as a negative factor of British rule in India. She encouraged British readers to acknowledge the problems in the Zemindari by asserting a certain sense of unity “[i]t is not longer ‘as far as the East is from the West,’ but ‘so near as the East is to the West,’ so near must ‘we’ be to one another” (“The United Empire” 240). However, this declaration of unity is negated by her own query: “Is it possible that England would re-conquer India by enabling the indebted country Ryot to redeem his lands and pay off his debts . . . ?” (242). Despite her description of England and India as “we,” it is difficult to believe that she sought to treat them as equals. Nightingale, from her both liberal and imperial viewpoints, stimulated the readers in the metropolis into grasping the fact that England had never completed the conquest of India. Her claim for the liberation of the ryots from the exploitation of the zemindars indicated not just humanitarian sympathy but the imperial impulse of Nightingale, who sought the intensification of moral value of British rule.

The scope of her scheme for the re-creation of India was broadened to incorporate British culture into India. Focusing on education in India, Nightingale contributed from August to October 1879 a series of articles to Journal of the National Indian Association. In her article entitled “Can We Educate Education in India to Educate Men? (Part 1),” Nightingale observed that primary education could provide the impoverished labourers with the means to obtain autonomy, even though survival – “to live and not to die” – on a daily basis was their only concern (419–20).

Although throughout her works Nightingale depicted the peasants sympathetically, this article shows a significant alteration in her representation of them. Referring to the incidents that involved ryots killing zemindars, Nightingale portrayed the ryots as brutal beings who required her “prescription.” She further highlighted the cruelty of the zemindars with the report of their retaliation. Here, she offered cultural “prescription” for them: “to teach him [a ryot] to be a man” (424) and “to educate Zemindars into men” (“Can We Educate Education in India to Educate Men? (Part 2)” (480). In short, neither the zemindars who exploited their rights to counter the government, nor the ryots who were unable to voice themselves were, in Nightingale's view, mature. She displayed strong confidence in her own culture when she asserted that education in English history and literature was imperative for moral cultivation among Indians (481).

An English education functioned as an effective means for the reproduction of imperial ideology. Thomas Babington Macaulay in his infamous Minute on Indian Education (1835) wrote that imperial education meant the creation of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (249). From this perspective, it is difficult to consider that Nightingale was free from the influence of nineteenth-century imperialism, since her endeavours to reform the Zemindari can be read as an alignment with the imperial project of Anglicisation of India. Besides, her positionality was rigidly in the pursuit of her obligation as part of the ruling country. Nightingale offered her “prescription” to the imperial policy, through which she asserted, in the fullest attempt, a benevolent, moral, and healthy rule.

British Woman's Mission towards Indian Brethren

In her final article of the serialised, “Can We Educate Education in India to Educate Men and Women?,” Nightingale's interest extended to the education of women as well. She asked for Indian women's contribution to the improvement of sanitation by means of their supervision over the healthy bodies and minds of their families. She proposed the distribution of sanitary manuals among primary schools (543) in order to disseminate the principal concept of sanitation, by which she sought to modify even the fundamental idea of life and home among Indian villagers: “It is impossible to make life life by carrying out the laws of life in the domestic arrangements of the masses of the people until the women know how to do it – are, in short, better educated in what makes home home” (540–41, emphasis added). Nightingale's speculation that the propagation of sanitary knowledge could improve Indian lives and homes was founded on the virtues of the domestic propriety and moral influence of Indian women as vital collaborators in her enterprise of imperial reform.Footnote ¹² Her letters written in the early 1880s expressed her positive foresight on public health reform through the medical training of Indian ladies initiated by British medical women including Dr. Mary Scharlieb, of whom Nightingale thought “what an admirable woman!,” missionary women and nurses (Vallée 727–36, 906).

Nightingale, in her “Introduction” to Behramji M. Malabari: A Biographical Sketch (1892), opined that the contribution of women was crucial to social reforms in both Britain and India. Malabari (1853–1891) was an Indian philanthropist and a collaborator of Nightingale's sanitary reform in India. Nightingale says that “[t]he mother's influence in India is so great” and that the “sympathy existing between mother and son determined the choice of his work in life” (v–vi). While considering the moral power of Indian women, she also appealed to English women for their power to improve the predicament of Indian women:

She claimed that it was their duty towards their “Indian brethren and sisters” (vii) to become involved in the promotion of women's education and the abolition of infant marriage in India. She pressed for feminine authority and the moral power of British women, and for their greater presence in the process of moral restoration of British rule in India.

Since the late eighteenth century, early feminists’ rhetoric claimed that the subordination of women provided proof of a state being uncivilised. Catherine Macaulay in her Letters on Education (1790), employing the imperial trope that in a “highly civilised” society women must enjoy independence and education (24, 50), asks that education should “breed my pupils up to act a rational part in the world, and not to fill up a niche in the seraglio of a sultan” (220). Like Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft's central concern in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was female education. She analysed how books on female education written by male authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Fordyce, and John Gregory created “a coquettish slave” (108) or “a house slave” (198). With the master and slave analogy, Wollstonecraft fuses the sexual and economic oppression of British women with African slaves: “Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subjected to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man?” (262). This metaphoric comparison between slaves and women was a conceptual instrument of the emancipation of British women.

The early feminists’ rhetoric of master/slave and Orientalist metaphors was developed into a conceptual framework of the narrative for the so-called “Woman Question” in Victorian feminist periodicals. The debate over the role of women in the Empire had been a staple of feminist journals since the 1860s. It suggests that a representation of stereotypical degraded Orientals reinforced the superiority of English women in order to promote the growth of their influence in the public arenas. The English Woman's Journal carried an article entitled “Women in Turkey” (1860) which criticised the sexual and moral degradation of women in Turkey as a primary indicator of the “uncivilised” Muslim convention. In the Englishwoman's Review (1866–1910), a successor to the feminist journal, one of the principal topics was the reports on the activities of British women who lived abroad during the heyday of imperialism.Footnote ¹³

In 1867, the Englishwoman's Review carried Mary Carpenter's address on “Female Education in India” read at a meeting of the Social Science in Belfast. She observed there was an urgent need to supply “female teachers, a first-rate certificated mistress being obtained from England” for Indian women (“Social Science at Belfast” 318). In response to her address, Mrs. Bayle Bernard's article entitled “The Position of Women in India” (1868) reiterated Carpenter's assumption that the elevation of the position of Indian women required a formal education provided by Englishwomen (474–79). In addition, the anonymous author of the article “Women in India” (1876) also provided motivation for British feminists in their involvement in education for Indian women under the protection of the government (369–70). When feminist contributors to the Englishwoman's Review argued that British women should initiate the reform of education for their Indian counterparts, metropolitan feminists assumed themselves to be independent, intellectual, and moral women in a “highly civilised society,” whereas Indian women were represented as oppressed and silenced beings.Footnote ¹⁴ However, their attempts to ameliorate the status of Indian women tended to be assimilated to British feminists’ aspirations towards liberating themselves from ideological restrictions at home, and thus seeking their own political rights.

Nightingale argued for an imperial “mission” of women on the premise of the moral and cultural superiority of British women. When she represented Indian women as the object of humanitarian compassion and intervention by British women, she endeavoured to intensify the domestic influence of Indian women in the domestic arena, and simultaneously to justify the expansion of the moral and political influence of British women from home to the Empire. Interestingly, Nightingale never saw herself as a feminist. She refused an invitation to join the suffrage committee, saying, “It makes me mad, the Woman's Rights talk. . . . They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can the other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information” (qtd. in Lacey 6). Her cousin, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, in her pamphlet entitled “Objections to the Enfranchisement of Women Considered” (1866), makes a bold statement on women's rights as follows: “From my own observation I should say that the women who have gained by their wisdom and earnestness a good indirect influence, would not lose that influence if they had votes. And I see no necessary connection between goodness and indirectness” (116). Bodichon denied the indirect influence of women on politics that was often advocated as women's role in social discourses. By a unique amalgamation of moral power and political influence, Nightingale achieved participation in the political realm through writing. Aspects of radicalism and directness in her works were embellished with her morally righteous claim on India. She regarded that the act of writing was a more effective tool for political intervention than was the right to vote. She wrote in a letter, dated 11 August 1867, to John Stuart Mill about her scepticism on female suffrage, while she agreed that “women's ‘political power’ should be ‘direct and open’” (Ever Yours 288). However, she also revealed her complex attitude in her own special case: “I have thought that I could work better for others, even for other women, off the stage than on it” (Ever Yours 288–89). Although she represented her activities as being indirect, “off the stage,” her writings directly challenged male politicians and administrators engaged in colonial rule through her contentious focus of attention at the deplorable occurrence in the Empire.

Purifier of Britannia: “Maid of all (dirty) work”

Her status as the “lady with the lamp” offered Nightingale the opportunity to engage in moral and political issues in both Britain and India. She saw the lower social orders in Britain, Indian people, and even the British government as diseased others. Thus, they were represented as objects in need of moral purification by means of her careful observation and supervision.

Nightingale saw the act of writing as a tool for participation in politics, through her coalescing of her masculine ambition into feminine duties. Interestingly, she maintained a modest mode of expression, as if she were pleading herself for the critical proposals towards British government's colonial policy: she said, in Life or Death in India, “[t]o thrust these poor remarks upon those who know it all so much better than I . . . seems needless” (61); in “The Dumb Shall Speak, and the Deaf Shall Hear,” she carefully wrote that “[i]t seems almost an impertinence to lay my facts before any who have been in India . . . and who may even have seen great service in India” (169), or “[t]his is a humble earnest contribution to our understanding of part at least of Indian legislative work” (194). Her remarks were made by virtue of the exercise of her role as a moral guardian, to remedy the government's dereliction of civilising duty in their colonial politics, by caring for a number of negative truths in British colonial rule. In her narrative mode, she strategically made herself subject to authoritative political power to propose a healthy and moral British rule in India within the imperialist paradigm. However, her writings tried to defy male-oriented politics, showing aspects of a promotion of, or a resistance to, the hegemonic idea of the nation.

Nightingale actually exerted a profound influence on Indian politics, as Viceroys and high officials made pilgrimages to her residence to be lectured on sanitation. When Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol and an intimate friend of Nightingale's, called her “Empress of Scavangers, Queen of Nurses, Reverend Mother Superior of the British Army, Governess of Governor of India,” she in return defined herself as a “Maid of all (dirty) work; or, The Nuisances Removal Act” (Cook 2: 169). This modest attitude reflects the domesticity and femininity of her work – purifying the contamination of national and colonial policies, and providing remedies for the diseased others in the nation and the Empire. She relished the image of maid, associated with subordination and subversion, because of her total confidence in her power to control others. While Nightingale also sought to remould the colonial administration in radical but still imperial and paternalistic directions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, she was convinced that her writings could wield an influence over the future of the British Empire.