Helen Keller

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Helen Keller holding a magnolia, ca. 1920. Helen Adams Keller Born June 27, 1880 Tuscumbia, Alabama, USA June 1, 1968 (aged 87) Died Arcan Ridge, Easton, Connecticut, USA

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Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.[1][2] The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. Her birthday on June 27 is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and was authorized at the federal level by presidential proclamation by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, her 100th birthday.

A prolific author, Keller was well-travelled and outspoken in her convictions. A member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, she campaigned for women's suffrage, labor rights, socialism, and other radical left causes. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1971.[3] Contents

 1 Early childhood and illness  2 Formal education  3 Companions  4 Political activities  5 Writings  6 Akita dog  7 Later life  8 Portrayals  9 Posthumous honors  10 See also  11 References  12 Further reading  13 External links

Early childhood and illness

Keller with Anne Sullivan vacationing at Cape Cod in July 1888

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green,[4] that Helen's grandfather had built decades earlier.[5]

Her father, Arthur H. Keller,[6] spent many years as an editor for the Tuscumbia North Alabamian, and had served as a captain for the Confederate Army.[5] Her paternal grandmother was the second cousin of Robert E. Lee.[7] Her mother, Kate Adams,[8] was the daughter of Charles W. Adams.[9] Though originally from Massachusetts, Charles Adams also fought for the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, earning the rank of colonel (and acting brigadier-general). Her paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland.[7][10] One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this coincidence in her first autobiography, stating "that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his."[7]

Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left the child deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington,[11] the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, Helen had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family.

In 1886, her mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman, Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out Dr. J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice.[12] He subsequently put them in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and only 20 years old, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship, Sullivan evolving into governess and then eventual companion.

Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the doll.[13] Keller's big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world. Due to a protruding left eye, Keller was usually photographed in profile. Both her eyes were replaced in adulthood with glass replicas for "medical and cosmetic reasons".[14] Formal education

Starting in May 1888, Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College, where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.[15]

Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak, and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures. She learned to "hear" people's speech by reading their lips with her hands—her sense of touch had become extremely subtle. She became proficient at using Braille and reading sign language with her hands as well.[volume & issue needed] Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.[16] Companions

Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thompson was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.[17]

Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Anne and John, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind.[18]

Anne Sullivan died in 1936 after a coma, with Keller holding her hand.[19] Keller and Thompson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the blind. Thompson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960.[1] Winnie Corbally, a nurse who was originally brought in to care for Thompson in 1957, stayed on after her death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life.[1] Political activities

Helen Keller portrait, 1904.

"The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods— are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease."

—Helen Keller, 1911[20]

Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist and a birth control supporter. In 1915 she and George Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. In 1920 she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller traveled to 40 some-odd countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were both considered radicals at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, their political views have been forgotten or glossed over in popular perception.[21]

Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency.

Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development." Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:

At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him. ... Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.[22]

Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (known as the IWW or the Wobblies) in 1912,[21] saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I Became an IWW,[23] Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other disabilities:

I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.

The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, the former a frequent cause of the latter, and the latter a leading cause of blindness. In the same interview, Keller also cited the 1912 strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts for instigating her support of socialism. Writings

Helen Keller, circa 1912

Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles.

One of her earliest pieces of writing, at age 11, was The Frost King (1891). There were allegations that this story had been plagiarized from The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby. An investigation into the matter revealed that Keller may have experienced a case of cryptomnesia, which was that she had Canby's story read to her but forgot about it, while the memory remained in her subconscious.[1]

At age 22, Keller published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband, John Macy. It includes words that Keller wrote and the story of her life up to age 21, and was written during her time in college.

Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908 giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world.[24] Out of the Dark, a series of essays on socialism, was published in 1913. When Keller was young, Anne Sullivan introduced her to Phillips Brooks, who introduced her to Christianity, Keller famously saying: "I always knew He was there, but I didn't know His name!"[25][26][27]

Her spiritual autobiography, My Religion, was published in 1927 and then in 1994 extensively revised and re-issued under the title Light in My Darkness. It advocates the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Christian revelator and theologian who gives a spiritual interpretation of the teachings of the Bible and who claims that the second coming of Jesus Christ has already taken place. Adherents use several names to describe themselves, including Second Advent Christian, Swedenborgian and New Church.

Keller described the progressive views of her belief in these words:

But in Swedenborg's teaching it [Divine Providence] is shown to be the government of God's Love and Wisdom and the creation of uses. Since His Life cannot be less in one being than another, or His Love manifested less fully in one thing than another, His Providence must needs be universal . . . He has provided religion of some kind everywhere, and it does not matter to what race or creed anyone belongs if he is faithful to his ideals of right living.[28] Akita dog

When Keller visited Akita Prefecture in Japan in July 1937, she inquired about Hachikō, the famed Akita dog that had died in 1935. She told a Japanese person that she would like to have an Akita dog; one was given to her within a month, with the name of Kamikaze-go. When he died of canine distemper, his older brother, Kenzan-go, was presented to her as an official gift from the Japanese government in July 1938. Keller is credited with having introduced the Akita to the United States through these two dogs.

By 1939 a breed standard had been established and dog shows had been held, but such activities stopped after World War II began. Keller wrote in the Akita Journal:

If ever there was an angel in fur, it was Kamikaze. I know I shall never feel quite the same tenderness for any other pet. The Akita dog has all the qualities that appeal to me – he is gentle, companionable and trusty.[29][30] Later life

Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.[1]

On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' two highest civilian honors. In 1965 she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair.[1]

Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday. A service was held in her honor at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and her ashes were placed there next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thompson. Portrayals

Keller's life has been interpreted many times. She appeared in a silent film, Deliverance (1919), which told her story in a melodramatic, allegorical style.[31]

She was also the subject of the documentaries Helen Keller in Her Story, narrated by Katharine Cornell, and The Story of Helen Keller, part of the Famous Americans series produced by Hearst Entertainment.

The Miracle Worker is a cycle of dramatic works ultimately derived from her autobiography, The Story of My Life. The various dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, depicting how the teacher led her from a state of almost feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity. The common title of the cycle echoes Mark Twain's description of Sullivan as a "miracle worker." Its first realization was the 1957 Playhouse 90 teleplay of that title by William Gibson. He adapted it for a Broadway production in 1959 and an Oscar-winning feature film in 1962, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It was remade for television in 1979 and 2000.

In 1984, Keller's life story was made into a TV movie called The Miracle Continues.[32] This film that entailed the semi-sequel to The Miracle Worker recounts her college years and her early adult life. None of the early movies hint at the social activism that would become the hallmark of Keller's later life, although a Disney version produced in 2000 states in the credits that she became an activist for social equality.

The Bollywood movie Black (2005) was largely based on Keller's story, from her childhood to her graduation.[citation needed]

A documentary called Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and Legacy was produced by the Swedenborg Foundation in the same year. The film focuses on the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology in her life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her triple disabilities of blindness, deafness and a severe speech impediment.[citation needed]

On March 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced that a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph showing Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had escaped widespread attention.[33] Depicting Helen holding one of her many dolls, it is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of Anne Sullivan Macy.[34] Posthumous honors

Helen Keller as depicted on the Alabama state quarter

In 1999, Keller was listed in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th century.

In 2003, Alabama honored its native daughter on its state quarter.[35]

The Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama is dedicated to her.[36]

There are streets named after Helen Keller in Getafe, Spain, in Lod, Israel,[37] in Lisbon, Portugal[38] and in Caen, France.

A preschool for the deaf and hard of hearing in Mysore, India, was originally named after Helen Keller by its founder K. K. Srinivasan.

On October 7, 2009, a bronze statue of Helen Keller was added to the National Statuary Hall Collection, as a replacement for the State of Alabama's former 1908 statue of the education reformer Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry. It is displayed in the United States Capitol Visitor Center and depicts Keller as a seven-year-old child standing at a water pump. The statue represents the seminal moment in Keller's life when she understood her first word: W-A-T-E-R, as signed into her hand by teacher Anne Sullivan. The pedestal base bears a quotation in raised letters and Braille characters: "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart."[39] The statue is the first one of a person with a disability and of a child to be permanently displayed at the U.S. Capitol.[40][41][42] See also

 Helen Keller Services for the Blind References

1. ^ a b c d e f "The life of Helen Keller". Royal National Institute of Blind People. November 20, 2008. Retrieved January 22, 2009. 2. ^ "Helen Keller FAQ". Perkins School for the Blind. Retrieved December 25, 2010. 3. ^ "Inductees". Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. State of Alabama. Retrieved February 20, 2012. 4. ^ Virtual tour of Ivy Green, Helen Keller's birthplace 5. ^ a b Nielsen, Kim E. (2007), "The Southern Ties of Helen Keller", Journal of Southern History 73 (4) 6. ^ "Arthur H. Keller". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved March 7, 2010. 7. ^ a b c Herrmann, Dorothy; Keller, Helen; Shattuck, Roger (2003), The Story of my Life: The Restored Classic, pp. 12–14, ISBN 978-0-393-32568-3, retrieved May 14, 2010 8. ^ "Kate Adams Keller". American Foundation for the Blind. Retrieved March 7, 2010. 9. ^ "Charles W. Adams (1817–1878) profile". Findagrave.com. Retrieved August 11, 2009. 10. ^ "American Foundation for the Blind". Afb.org. June 1, 1968. Retrieved August 24, 2010. 11. ^ Helen Keller. "The Story of My Life". Project Gutenberg. p. 11. Retrieved March 7, 2010. 12. ^ Worthington, W. Curtis. A Family Album: Men Who Made the Medical Center (Medical University of South Carolina ed.). ISBN 978-0-87152-444-7. 13. ^ Wilkie, Katherine E. Helen Keller: Handicapped Girl. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. 14. ^ Herrmann, Dorothy. Helen Keller: A Life. New York, NY: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679- 44354-4. 15. ^ Herbert Gantschacher "Back from History! – The correspondence of letters between the Austrian-Jewish philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem and the American deafblind writer Helen Keller", Gebärdensache, Vienna 2009, p. 35ff. 16. ^ "First Number Citizens Lecture Course Monday, November Fifth", The Weekly Spectrum, North Dakota Agricultural College, Volume XXXVI no. 3, November 7, 1917. 17. ^ "The Life of Helen Keller". Graceproducts.com. Retrieved August 24, 2010. 18. ^ The life of Helen Keller, Royal National Institute of Blind People, last updated November 20, 2008. Retrieved June 17, 2009. 19. ^ Herrmann, p. 255. 20. ^ Helen Keller: Rebel Lives, by Helen Keller & John Davis, Ocean Press, 2003 ISBN 978-1-876175-60-3, pg 57 21. ^ a b Loewen, James W. (1996) [1995]. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Touchstone Edition ed.). New York, NY: Touchstone. pp. 20–22. ISBN 978-0-684-81886-3. 22. ^ Keller, Helen. "How I Became a Socialist". Retrieved August 27, 2007. 23. ^ "Why I Became an IWW" in Helen Keller Reference Archive from An interview written by Barbara Bindley[who?], published in the New York Tribune, January 16, 1916 24. ^ Keller, Helen (2004) [1908]. The World I Live In (NYRB Classics 2004 ed.). New York: NYRB Classics. ISBN 978-1-59017-067-0. 25. ^ H. L. Willmington. Willmington's Guide to the Bible. Tyndale House Publishers. Retrieved October 18, 2007. "Sometime after she had progressed to the point that she could engage in conversation, she was told of God and his love in sending Christ to die on the cross. She is said to have responded with joy, "I always knew he was there, but I didn't know his name!"" 26. ^ Harold E. Helms. God's Final Answer. Retrieved October 18, 2007. "A favorite story about Helen Keller concerns her first introduction to the gospel. When Helen, who was both blind and deaf, learned to communicate, Anne Sullivan, her teacher, decided that it was time for her to hear about Jesus Christ. Anne called for Phillips Brooks, the most famous preacher in Boston. With Sullivan interpreting for him, he talked to Helen Keller about Christ. It wasn't long until a smile lighted up her face. Through her teacher she said, "Mr. Brooks, I have always known about God, but until now I didn't know His name."" 27. ^ Mary Lowe Dickinson, Myrta Lockett Avary. Heaven, Home And Happiness. Kessinger Publishing. Retrieved October 18, 2007. "Phillips Brooks began to tell her about God, who God was, what he had done, how he loved me, and what he was to us. The child listened very intently. Then she looked up and said, "Mr. Brooks, I knew all that before, but I didn't know His name."" 28. ^ Keller, Helen (1927). My Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Company. pp. pp. 177 – 178. 29. ^ The Akita Inu: The Voice of Japan by Rick Beauchamp in Dog & Kennel 30. ^ "Helen Keller: First Akitas in the USA". Natural-akita.com. June 14, 1937. Retrieved August 24, 2010. 31. ^ "Deliverance (1919)". Retrieved June 15, 2006. 32. ^ "Helen Keller: The Miracle Continues (1984) (TV)". Retrieved June 15, 2006. 33. ^ The Independent (March 7, 2008). "Picture of Helen Keller as a child revealed after 120 years". London. Retrieved May 4, 2010. 34. ^ "Newly Discovered Photograph Features Never Before Seen Image Of Young Helen Keller", New England Genealogical Society. Retrieved March 6, 2008. 35. ^ The United States Mint (March 23, 2010). "A likeness of Helen Keller is featured on Alabama's quarter". Usmint.gov. Retrieved August 24, 2010. 36. ^ "Helen Keller Hospital website". Helenkeller.com. Retrieved August 24, 2010. .Google Maps". Google. January 1, 1970. Retrieved July 24, 2011 – דול ,רלק ןלה בוחר" ^ .37 38. ^ "Toponomy section of the Lisbon Municipality website". Toponimia.cm-lisboa.pt. January 6, 1968. Retrieved July 24, 2011. 39. ^ "Helen Keller". The Architect of The Capitol. Retrieved December 25, 2009. 40. ^ "Helen Keller Statue Unveiled in Capitol". CBS News. October 7, 2009. Retrieved December 25, 2008. 41. ^ "Helen Keller statue unveiled at Capitol". CNN. October 7, 2009. Retrieved December 25, 2008. 42. ^ "One Impressive Kid Gets Her Statue at Capitol". The Washington Post. October 8, 2009. Retrieved December 25, 2008. Further reading

Library resources

About Helen Keller  Online books  Resources in your library  Resources in other libraries

By Helen Keller

 Online books  Resources in your library  Resources in other libraries

 Keller, Helen with Anne Sullivan and John A. Macy (1903) The Story of My Life. New York, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co.  Lash, Joseph P. (1980) Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy . New York, NY: Delacorte Press. ISBN 978-0-440-03654-8  Herrmann, Dorothy (1998) Helen Keller: A Life. New York, NY: Knopf. ISBN 978-0- 679-44354-4  "Keller, Helen Adams | World Encyclopedia. Philip's, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Edinburgh. February 10, 2012". External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Helen Keller

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Helen Keller

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Helen Keller

 The Story of My Life by Helen Keller at Project Gutenberg  The Story of My Life with introduction to the text  Works by or about Helen Keller in libraries (WorldCat catalog)  Booknotes interview with Dorothy Herrmann on Helen Keller: A Life, October 25, 1998.  "Who Stole Helen Keller?" by Ruth Shagoury in the Huffington Post, June 22, 2012.  Papers of Helen Adams Keller, 1898-2003. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.  Poems by Florence Earle Coates: "To Helen Keller", "Helen Keller with a Rose", "Against the Gate of Life"

Florence Nightingale

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search Florence Nightingale

12 May 1820 Born Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany 13 August 1910 (aged 90) Died Park Lane, London, England, United Kingdom Known for Pioneering modern nursing Signature

Medical career Profession Nurse and Statistician Institutions Selimiye Barracks, Scutari Specialism Hospital hygiene and sanitation

Florence Nightingale, OM, RRC (pron.: /ˈflɒrəns ˈnaɪtɨŋɡeɪl/; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was a celebrated English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. She came to prominence while serving as a nurse during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night.

Early 21st century commentators have asserted Nightingale's achievements in the Crimean War had been exaggerated by the media at the time, to satisfy the public's need for a hero. But her later achievements remain widely accepted. In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King's College London. The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday. Her social reforms include improving healthcare for all sections of British society; improving healthcare and advocating for better hunger relief in India; helping to abolish laws regulating prostitution that were overly harsh to women; and expanding the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce. Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer. In her lifetime much of her published work was concerned with spreading medical knowledge. Some of her tracts were written in simple English so they could easily be understood by those with poor literary skills. She helped popularize the graphical presentation of statistical data. Much of her writing, including her extensive work on religion and mysticism, has only been published posthumously.

Nightingale was born to a wealthy upper-class family, at a time when women of her class were expected to focus on marriage and child bearing. Unitarian religious inspiration led her to devote her life to serving others, both directly and as a reformer. Nightingale rejected proposals of marriage so as to be free to pursue her calling. Her father had progressive social views, providing his daughter with a well-rounded education that included mathematics and supported her desire to lead an active life. Nightingale's ability to effect reform rested on her exceptional analytic skills, her high reputation, and her network of influential friends. Starting in her mid thirties, she suffered from chronic poor health, but continued working almost until her death at the age of ninety.

Contents

 1 Early life  2 Crimean War o 2.1 The Lady with the Lamp  3 Later career  4 Relationships  5 Death  6 Contributions o 6.1 Statistics and sanitary reform o 6.2 Literature and the women's movement o 6.3 Theology  7 Legacy and memory o 7.1 Nursing o 7.2 Hospitals o 7.3 Museums and monuments o 7.4 Audio o 7.5 Theatre o 7.6 Television o 7.7 Film o 7.8 Banknotes o 7.9 Photography o 7.10 Biographies o 7.11 Other  8 See also  9 Works  10 Sources  11 References  12 Further reading  13 External links

Early life

Embley Park, now a school, was one of the family homes of William Nightingale

Young Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia,[1] near the Porta Romana at Bellosguardo in Florence, Italy, and was named after the city of her birth. Florence's older sister Frances Parthenope had similarly been named after her place of birth, Parthenopolis, a Greek settlement now part of the city of Naples. The family moved back to England in 1821, with Nightingale being brought up in the family's homes at Embley and Lea Hurst.[2][3] Her parents were William Edward Nightingale, born William Edward Shore (1794–1874) and Frances ("Fanny") Nightingale née Smith (1789–1880). William's mother Mary née Evans was the niece of one Peter Nightingale, under the terms of whose will William inherited his estate at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and assumed the name and arms of Nightingale. Fanny's father (Florence's maternal grandfather) was the abolitionist and Unitarian William Smith.[4] Nightingale was educated mainly by her father.[3]

Nightingale underwent the first of several experiences that she believed were calls from God in February 1837 while at Embley Park, prompting a strong desire to devote her life to the service of others. In her youth she was respectful of her family's opposition to her working as a nurse, only announcing her decision to enter the field in 1844. Despite the intense anger and distress of her mother and sister, she rebelled against the expected role for a woman of her status to become a wife and mother. Nightingale worked hard to educate herself in the art and science of nursing, in spite of opposition from her family and the restrictive social code for affluent young English women.

As a young woman Nightingale was attractive, slender and graceful. While her demeanor was often severe, she could be very charming and her smile was radiant. Her most persistent suitor was the politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but after a nine-year courtship she rejected him, convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing.

In Rome in 1847, she met Sidney Herbert, a politician who had been Secretary at War (1845– 1846). Herbert was on his honeymoon; he and Nightingale became lifelong close friends. Herbert would be Secretary of War again during the Crimean War; he and his wife were instrumental in facilitating Nightingale's nursing work in the Crimea. She became a key adviser to him in his political career, though she was accused by some of having hastened Herbert's death from Bright's Disease in 1861 because of the pressure her programme of reform placed on him.

Nightingale also much later had strong relations with Benjamin Jowett, who may have wanted to marry her.

Nightingale continued her travels (now with Charles and Selina Bracebridge) as far as Greece and Egypt. Her writings on Egypt in particular are testimony to her learning, literary skill and philosophy of life. Sailing up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel in January 1850, she wrote

"I don't think I ever saw anything which affected me much more than this." And, considering the temple: "Sublime in the highest style of intellectual beauty, intellect without effort, without suffering... not a feature is correct – but the whole effect is more expressive of spiritual grandeur than anything I could have imagined. It makes the impression upon one that thousands of voices do, uniting in one unanimous simultaneous feeling of enthusiasm or emotion, which is said to overcome the strongest man."

Nightingale circa 1854

At Thebes she wrote of being "called to God" while a week later near Cairo she wrote in her diary (as distinct from her far longer letters that her elder sister Parthenope was to print after her return): "God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation."[5] Later in 1850, she visited the Lutheran religious community at Kaiserswerth-am- Rhein in Germany, where she observed Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses working for the sick and the deprived. She regarded the experience as a turning point in her life, and issued her findings anonymously in 1851; The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc. was her first published work;[6] she also received four months of medical training at the institute which formed the basis for her later care.

On 22 August 1853, Nightingale took the post of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until October 1854.[7] Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly £40,000/US$65,000 in present terms), which allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career. Crimean War

A print of the jewel awarded to Nightingale by Queen Victoria, for her services to the soldiers in the war

A tinted lithograph by William Simpson illustrating conditions of the sick and injured in Balaklava

A ward of the hospital at Scutari where Nightingale worked, from an 1856 lithograph

"Nightingale receiving the Wounded at Scutari", a portrait by Jerry Barrett

Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith,[8] were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire. They were deployed about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

Nightingale arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari (modern-day Üsküdar in Istanbul). Her team found that poor care for wounded soldiers was being delivered by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.

After Nightingale sent a plea to The Times for a government solution to the poor condition of the facilities, the British Government commissioned Isambard Kingdom Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital which could be built in England and shipped to the Dardanelles. The result was Renkioi Hospital, a civilian facility which under the management of Dr. Edmund Alexander Parkes had a death rate less than 1/10th that of Scutari.[9]

The first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography (1911) asserted that Nightingale reduced the death rate from 42% to 2% either by making improvements in hygiene herself or by calling for the Sanitary Commission. However, death rates actually began to rise to the highest of all hospitals in the region. During her first winter at Scutari, 4,077 soldiers died there. Ten times more soldiers died from illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds. With overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of ventilation, the Sanitary Commission had to be sent out by the British government to Scutari in March 1855, almost six months after Florence Nightingale had arrived. The commission flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation.[10] Death rates were sharply reduced, but she did not recognise hygiene as the predominant cause of death at the time and never claimed credit for helping to reduce the death rate.[11] In 2001 and 2008 the BBC released documentaries which were critical of Nightingale's performance in the Crimean War, as were some follow-up articles published in The Guardian and the Sunday Times. Nightingale scholar L. McDonald has dismissed these criticisms as "often preposterous", arguing they are not supported by the primary sources.[3]

Nightingale still believed that the death rates were due to poor nutrition, lack of supplies and overworking of the soldiers. After she returned to Britain and began collecting evidence before the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, she came to believe that most of the soldiers at the hospital were killed by poor living conditions. This experience influenced her later career, when she advocated sanitary living conditions as of great importance. Consequently, she reduced peacetime deaths in the army and turned attention to the sanitary design of hospitals.

The Lady with the Lamp

During the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale gained the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" from a phrase in a report in The Times:

She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.[12]

The phrase was further popularised by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1857 poem "Santa Filomena":[13] Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room to room. Later career

In the Crimea on 29 November 1855, the Nightingale Fund was established for the training of nurses during a public meeting to recognize Nightingale for her work in the war. There was an outpouring of generous donations. Sidney Herbert served as honorary secretary of the fund and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman. Nightingale was considered a pioneer in the concept of medical tourism as well, based on her 1856 letters describing spas in the Ottoman Empire. She detailed the health conditions, physical descriptions, dietary information, and other vital details of patients whom she directed there. The treatment there was significantly less expensive than in Switzerland.

Florence Nightingale, circa 1858

Nightingale had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital on 9 July 1860. The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on 16 May 1865 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. Now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery, the school is part of King's College London. She also campaigned and raised funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury near her family home.

Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing (1859). The book served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing schools, though it was written specifically for the education of those nursing at home. Nightingale wrote "Every day sanitary knowledge, or the knowledge of nursing, or in other words, of how to put the constitution in such a state as that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. It is recognised as the knowledge which every one ought to have – distinct from medical knowledge, which only a profession can have".[14]

Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general reading public and is considered a classic introduction to nursing. Nightingale spent the rest of her life promoting and organizing the nursing profession. In the introduction to the 1974 edition, Joan Quixley of the Nightingale School of Nursing wrote: "The book was the first of its kind ever to be written. It appeared at a time when the simple rules of health were only beginning to be known, when its topics were of vital importance not only for the well-being and recovery of patients, when hospitals were riddled with infection, when nurses were still mainly regarded as ignorant, uneducated persons. The book has, inevitably, its place in the history of nursing, for it was written by the founder of modern nursing".[15]

As Mark Bostridge has recently demonstrated, one of Nightingale's signal achievements was the introduction of trained nurses into the workhouse system in England and Ireland from the 1860s onwards. This meant that sick paupers were no longer being cared for by other, able-bodied paupers, but by properly trained nursing staff.

Though Nightingale is sometimes said to have denied the theory of infection for her entire life, a recent biography disagrees,[16] saying that she was simply opposed to a precursor of germ theory known as "contagionism". This theory held that diseases could only be transmitted by touch. Before the experiments of the mid-1860s by Pasteur and Lister, hardly anyone took germ theory seriously; even afterwards, many medical practitioners were unconvinced. Bostridge points out that in the early 1880s Nightingale wrote an article for a textbook in which she advocated strict precautions designed, she said, to kill germs. Nightingale's work served as an inspiration for nurses in the American Civil War. The Union government approached her for advice in organizing field medicine. Although her ideas met official resistance, they inspired the volunteer body of the United States Sanitary Commission.

In the 1870s, Nightingale mentored Linda Richards, "America's first trained nurse", and enabled her to return to the USA with adequate training and knowledge to establish high-quality nursing schools. Linda Richards went on to become a great nursing pioneer in the USA and Japan.

By 1882, several Nightingale nurses had become matrons at several leading hospitals, including, in London (St Mary's Hospital, Westminster Hospital, St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary and the Hospital for Incurables at Putney) and throughout Britain (Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley; Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; Cumberland Infirmary and Liverpool Royal Infirmary), as well as at Sydney Hospital in New South Wales, Australia.

In 1883, Nightingale was awarded the Royal Red Cross by Queen Victoria. In 1904, she was appointed a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John (LGStJ). In 1907, she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In the following year she was given the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. Her birthday is now celebrated as International CFS Awareness Day.

From 1857 onwards, Nightingale was intermittently bedridden and suffered from depression. A recent biography cites brucellosis and associated spondylitis as the cause.[17] An alternative explanation for her depression is based on her discovery after the war that she had been mistaken about the reasons for the high death rate.[11] There is, however, no documentary evidence to support this theory. Most authorities today accept that Nightingale suffered from a particularly extreme form of brucellosis, the effects of which only began to lift in the early 1880s. Despite her symptoms, she remained phenomenally productive in social reform. During her bedridden years, she also did pioneering work in the field of hospital planning, and her work propagated quickly across Britain and the world. Nightingale output slowed down considerably in her last decade, she now wrote very little due to blindness and declining mental abilities, though she still retained an interest in current affairs.[3] Relationships

Although much of Nightingale's work improved the lot of women everywhere, Nightingale was of the opinion that women craved sympathy and were not as capable as men.[18] She criticized early women's rights activists for decrying an alleged lack of careers for women at the same time that lucrative medical positions, under the supervision of Nightingale and others, went perpetually unfilled.[19] She preferred the friendship of powerful men, insisting they had done more than women to help her attain her goals, writing, "I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions."[20] [21] She often referred to herself in the masculine, as for example "a man of action" and "a man of business".[22]

She did, however, have several important and passionate friendships with women. Later in life she kept up a prolonged correspondence with Irish nun Sister Mary Clare Moore, with whom she had worked in Crimea.[23] Her most beloved confidante was Mary Clarke, an Englishwoman she met in 1837 and kept in touch with throughout her life.[24]

In spite of these deep emotional attachments to women, some scholars of Nightingale's life believe that she remained chaste for her entire life; perhaps because she felt a religious calling to her career, or because she lived in the time of Victorian sexual morality.[25] Death

Last photo of Florence Nightingale taken in 1910, a few weeks before her death by Elizabeth Caswall Smith.

The grave of Florence Nightingale in the churchyard of St. Margaret's Church, East Wellow.

On 13 August 1910, at the age of 90, she died peacefully in her sleep in her room at 10 South Street, Mayfair, London.[26][27] The offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her relatives and she is buried in the graveyard at St. Margaret Church in East Wellow, Hampshire.[28][29] She left a large body of work, including several hundred notes which were previously unpublished.[30] Contributions

Statistics and sanitary reform

Florence Nightingale exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age and excelled in the subject under the tutorship of her father. Later, Nightingale became a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics.[31] She used methods such as the pie chart, which had first been developed by William Playfair in 1801. While taken for granted now, it was at the time a relatively novel method of presenting data.[32]

Indeed, Nightingale is described as "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics", and is credited with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram,[33] or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram, in order to illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb", but later that term would frequently be used for the individual diagrams. She made extensive use of coxcombs to present reports on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports.

"Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" by Florence Nightingale.

In her later life Nightingale made a comprehensive statistical study of sanitation in Indian rural life and was the leading figure in the introduction of improved medical care and public health service in India. In 1858 and 1859 she successfully lobbied for the establishment of a Royal Commission into the Indian situation. Two years later she provided a report to the commission, which completed its own study in 1863. "After 10 years of sanitary reform, in 1873, Nightingale reported that mortality among the soldiers in India had declined from 69 to 18 per 1,000".[33]

In 1859 Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and she later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.

Literature and the women's movement

Nightingale's achievements are all the more impressive when they are considered against the background of social restraints on women in Victorian England. Her father, William Edward Nightingale, was an “ extremely wealthy landowner, and the family moved in the highest circles of English society. In those days, women of Nightingale's class did not attend universities and did not pursue professional careers; their purpose in life was to marry and bear children. Nightingale was fortunate. Her father believed women should be educated, and he personally taught her Italian, Latin, Greek, philosophy, history and - most unusual of all for women of the time - writing and mathematics.[34] ”

While better known for her contributions in the nursing and mathematical fields, Nightingale is also an important link in the study of English feminism. During 1850 and 1852, she was struggling with her self-definition and the expectations of an upper-class marriage from her family. As she sorted out her thoughts, she wrote Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. This was an 829 page, three-volume work, which Nightingale had printed privately in 1860, but which until recently was never published in its entirety.[35] An effort to correct this was made with a 2008 publication by Wilfrid Laurier University, as volume 11[36] of a 16 volume project, the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale.[37] The best known of these essays, called Cassandra, was previously published by Ray Strachey in 1928. Strachey included it in The Cause, a history of the women's movement. Apparently, the writing served its original purpose of sorting out thoughts; Nightingale left soon after to train at the Institute for deaconesses at Kaiserswerth.

Cassandra protests the over-feminization of women into near helplessness, such as Nightingale saw in her mother's and older sister's lethargic lifestyle, despite their education. She rejected their life of thoughtless comfort for the world of social service. The work also reflects her fear of her ideas being ineffective, as were Cassandra's. Cassandra was a princess of Troy who served as a priestess in the temple of Apollo during the Trojan War. The god gave her the gift of prophecy; when she refused his advances, he cursed her so that her prophetic warnings would go unheeded. Elaine Showalter called Nightingale's writing "a major text of English feminism, a link between Wollstonecraft and Woolf."[38]

Theology

Despite being named as a Unitarian in several older sources, Nightingale's own rare references to conventional Unitarianism are mildly negative. She remained in the Church of England throughout her life, albeit with unorthodox views. Influenced from an early age by the Wesleyan tradition, Nightingale felt that genuine religion should manifest in active care and love for others.[39][40] She wrote a work of theology: Suggestions for Thought, her own theodicy, which develops her heterodox ideas. Nightingale questioned the goodness of a God who would condemn souls to hell, and was a believer in universal reconciliation - the concept that even those who die without being saved will eventually make it to Heaven.[41] She would sometimes comfort those in her care with this view. For example, a dying young prostitute being tended by Nightingale was concerned she was going to hell and said to her 'Pray God, that you may never be in the despair I am in at this time'. The nurse replied "Oh, my girl, are you not now more merciful than the God you think you are going to? Yet the real God is far more merciful than any human creature ever was or can ever imagine." [2][21][42][43]

Despite her intense personal devotion to Christ, Nightingale believed for much of her life that the pagan and eastern religions had also contained genuine revelation. She was a strong opponent of discrimination both against Christians of different denominations, and against those of non- Christian religions. Nightingale believed religion helped provide people with the fortitude for arduous good work, and would ensure the nurses in her care attended religious services. However she was often critical of organised religion. She disliked the role the 19th century Church of England would sometimes play in worsening the oppression of the poor. Nightingale argued that secular hospitals usually provided better care than their religious counterparts. While she held that the ideal health professional should be inspired by a religious as well as professional motive, she said that in practice many religiously motivated health workers were concerned chiefly in securing their own salvation, and that this motivation was inferior to the professional desire to deliver the best possible care.[2][21] Legacy and memory

Nursing

Blue plaque for Nightingale in South Street, Mayfair

The first official nurses’ training programme, the Nightingale School for Nurses, opened in 1860. The mission of the school was to train nurses to work in hospitals, to work with the poor and to teach. This intended that students cared for people in their homes, an appreciation that is still advancing in reputation and professional opportunity for nurses today.[44]

Florence Nightingale's lasting contribution has been her role in founding the modern nursing profession. She set an example of compassion, commitment to patient care and diligent and thoughtful hospital administration. In addition to the continued operation of the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King's College London, The Nightingale Building in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Southampton is also named after her. International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birthday each year.

The Florence Nightingale Declaration Campaign,[45] established by nursing leaders throughout the world through the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health (NIGH), aims to build a global grassroots movement to achieve two United Nations Resolutions for adoption by the UN General Assembly of 2008. They will declare: The International Year of the Nurse–2010 (the centennial of Nightingale's death); The UN Decade for a Healthy World–2011 to 2020 (the bicentennial of Nightingale's birth). NIGH also works to rekindle awareness about the important issues highlighted by Florence Nightingale, such as preventive medicine and holistic health. So far, the Florence Nightingale Declaration has been signed by over 18,500 signatories from 86 countries.

During the Vietnam War, Nightingale inspired many U.S. Army nurses, sparking a renewal of interest in her life and work. Her admirers include Country Joe of Country Joe and the Fish, who has assembled an extensive website in her honour.[46]

The Agostino Gemelli Medical School[47] in Rome, the first university-based hospital in Italy and one of its most respected medical centres, honoured Nightingale's contribution to the nursing profession by giving the name "Bedside Florence" to a wireless computer system it developed to assist nursing.[48]

In 1912 the International Committee of the Red Cross instituted the Florence Nightingale Medal, awarded every two years to nurses or nursing aides for outstanding service.

Hospitals Four hospitals in Istanbul are named after Nightingale: F. N. Hastanesi in Şişli (the biggest private hospital in Turkey), Metropolitan F.N. Hastanesi in Gayrettepe, Avrupa F.N. Hastanesi in Mecidiyeköy, and Kızıltoprak F.N. Hastanesi in Kadiköy, all belonging to the Turkish Cardiology Foundation.[49]

An appeal is being considered for the former Derbyshire Royal Infirmary hospital in Derby, England to be named after Nightingale. The suggested new name will be either Nightingale Community Hospital or Florence Nightingale Community Hospital. The area in which the hospital lies in Derby has recently been referred to as the "Nightingale Quarter".[50]

Museums and monuments

Statue of Florence Nightingale in Waterloo Place, London

Florence Nightingale Statue, London Road, Derby

Florence Nightingale stained glass window, originally at the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary Chapel and now removed to St Peter's Church, Derby and rededicated October 9th 2010

Florence Nightingale exhibit at Malvern Museum 2010

A statue of Florence Nightingale stands in Waterloo Place, Westminster, London, just off The Mall.

There are three statues of Florence Nightingale in Derby — one outside the London Road Community Hospital formerly known as the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary, one in St. Peter's Street, and one above the Nightingale-Macmillan Continuing Care Unit opposite the Derby Royal Infirmary. A public house named after her stands close to the Derby Royal Infirmary.[51] The Nightingale-Macmillan continuing care unit is now at the Royal Derby Hospital, formerly known as The City Hospital, Derby.

A remarkable stained glass window was commissioned for inclusion in the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary chapel in the late 1950s. When the chapel was later demolished the window was removed, stored and replaced in the new replacement chapel. At the closure of the DRI the window was again removed and stored. In October 2010, £6,000 was raised by friends of the window and St Peters Church to reposition the window in St Peters Church, Derby. The remarkable work features nine panels, of the original ten, depicting scenes of hospital life, Derby townscapes and Florence Nightingale herself. Some of the work was damaged and the tenth panel was dismantled for the glass to be used in repair of the remaining panels. All the figures, who are said to be modelled on prominent Derby town figures of the early sixties, surround and praise a central pane of the triumphant Christ. A nurse who posed for the top right panel in 1959 attended the rededication service in October 2010.[52]

The Florence Nightingale Museum at St Thomas' Hospital in London reopened in May 2010 in time for the centenary of Nightingale's death. Another museum devoted to her is at her sister's family home, Claydon House, now a property of the National Trust.

Upon the centenary of Nightingale's death in 2010, and to commemorate her connection with Malvern, the Malvern Museum held a Florence Nightingale exhibit[53] with a school poster competition to promote some events.[54]

In Istanbul, the northernmost tower of the Selimiye Barracks building is now a Florence Nightingale Museum.[55] and in several of its rooms, relics and reproductions relevant to Florence Nightingale and her nurses are on exhibition.[56]

When Nightingale moved on to the Crimea itself in May 1855, she often travelled on horseback to make hospital inspections. She later transferred to a mule cart and was reported to have escaped serious injury when the cart was toppled in an accident. Following this episode, she used a solid Russian-built carriage, with a waterproof hood and curtains. The carriage was returned to England by Alexis Soyer after the war and subsequently given to the Nightingale training school for nurses. The carriage was damaged when the hospital was bombed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was later restored and transferred to the Army Medical Services Museum in Mytchett, Surrey, near Aldershot.

A bronze plaque, attached to the plinth of the Crimean Memorial in the Haydarpaşa Cemetery, Istanbul and unveiled on Empire Day, 1954, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of her nursing service in that region, bears the inscription:[57]

"To Florence Nightingale, whose work near this Cemetery a century ago relieved much human suffering and laid the foundations for the nursing profession."

Audio

Florence Nightingale's voice was saved for posterity in a phonograph recording from 1890 preserved in the British Library Sound Archive. The recording is in aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund, and says:

"When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore. Florence Nightingale."[58] The recording is available online.[59]

Theatre

The first theatrical representation of Nightingale was Reginald Berkeley in his "The Lady with the Lamp", premiering in London in 1929 with Edith Evans in the title role. It did not portray her as an entirely sympathetic character and draws much characterisation from Lytton Strachey's biography of her in Eminent Victorians.[60] It was adapted as a film of the same name in 1951.

In 2009, a stage musical play representation of Nightingale was produced by the Association of Nursing Service Administrators of the Philippines (ANSAP), entitled "The Voyage of the Lass". The play depicts the story of love and vocation on the nursing communities' icon Florence Nightingale, shown on all Fridays of February 2009 at the AFP Theatre, Camp Crame, Philippines. The play tells the story of Nightingale's early life and her struggles during the Crimean War. "The Voyage of the Lass" was a two-hour play that showcased Philippine local registered nurses from various hospitals of the country, exposing their talents on the performing arts.

Television

Portrayals of Nightingale on television, in documentary as in fiction, vary - the BBC's 2008 Florence Nightingale emphasised her independence and feeling of religious calling, but in Channel 4's 2006 Mary Seacole: The Real Angel of the Crimea and Simon Schama's A History of Britain she was portrayed as narrow-minded and opposed to Seacole's efforts. In 1985 a TV biopic "Florence Nightingale", starring Jaclyn Smith as Florence, was produced.

Film

In 1912 a biographical silent film titled The Victoria Cross starring Julia Swayne Gordon as Nightingale was produced. In 1915 another biographical silent film, Florence Nightingale, was produced starring Elisabeth Risdon. In 1936 a biographical film titled White Angel was produced, starring Kay Francis as Nightingale. In 1951 a second biographical film titled The Lady With the Lamp starred Anna Neagle.

Banknotes

Florence Nightingale's image appeared on the reverse of Series D £10 banknotes issued by the Bank of England from 1975 until 1994. As well as a standing portrait, she was depicted on the notes in a field hospital in the Crimea, holding her lamp.[61]

Photography

Nightingale had a principled objection to having photographs taken or her portrait painted. An extremely rare photograph of her, taken at Embley on a visit to her family home in May 1858, was discovered in 2006 and is now at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London. A black and white photograph of Florence Nightingale taken in about 1907 by Lizzie Caswall Smith at Nightingale's London home in South Street, Park Lane, was auctioned on 19 November 2008 by Dreweatts auction house in Newbury, Berkshire, England, for £5,500.[62]

Biographies

The first biography of Nightingale was published in England in 1855. In 1911 Edward Cook was authorised by Nightingale's executors to write the official life, published in two volumes in 1913. Lytton Strachey based much of his chapter on Nightingale in Eminent Victorians on Cook, and Cecil Woodham-Smith relied heavily on Cook's Life in her 1950 biography, though she did have access to new family material preserved at Claydon. In 2008 Mark Bostridge published a major new life of Nightingale, almost exclusively based on unpublished material from the Verney Collections at Claydon, and from archival documents from about 200 archives around the world, some of which had been published by Lynn McDonald in her projected sixteen-volume edition of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2001 to date).

Other

Several churches in the Anglican Communion commemorate Nightingale with a feast day on their liturgical calendars. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commemorates her as a renewer of society with Clara Maass on 13 August.

Washington National Cathedral celebrates her accomplishments with a double-lancet stained glass window featuring six scenes from her life, designed by artist Joseph G. Reynolds.

Beginning in 1968, the U.S. Air Force operated a fleet of 20 C-9A "Nightingale" aeromedical evacuation aircraft, based on the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 platform.[63] The last of these planes was retired from service in 2005.[64]

In 1982 Sentara Healthcare inaugurated its medical helicopter service, officially named "Nightingale".[65]

A KLM McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 (registration PH-KCD) also named after her honour.[66]

In 2002, Nightingale was ranked in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK- wide vote.[67] See also

Nursing portal

 Cicely Saunders  Betsi Cadwaladr  Dasha from Sevastopol  Crimean War Memorial  Ethel Gordon Fenwick  Florence Nightingale effect  History of feminism  Licensed practical nurse  List of suffragists and suffragettes  Mary Seacole  Nightingale's environmental theory  Nursing process  Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom Works

Library resources

About Florence Nightingale

 Online books  Resources in your library  Resources in other libraries

By Florence Nightingale

 Online books  Resources in your library  Resources in other libraries

 Nightingale, Florence (1979). Cassandra. First published 1852: 1979 reprint by The Feminist Press. ISBN 0-912670-55-X. Retrieved 6 July 2010  "Notes on Nursing: What Nursing Is, What Nursing is Not". Philadelphia, London, Montreal: J.B. Lippincott Co. 1946 reprint (First published London, 1859: Harrison & Sons). Retrieved 6 July 2010  Nightingale, Florence; McDonald, Lynn (2001). Florence Nightingale's Spiritual Journey: Biblical Annotations, Sermons and Journal Notes. Collected Works of Florence Nighingale (Editor Lynn McDonald) 2. Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 0-88920-366-0. Retrieved 6 July 2010  Florence Nightingale's Theology: Essays, Letters and Journal Notes. Collected Works of Florence Nighingale (Editor Lynn McDonald) 3. Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 2002. ISBN 0-88920-371-7. Retrieved 6 July 2010  Nightingale, Florence; Vallée, GéRard (2003). Mysticism and Eastern Religions. Collected Works of Florence Nighingale (Editor Gerard Vallee) 4. Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 0-88920-413-6. Retrieved 6 July 2010  Nightingale, Florence; McDonald, Lynn (2008). Suggestions for Thought. Collected Works of Florence Nighingale (Editor Lynn McDonald) 11. Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 978-0-88920-465-2. Retrieved 6 July 2010. Privately printed by Nightingale in 1860.  Notes on Nursing for the Labouring Classes. London: Harrison. 1861. Retrieved 6 July 2010  The Family, a critical essay in Fraser's Magazine (1870)  "Introductory Notes on Lying-In Institutions". Nature (London: Longmans, Green & Co) 5 (106): 22. 1871. Bibcode:1871Natur...5...22. doi:10.1038/005022a0. Retrieved 6 July 2010More than one of |work= and |journal= specified (help)  Una and the Lion. Cambridge: Riverside Press. 1871. Retrieved 6 July 2010. Note: First few pages missing. Title page is present.  "Una and Her Paupers, Memorials of [[Agnes Elizabeth Jones]], by her sister". with an introduction by Florence Nightingale (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1872). Retrieved 6 July 2010Wikilink embedded in URL title (help). See also 2005 publication by Diggory Press, ISBN 978-1-905363-22-3  Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-1850 (1987) ISBN 1-55584-204-6 Sources

 Baly, Monica E. and H. C. G. Matthew, "Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910)"; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (2004); online edn, May 2005 accessed 28 October 2006  Bostridge, Mark (2008). Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend. London: Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-87411-8.  Gill, G. The extraordinary upbringing and curious life of Miss Florence Nightingale Random House, New York (2005)  Kelly, Heather (1998). Florence Nightingale's autobiographical notes: A critical edition of BL Add. 45844 (M.A. thesis). Wilfrid Laurier University.  Lytton Strachey; Eminent Victorians, London (1918)  McDonald, Lynn ed., Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Wilfrid Laurier University Press  Pugh, Martin; The march of the women: A revisionist analysis of the campaign for women's suffrage 1866-1914, Oxford (2000), at 55.  Sokoloff, Nancy Boyd.; Three Victorian women who changed their world, Macmillan, London (1982)  Webb, Val; The Making of a Radical Theologician, Chalice Press (2002)  Woodham Smith, Cecil; Florence Nightingale, Penguin (1951), rev. 1955 References

1. ^ Florence Nightingale's birthplace with photo of commemorative plaque 2. ^ a b c Florence Nightingale and Gerard Vallee (Editor) (2003). "passim, see esp Introduction". Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 0889204136. 3. ^ a b c d Florence Nightingale and Lynn McDonald (Editor) (2010). "An introduction to Vol 14". Florence Nightingale: The Crimean War. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 0889204691. 4. ^ "Pedigree of Shore of Sheffield, Meersbrook, Norton and Tapton". Rotherham Web. Retrieved 2012-05-17. 5. ^ Edward Chaney, "Egypt in England and America: The Cultural Memorials of Religion, Royalty and Revolution", in: Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, eds. M. Ascari and A. Corrado (Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2006), 39-74. 6. ^ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 7. ^ History of Harley Street at Harley Street Guide (commercial website) 8. ^ Gill, CJ; Gill, GC; Gillian C. Gill (Jun 2005). "Nightingale in Scutari: Her Legacy Reexamined". Clinical Infectious Diseases 40 (12): 1799–1805. doi:10.1086/430380. ISSN 1058-4838. PMID 15909269.More than one of |last= and |last1= specified (help); More than one of |first= and |first1= specified (help) 9. ^ "Report on Medical Care". British National Archives (WO 33/1 ff.119, 124, 146–7). Dated 1855-02-23. 10. ^ Nightingale, Florence (1999-08). Florence Nightingale: Measuring Hospital Care Outcomes. ISBN 0-86688-559-5. Retrieved 2010-03-13. 11. ^ a b Florence Nightingale, Avenging Angel by Hugh Small (Constable 1998) 12. ^ Cited in Cook, E. T. The Life of Florence Nightingale. (1913) Vol 1, p 237. 13. ^ "''The Atlantic Monthly''; November 1857; "Santa Filomena," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Volume 1, No. 1; pages 22-23". Theatlantic.com. Retrieved 2010-03-13. 14. ^ Nightingale, Florence (1974. First published 1859). "Preface". In ... Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not. Glasgow & London: Blackie & Son Ltd. ISBN 0-216- 89974-5.Unknown parameter |isbn-status= ignored (help) 15. ^ Nightingale, Florence (1974. First published 1859). "Introduction by Joan Quixley". In ... Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not. Blackie & Son Ltd. ISBN 0-397- 55007-3. 16. ^ Florence Nightingale, the Woman and her Legend, by Mark Bostridge (Viking, 2008) 17. ^ Bostridge (2008) 18. ^ In an 1861 letter, Nightingale wrote "Women have no sympathy. [...] Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. ... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information.". 19. ^ In the same 1861 letter she wrote, "It makes me mad, the Women's Rights talk about 'the want of a field' for them -- when I would gladly give $500 a year for a Woman secretary. And two English Lady superintendents have told me the same thing. And we can't get one..." 20. ^ Cook, Sir Edward Tyas (1914). The Life of Florence Nightingale: 1862-1910. 21. ^ a b c Florence Nightingale and Lynn McDonald (Editor) (2005). Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. pp. 7, 48–49, 414. ISBN 0889204667. 22. ^ Stark, Myra. "Florence Nightingale's Cassandra". The Feminist Press, 1979, p.17. 23. ^ "Institute of Our Lady of Mercy, Great Britain". Ourladyofmercy.org.uk. 2009-12-08. Retrieved 2010-03-13. 24. ^ Cannadine, David. "Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters." The New Republic. 203.7 (13 August 1990): 38-42. 25. ^ Dossey, Barbara Montgomery. Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Reformer. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1999. 26. ^ Plaque #6 on Open Plaques. 27. ^ "Miss Nightingale Dies, Aged Ninety". The New York Times. 1910-08-15. Retrieved 2007-07-21. "Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse of the Crimean war and the only woman who ever received the Order of Merit, died yesterday afternoon at her London home. Although she had been an invalid for a long time, rarely leaving her room, where she passed the time in a half-recumbent position and was under the constant care of a physician, her death was somewhat unexpected. A week ago she was quite sick, but then improved and on Friday was cheerful. During that night alarming symptoms developed and she gradually sank until 2 o'clock Saturday afternoon, when the end came." 28. ^ http://www.countryjoe.com/nightingale/joe_grave.jpg 29. ^ "Florence Nightingale: The Grave at East Wellow". Countryjoe.com. Retrieved 2010- 03-13. 30. ^ Kelly, Heather (1998). Florence Nightingale's autobiographical notes: A critical edition of BL Add. 45844 (England) (M.A. thesis) Wilfrid Laurier University 31. ^ Lewi, Paul J. (2006). Speaking of Graphics. 32. ^ Cohen, I. Bernard (March). "Florence Nightingale". Scientific American 250 (3): 128– 137. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0384-128. PMID 6367033. (alternative pagination depending on country of sale: 98-107. Bibliography on p.114) online article - see documents link at left 33. ^ a b Cohen, I. Bernard (1984), p.107. 34. ^ Cohen, I. Bernard (1984), p.98 35. ^ Nightingale, Florence (1994). In Michael D. Calabria & Janet A. Macrae. Suggestions for Thought: Selections and Commentaries. ISBN 0-8122-1501-X. Retrieved 6 July 2010 36. ^ McDonald, Lynn, ed. (2008). Florence Nightingale's Suggestions for Thought. Collected Works of Florence Nighingale. Volume 11. Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 978-0-88920-465-2. Retrieved 6 July 2010. Privately printed by Nightingale in 1860. 37. ^ Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Retrieved 6 July 2010 38. ^ Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "Florence Nightingale." The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. 836- 837. 39. ^ Her parents took their daughters to both Church of England and Methodist churches. 40. ^ Lynn McDonald Florence Nightingale: extending nursing p11 Nightingale's rare references to Unitarianism are mildly negative, and while her religious views were heterodox, she remained in the Church of England throughout her life. Her biblical annotations, private journal notes and translations of the mystics give quite a different impression of her beliefs, and these do have a bearing on her work with nurses, and not only at Edinburgh, but neither [Cecil Woodham-]Smith nor his followers consulted their sources." 41. ^ While this has changed by the 21st century, universal reconciliation was very far from being mainstream in the Church of England at the time. 42. ^ Lynn McDonald Florence Nightingale's theology: essays, letters and journal notes 2002 p18 "Certainly the worst man would hardly torture his enemy, if he could, forever. Unless God has a scheme that every man is to be saved forever, it is hard to say in what He is not worse than man. For all good men would save others if they could" 43. ^ [influence on Clara Barton] Russell E. Miller The larger hope: the first century of the Universalist Church in 1979 Clara Barton - "Although not formally a Universalist by church membership, she had come of a Universalist family, was sympathetic to the tenets of the denomination, and has always been claimed by it.124 Known as "the Florence Nightingale of our war" 44. ^ Neeb, Kathy. Mental Health Nursing. 3rd. Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company, 2006. 45. ^ "Florence Nightingale Declaration Campaign". Nightingaledeclaration.net. Retrieved 2010-03-13. 46. ^ "Country Joe McDonald's Tribute to Florence Nightingale". Countryjoe.com. Retrieved 2010-03-13. 47. ^ "Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - The Rome Campus". .unicatt.it. Retrieved 2010-03-13. 48. ^ "Cacace, Filippo et. al. "The impact of innovation in medical and nursing training: a Hospital Information System for Students accessible through mobile devices"" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-05-17. 49. ^ "Group Florence Nightingale". Groupflorence.com. Retrieved 2012-05-17. 50. ^ "Hospital name campaign will honour Florence". Derby Express. 18 August 2011. 51. ^ "Florence Nightingale". Derby Guide. Retrieved 2010-03-13. 52. ^ "Nurses attend tribute to Florence Nightingale in Derby", BBC News, October 11, 2010 53. ^ "Malvern Museum's Nightingale Exhibit March - October 2010". Retrieved 16 July 2010 54. ^ "Chase pupil wins poster competition". Malvern Gazette (Newsquest Media Group). 21 June 2010. Retrieved 12 July 2010 55. ^ "The Florence Nightingale Museum (Istanbul)". Telegraph (Telegraph Media Group). 15 September 2007. Retrieved 16 July 2010 56. ^ "Florence Nightingale". Florence-nightingale-avenging-angel.co.uk. Retrieved 2010- 03-13. 57. ^ "Commonwealth War Graves Commission Haidar Pasha Cemetery" (PDF). Retrieved 2010-03-13. 58. ^ "Florence Nightingale". British Library. Retrieved 2011-01-14. ""In aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund" - catalogue entry". British Library. Retrieved 2011-01-14. 59. ^ "Florence Nightingale voice". archive.org. Retrieved 2011-01-14. 60. ^ Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale - The Woman and Her Legend 61. ^ "Withdrawn banknotes reference guide". Bank of England. Retrieved 2008-10-17. 62. ^ "Rare Nightingale photo sold off". BBC News. 19 November 2008. Retrieved 2008-11- 19. 63. ^ Air Mobility Command Museum: "C-9 Nightingale". 64. ^ Air Force Link: "Historic C-9 heads to Andrews for retirement". 65. ^ "Sentara Healthcare: Nightingale Regional Air Ambulance Service". Sentara.com. Retrieved 2012-05-17. 66. ^ "Photos: McDonnell Douglas MD-11 Aircraft Pictures". Airliners.net. 2010-08-14. Retrieved 2012-05-17. 67. ^ "100 great Britons - A complete list". Daily Mail. 21 August 2002. Retrieved 16 August 2012. Further reading

 Baly, Monica and E. H. C. G. Matthew. "Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 accessed 22 Feb 2013  Bostridge, Mark (2008). Florence Nightingale. The Woman and Her Legend. Viking (2008); Penguin (2009). US title Florence Nightingale. The Making of an Icon. Farrar Straus (2008).  Chaney, Edward (2006). "Egypt in England and America: The Cultural Memorials of Religion, Royalty and Revolution", in: Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, eds. M. Ascari and A. Corrado. (Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 39-74.  Davey, Cyril J. (1958). Lady with a Lamp. Lutterworth Press. ISBN 978-0-7188-2641-3.  Gill, Gillian (2004). Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale. Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0-345-45187-3  Magnello, M. Eileen. "Victorian statistical graphics and the iconography of Florence Nightingale's polar area graph," BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (2012) 27#1 pp 13–37  Nelson, Sioban and Anne Marie Rafferty, eds. Notes on Nightingale: The Influence and Legacy of a Nursing Icon (Cornell University Press; 2010) 184 pages. Essays on Nightingale's work in the Crimea and Britain's colonies, her links to the evolving science of statistics, and debates over her legacy and historical reputation and persona.  Rees, Joan. Women on the Nile: Writings of Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, and Amelia Edwards. Rubicon Press: 1995, 2008  Rehmeyer, Julia (2008-11-26). "Florence Nightingale: The Passionate Statistician". Science News. Retrieved 2008-12-04.  Richards, Linda (2006). America's First Trained Nurse: My Life as a Nurse in America, Great Britain and Japan 1872-1911. Diggory Press. ISBN 978-1-84685-068-4.  Strachey, Lytton (1918). Eminent Victorians. Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Pub. Co., Inc. ISBN 0-8486-4604-5. - available online at http://www.bartleby.com/189/201.html External links

Find more about Florence Nightingale at Wikipedia's sister projects Media from Commons

Quotations from Wikiquote

Source texts from Wikisource

Travel information from Wikivoyage

 UCLA Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale Collection, hosted at Internet Archive  Eminent Victorians: Florence Nightingale by Lytton Strachey  1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article  "New photo of 'Lady of the Lamp'". BBC News. 2006-08-06. Retrieved 2008-08-07.  Correspondence between Nightingale and Benjamin Jowett  University of Guelph: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale project  Archival material relating to Florence Nightingale listed at the UK National Archives  Florence Nightingale Letters Collection - correspondence in the University of Illinois at Chicago digital collections  Florence Nightingale Declaration Campaign for Global Health established by the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health (NIGH)  Works by Florence Nightingale at Project Gutenberg  O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Florence Nightingale", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.  Florence Nightingale Window at St. Peter's, Derby

Roquia Sakhawat Hussain

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Roquia Sakhawat Hussain Roquia Khatun 1880 Born Rangpur, Bengal Presidency, British India (Now Bangladesh) December 9, 1932 Died Kolkata Occupation Social worker, Writer,

Nationality British Indian

Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, (Bengali: বেগম ব োকেযো), (1880 – December 9, 1932) was a prolific writer and a social worker in undivided Bengal in the early 20th century. She is most famous for her efforts on behalf of gender equality and other social issues. She established the first school aimed primarily at Muslim girls, which still exists today. She was a notable Muslim feminist; modern feminist writers such as Taslima Nasrin cite her as an influence.[1] Begum Rokeya also wrote short stories and novels. Her important books are Sultana's Dream and Paddorag.

Contents

 1 Names  2 Life  3 Gender equality  4 Works  5 References

Names

She was born Roquia Khatun but achieved prominence as Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hussain. Begum is an honorific, that is, a title of respect in addressing a woman. When she wrote in English, she transliterated her name as Roquia. Life

Birth Place of Begum Roquia in Pairabondh, Rangpur

Roquia Khatun was born in 1880 in the village of Pairabondh,Mithapukur, Rangpur, in what was then the British Indian Empire and is now Bangladesh. Her father, Jahiruddin Muhammad Abu Ali Haidar Saber, was a highly educated zamindar (landlord). Roquia had two sisters, Karimunnesa Khatun and Humayra Khatun; and three brothers, one of whom died in childhood. Roquia's eldest brother Ibrahim, and her immediate elder sister Karimunnesa, both had great influence on her life. Karimunnesa wanted to study Bengali, the language of the majority in Bengal. The family disliked this because many upper class Muslims of the time preferred to use Arabic and Persian as the media of education, instead of their native language, Bengali. Ibrahim taught English and Bengali to Roquia and Karimunnesa; both sisters became authors.

Karimunnesa married at the age of fourteen, later earning a reputation as a poet. Both of her sons, Nawab Abdul Karim Gaznawi and Nawab Abdul Halim Gaznawi, became famous in the political arena and occupied ministerial portfolios under British authorities.

Roquia married at the age of sixteen in 1896. Her Urdu-speaking husband, Khan Bahadur Sakhawat Hussain, was the Deputy Magistrate of Bhagalpur, which is now a district under the Indian state of Bihar. He continued her brother's work by encouraging her to keep learning Bengali and English. He also suggested that she write, and on his advice she adopted Bengali as the principal language for her literary works because it was the language of the masses. She launched her literary career in 1902 with a Bengali essay entitled Pipasa (Thirst).

In 1909, Sakhawat Hussain died. He had encouraged his wife to set aside money to start a school primarily for Muslim women. Five months after his death, Roquia established a high school in her beloved husband's memory, naming it Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School.[2] It started in Bhagalpur, a traditionally Urdu-speaking area, with only five students. A dispute with her husband's family over property forced Roquia to move the school in 1911 to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), a Bengali-speaking area.[2] It remains one of the city's most popular schools for girls and is now run by the state government of West Bengal.

Statue of Begum Rokeya on the premises of Rokeya Hall, University of Dhaka

Begum Roquia also founded the Anjuman e Khawateen e Islam (Islamic Women's Association), which was active in holding debates and conferences regarding the status of women and education. She advocated reform, particularly for women, and believed that parochialism and excessive conservatism were principally responsible for the relatively slow development of Muslims in British India. As such, she is one of the first Islamic feminists. She was inspired by the traditional Islamic learning as enunciated in the Qur'an, and believed that modern Islam had been distorted or corrupted; her organization Anjuman e Khawateen e Islam organised many events for social reforms based on the original teachings of Islam that, according to her, were lost.

Begum Roquia remained busy with the school, the association, and her writings for the rest of her life. She died of heart problems on December 9, 1932. In Bangladesh, December 9 is celebrated as Rokeya Day. Gender equality

This section requires expansion. (January 2007)

Statue of Begum Roquia in Begum Rokeya Memorial Centre, Pairabondh, Rangpur

Begum Roquia was an inspiring figure who contributed much to the struggle to liberate women from the bondage of social malaises. Her life can be seen in the context of other social reformers within what was then India. To raise popular consciousness, especially among women, she wrote a number of articles, stories and novels, mostly in Bengali.

Begum Roquia used humor, irony, and satire to focus attention on the injustices faced by Bengali-speaking Muslim women. She criticized oppressive social customs forced upon women that were based upon a corrupted version of Islam, asserting that women fulfilling their potential as human beings could best display the glory of Lord.

Begum Roquia wrote courageously against restrictions on women in order to promote their emancipation, which, she believed, would come about by breaking the gender division of labor. She rejected discrimination for women in the public arena and believed that discrimination would cease only when women were able to undertake whatever profession they chose. In 1926, begum strongly condemned men for withholding education from women in name of religion as she addressed the Bengal women's education conference:

"'The opponents of the female education say that women will be unruly...fie !they call themselves muslims and yet go against the basic tenet of islam which gives equal right to education. If men are not led astray once educated, why should women?. Works

Library resources

About Roquia Sakhawat Hussain

 Resources in your library  Resources in other libraries By Roquia Sakhawat Hussain

 Online books  Resources in your library  Resources in other libraries

 Sultana's Dream, a notable early work of feminist science fiction involving a utopian male/female role-reversal.  Oborodhbashini ("The woman in captivity")  Motichur  Paddorag ("Essence of the Lotus")  Narir Adhikar ("The Rights of Women"), an unfinished essay for the Islamic Women's Association References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Roquia Sakhawat Hussain

1. ^ Targett, motiur (1995-02-24). "She who makes holy men fume". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 2009-06-01. 2. ^ a b Dr. Barnita Bagchi (2003-10-01). "Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain". Retrieved 2010-05- 16.

 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain  By Dr Barnita Bagchi  01 October, 2003  The life and work of multifaceted South Asian Bengali feminist (writer, novelist, essayist, polemicist, teacher, manager of a school, social worker) Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932) provides inspiration and a rich source of insight to all those committed to furthering equity in education, and to those who perceive that processes of development in a patriarchal, multifaith society must be taken up and furthered by activist women intellectuals who invest energy in furthering formal education, particularly school education for girls. Rokeya is a diamond in the history of women's emancipation in South Asia: every little corner of her life and work yields beauty and splendour. Bangladesh celebrates her by observing Rokaya Day on December 9 each year, while India too boasts of many and growing numbers of admirers and scholars. A recent book by the distinguished scholar Professor Bharati Ray, Early Bengali Feminists, for example, analysed the richness of Rokeya's work.  As a crusader for girls' education, Rokaya saw the integral link between adult women's life-long learning and growth, that is women's own self-development and emancipation, and the education of millions of girls who even today lack access or security in schooling, a problem which is particularly acute in South Asia.  Rokeya set up a school for girls in 1909 in Bhagalpur, Bihar with the material and intellectual support of her husband. After being widowed, she came to Calcutta and re-opened her school, called Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School, in 1911. The school evolved into a full-fledged high school by the time of her death. It was a pioneering institution for Muslim girls, and still flourishes with government aid, a testament to the solidity of Rokeya's effort. The same Rokeya all through her life wrote impassioned, highly intelligent polemics about the oppression, discrimination, pain, and obstacles to development faced by women, both within her own community, and by women belonging to all communities. Published first as a series of columns in 1928-30, her Abarodhbasini ('The Secluded Ones'), bold and unflinching in its denunciation of the cruelty of the then-prevalent system of purdah, took Bengal by storm, as did similar essays in Motichur (1903-04). Sultana's Dream (1905), written in delightfully easy, humorous style, in English, depicted a female utopia where the principal of the ladies' college is largely instrumental in taking over the reins of government from a militaristic, patriarchal regime.  It is Rokeya's much-neglected novella Padmarag (1924) which shows her bringing together her espousal of women's personal journeys of growth and emancipation and their working to advance educational equity. This also shows her powerfully, explicitly, and boldly expressing her belief in an unsectarian, universalist society where women from all races, creeds, and colours, having suffered from patriarchal oppression, determine to better their lot by concrete social action and organising, and devote themselves to the often thankless task of getting out of school girls into school.  In this work of Rokeya's, a young widow, of Hindu origin, sets up a community which will both give shelter and training to women who have faced patriarchal and familial oppression, and which also runs a school, a vocational training workshop, and a home for the sick and destitute. The women who find refuge and run the community are Muslims, Brahmos, Christian, and Hindu-as well as white and black. We find wonderfully realistic details of pioneering working women typing, managing accounts, supervising subordinates, teaching: in short, taking on the full gamut of activities that competent women educators undertake.  Delving into the richness of Rokeya's educational work and her fictional depiction of it, I find as a feminist academic working in the field of gender, education, and development that we have troves of learning to glean from her. Today, the problem of girls' education in South Asia is urgently and worryingly acute. As the Education For All UNESCO initiative noted in 2000, half the girls in South Asia (as in sub-Saharan Africa) never attend school, over half the female population above 15 is illiterate, and South Asia has the highest gender gap in education of 29 points.  Meanwhile, international education and development experts are increasingly advocating that to progress in primary or basic education, one needs grassroots-based, community-based educational movements that heavily involve adult women from the community acting as motivators, participants, galvanizers, and teachers. We need simultaneous emphasis on adult education and life-long learning for women, with a recognition that women make exceptionally successful educational mobilizers and teachers. Recent success stories in school education, whether the schooling revolution involving hill women in Himachal Pradesh, or the success of community-based, women teacher-based civil society organization based movements such as BRAC in Bangladesh or Pratham in India, demonstrate the effectiveness of women taking charge of their own lives and entering teaching and community mobilization, with a special sensitivity to girls.  This is the mighty power and success unleashed when women, education, and social capital work in synergy, and this Rokeya realised and attempted heroically to achieve on micro-scale in the last century. The heritage of Rokeya's multifaith, multicultural, gender-just vision needs to be retrieved and learned from by those of us working in the field of development who have a similar unsectarian, feminist ethos, and who want urgently to bring millions of South Asian children and adults, particularly the neglected girls and women, into the fold of education.  Barnita Bagchi Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research General Vaidya Marg, Goregaon E Mumbai 400065, India [email protected], [email protected]