At 61, suffragist Annie Smith Peck climbed a 21,000-foot mountain and planted a ‘Votes for Women’ banner
#womens-history — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #womens-history, aggregated by home.social.
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Library of Congress: Become Part of the Legacy of Abolitionist and Educator, Myrtilla Miner. “In 1851, more than a decade before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the School for Colored Girls opened in Washington, D.C. with the mission of training Black women educators. The institution was the first of its kind in the District and only the fourth in the nation. Today, the Library of […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/10/24/library-of-congress-become-part-of-the-legacy-of-abolitionist-and-educator-myrtilla-miner/ -
In the 1400s, a woman fought sexism by imagining a literary ‘City of Ladies’ built on 3 principles
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I read Anarcha Westcott’s story for the first time, and it stayed with me.
She was an enslaved Black teenager subjected to repeated surgeries without anesthesia in the 1840s, while doctors developed techniques that shaped gynecology.
This painting is not merely a scene from the past; it opens a painful chapter in medical history, exposing racism and the exploitation of women’s suffering across centuries.
#AnarchaWestcott #WomensHistory #MedicalRacism #WomenRights
https://chuffed.org/project/161851-help-aya-go-to-uni-and-survive-in-gaza -
DigitalNC: EXTRA, EXTRA! DigitalNC Sets New Record of 5 MILLION Newspaper Pages with Addition of Blue Ridge Sun. “We are elated to have the entire run of The Blue Ridge Sun (Sparta, N.C.) join our newspaper collection for many reasons, such as its geographic location, time period coverage, and that it was established, published, and edited by a woman.”
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/10/19/digitalnc-extra-extra-digitalnc-sets-new-record-of-5-million-newspaper-pages-with-addition-of-blue-ridge-sun/ -
Oct 15, 1902: Amparo Poch y Gascón was born on this date in Zaragosa, Spain. She (along with Lucía Sánchez Saornil & Mercedes Comaposada) founded the anarcho-feminist organization Mujeres Libres (Free Women). The group ultimately became a national federation of 30,000 members at its height in the summer of 1938 & played an important part in the Spanish Civil War. Gascón died in exile in Toulouse, France on April 15, 1968.
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The first book reviews in @[email protected] are out, by @[email protected] & @[email protected], of books by @[email protected], @[email protected], & @[email protected]!
💙📚 🗃 #medieval #womenshistory #religioushistory
www.draftingthepast.com/tag/book-rev...
Book Reviews - Drafting the Pa... -
Joining friends for #BannedBooksWeek! As a librarian, I know how ridiculous book bans are.
From my collection: Bicycling for Ladies (1896). Seems innocuous, right? But Victorians had opinions on what women should do.
The woman on this cover is riding alone, at night, fast, and wearing pants! In one illustration, she broke every social norm.
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"Self-Portrait with Telephone," Wiktoria Goryńska, 1930.
Woodcut artist Goryńska (1902-1945), while ethnically Polish, was born in Vienna, spent her childhood in the UK, and was educated in Berlin before establishing herself in Warsaw.
She was a star of the short-lived Warsaw School of woodcut art; this self portrait is her most famous work. She had her first solo show in 1931 and won multiple awards for her work as an artist and illustrator.
She was also a journalist, writing art essays and criticism, articles on fencing (she was an enthusiastic fencer), and giving English-language talks for Polish Americans on Polish Radio.
She was also intensely patriotic and worked fiercely for the Warsaw underground during the Nazi occupation. After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she perished. (Records are spotty, so it's unclear if it was disease or an execution.)
From a private collection.
#Art #WiktoriaGorynska #WarsawSchool #Woodcut #WomenArtists #ConcentrationCampVictim #WWII #Resistance #WomensHistory
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"Girl Awakening," Eva Gonzalès, c. 1877-8.
Gonzalès (1847-83) isn't well remembered today, but she has a significant position as one of the notable women Impressionists, along with Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Marie Bracquemond. The (deserved) fame of the former two has sadly eclipsed Gonzalès and Bracquemond.
Daughter of a writer, she trained under portraitist Charles Chaplin (no, not THAT Chaplin), then became a model and student of Édouard Manet. She initially wasn't taken seriously by art critics, but her intuition and skill spoke for themselves and she received significant praise.
Sadly, she died young, in childbirth, only a few days after Manet's passing.
Here she paints her sister Jeanne, a frequent model, and shows off her technique. She deserves greater attention.
From the Kunsthalle Bremen.
#Art #EvaGonzales #Impressionism #WomenInArt #WomenArtists #WomensHistory #Sleep
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"Girl with a Cat," Gwen John, 1918-22.
John (1876-1939) was a Welsh painter who had a very individual style that defies easy categorization. There's Realism, of course, an influence of Impressionism, and maybe even some Pointillism.
Her misty, hazy portraits of mostly unidentified women are usually very simple and direct, with no elaborate poses or attempts at symbolism. Usually they simply had their hands in their laps, and their hair in simple arrangements. The girl here has an almost sad expression; one wonders what is on her mind.
John's work was overlooked for many years, in part because her younger brother Augustus John (1878-1961) was such a huge artistic force in his life, and because of her relationship with her lover/mentor Auguste Rodin. But in recent years she has undergone reassessment and is now hailed as a unique vision in the art world.
Happy Portrait Monday!
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
#Art #GwenJohn #Realism #WomenArtists #WomenInArt #WomensHistory #CatsOfMastodon
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Eglantyne Jebb
There are some names that really ought to be better known. Eglantyne Jebb is one of them.
If the name means anything at all to you, you may know her as the founder of Save the Children. That alone would be quite an achievement, but it barely scratches the surface of what this extraordinary British woman actually did. Because Eglantyne didn’t just establish a charity. She helped change the way that the world thought about children.
Born in Shropshire on 25 August 1876, Eglantyne grew up in a comfortable and socially conscious family. Her mother, also called Eglantyne, was involved in charitable work, and the idea that those fortunate enough to have money and education had some responsibility towards those who did not was part of the world in which the younger Eglantyne was raised. She studied history at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and afterwards trained as a teacher.
She hated it.
Which is probably worth mentioning, because we have a habit of tidying remarkable women into neat little biographies in which they appear to know exactly what they are doing from the age of twelve. Eglantyne didn’t, teaching wasn’t for her so she left it behind. Instead, while living in Cambridge, she became involved with the Charity Organisation Society and began investigating poverty. Not just feeling sorry for people. She investigated it. She visited families, gathered information and examined the conditions in which people were actually living. In 1906 she published Cambridge: A Study in Social Questions, based upon this research. It was an approach that would remain important throughout her life. Charity work was useful, certainly, but sympathy without understanding just wasn’t enough.
Then came the First World War. And afterwards came something which appalled her.
The fighting officially ended in November 1918, but the Allied blockade of Germany continued into the following year. Across Germany and Austria, civilians were suffering from severe shortages. Children, inevitably, were among those paying the price. To many British people these were the children of the enemy. To Eglantyne, they were children. That distinction – or rather her refusal to make it – is probably the key to everything that followed. Alongside her sister, Dorothy Buxton, Eglantyne became involved with the Fight the Famine movement. They wanted the blockade lifted and food allowed to reach starving civilians in Europe.
In 1919, Eglantyne took to Trafalgar Square with leaflets showing the effects of starvation on children. The headline was not subtle:
“Our Blockade Has Caused This – Millions of Children Are Starving To Death”
She was arrested. And there is something wonderfully ballsy about this part of her story. Britain had just emerged from a devastating war with Germany. Anti-German feeling had not disappeared overnight, and here was an Englishwoman publicly asking people to care about German and Austrian children. Eglantyne was prosecuted and fined £5.
Then something rather lovely happened. The prosecuting counsel was apparently so impressed by her argument that he offered to pay the fine himself. That £5 is regarded by Save the Children as its first donation. Eglantyne and Dorothy realised that protesting was not enough. Children needed food, medicine and practical assistance, and they needed it immediately. In May 1919 the Save the Children Fund was established.
Even then, persuading the British public to donate money to children in countries Britain had so recently been fighting was not an easy sell. Eglantyne was asking people to look beyond borders, governments and blame and see hungry children who had played no part in creating the war that had devastated their lives. And it worked.
The organisation rapidly expanded its work. In 1920 the International Save the Children Union was established in Geneva, and when famine devastated Russia in 1921, Save the Children launched another huge relief effort. A ship, the SS Torcello, was loaded with around 600 tons of food and medical supplies. During the Russian relief operation, meals funded through Save the Children were eventually feeding hundreds of thousands of people.
But Eglantyne had begun thinking beyond emergency relief. Feeding a starving child was essential. But why had the child been allowed to starve in the first place? Saving children after catastrophe was necessary. Could the world agree that children were entitled to protection before catastrophe swallowed them?
Today, the phrase Children’s Rights seems perfectly ordinary. In Eglantyne’s time, it was anything but. Children were generally considered dependants for whom adults were responsible. Eglantyne pushed the idea further.
Children should not have to depend on the goodwill of adults. They had rights of their own.
In 1923, she drafted a short document containing five principles. It became known as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, or the Geneva Declaration. There was nothing complicated about it. Children should be given what they need to develop. Hungry children should be fed. Sick children should be cared for. Children should receive help in times of distress. They should be protected from exploitation.
Simple ideas. Revolutionary implications.
On 26 September 1924, the League of Nations adopted the Declaration of Geneva. Its opening declared that humanity owed the child “The best it had to give.”
Let’s just take a minute to think about that.
A woman born in Victorian England had helped persuade an international organisation representing nations across the world to formally recognise that the welfare of children was not simply a private family matter or an occasional subject for charity. Humanity itself had responsibilities towards them. A woman. Helped to convince them of that.
In the words of M People – “What have you done today to make you feel proud?”
Eglantyne did not live long enough to see where that idea would eventually lead. She suffered from serious thyroid problems and died in Geneva in 1928. She was only 52.
But the document survived her.
The United Nations adopted an expanded Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959. Thirty years later came the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, setting out children’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights across 54 articles. Eglantyne’s five simple principles had helped to lay the foundations for something vast.
And Save the Children survived too. What began in the ruins of the First World War became an international organisation still operating over a century later. In 2025 alone, Save the Children reported reaching 37.8 million children in 92 countries. Yet Eglantyne Jebb herself remains strangely absent from the collection of names we reach for when we talk about influential British women or Strong Feminine Energy.
Maybe part of the reason for that is because her work sits in that awkward space between activism, humanitarianism and political reform. She didn’t discover an element or fly an aeroplane or lead an army. There is no single dramatic moment into which her achievement can be squeezed. She looked at something society had largely accepted and said that it wasn’t good enough. Children should not starve because adults had gone to war. They shouldn’t suffer because they were born on the wrong side of a border. Helping them should not depend on someone feeling charitable and their protection should not be regarded as a favour. It should be their right.
In 2026, 150 years after her birth, millions of people know the organisation she created. Millions more live in countries which have formally accepted the principle she helped to introduce to international politics: that children possess rights simply because they are children. Yet comparatively, few know her name.
So let’s fix that.
Eglantyne Jebb.
Shropshire woman. Failed teacher. Social researcher. Campaigner. Lawbreaker. Humanitarian.
And the woman who showed the world that its children were owed something better.
A Little Something You Can Do
Writing about Eglantyne Jebb feels particularly timely.
At Buxton for Books this year, I met author Zoe Sharp. Next month, she will be driving a truck carrying supplies and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Eglantyne believed that feeling sympathy for people in desperate circumstances wasn’t enough when there was something practical that could be done to help them. More than a century later, that seems like a pretty good principle to live by.
If you’d like to support Zoe and help towards the journey and the aid she is taking with her, you can find her JustGiving page here:
Nobody is under any obligation to donate, obviously. But if this article has left you wondering what you can do today, here’s one small answer.
#20thCenturyHistory #BritishWomen #ChildrenSRights #DorothyBuxton #EglantyneJebb #FightTheFamine #FirstWorldWar #GenevaDeclaration #HumanitarianAid #Humanitarianism #LeagueOfNations #SaveTheChildren #Shropshire #SocialReform #StrongFeminineEnergy #WomenSHistory -
❓#QuestionOfTheWeek Did any women in your family work in a STEM field? 🔬
https://youtube.com/shorts/-IdJkblrfvAScience, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics: was there a chemist, engineer, statistician, programmer, or physician in your family tree? Tell us about her in the G2G forum:
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/2086207Looking for inspiration? WikiTree's Women of Science page celebrates profiles of influential women in STEM, from mathematicians and computer programmers to paleontologists and aerospace engineers:
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Women_of_Science#Genealogy #FamilyHistory #WomenInSTEM #WomenInScience #WomensHistory #CollaborativeGenealogy #WhereGenealogistsCollaborate
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The Seventh Chair – Kirst D’Raven
The invitation had been very specific.
Dinner. Seven o’clock. Come as you are.
There had been no address or date, which was inconvenient to say the least. Nevertheless, at precisely seven o’clock, Florence Nightingale opened a door that had not been there a moment ago and walked into the dining room. She paused, taking in the six women already seated around the long dining table. Seven chairs. Two were empty.
“Late,” said a woman with a magnificent quantity of hair and the expression of someone who had personally invented punctuality.
Florence eyed the clock on the mantlepiece. It said seven.
“I am precisely on time.”
“Then the clock is wrong.”
Florence regarded the woman coldly.
“I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“No. I’m Beatrix.”
“Potter?”
Beatrix sighed.
“Yes.”
Florence removed her cloak.
“I’ve read your books.”
Beatrix’s expression softened slightly.
“Thank you.”
“My sister liked the rabbit.”
It hardened again.
Across the table somebody snorted. She was small, neat and formidable looking, with the sort of eyes that suggested very little escaped them.
“Maria Dickin,” she said. “Sit down before the soup gets cold.”
Florence sat. The dining room was peculiar. Not unpleasant. Just peculiar. A fire crackled in a stone fireplace although Florence could not remember seeing a chimney from outside.Then again, she couldn’t remember seeing an outside. There were no windows. There were paintings on the walls, but whenever she tried to examine them properly, she found herself looking somewhere else. The table was laid with white linen, silver cutlery and seven place settings. Seven glasses. Seven napkins. Seven bowls of soup. Florence looked at the empty chair.
“Are we waiting for someone?”
Nobody answered.
At the opposite end of the table, a woman looked up from the spoon she had been studying as though considering whether it might be useful for dismantling something.
“Lilian Bland.”
Florence knew the name.
“The aviator?”
“The journalist. Photographer. Sportswoman. Aviator when people insist.”
“You built an aeroplane.”
“I did!” Lilian raised her glass and smiled, as though toasting Florence.
“Did it fly?”
Lilian gave her a look.
“Well now, I wouldn’t be much of an aviator if it hadn’t.”
Beside her, a handsome woman with determined features laughed.
“I like you.”
“How kind…”
“Elsie Inglis.”
“Yes,” said Florence. “I know.”
There was a moment. Not an uncomfortable one exactly. But there are some names that seem to arrive long before their owners do. Elsie raised her glass. “And I know you.”
Florence inclined her head.
“Then we’re even.”
The final woman had been quiet so far. She sat with both hands around her glass, watching the others with an expression that was gentle but by no means timid.
“Eglantyne Jebb.”
Another paused followed. Florence frowned.
“I.m not sure I…”
“Save the Children?”
“Ah”
“Yes.”
“I know your work”
“Most people know the organisation.”
“But not you.”
Eglantyne smiled.
“That seems to be the theme of the evening.”
Silence settled around the table. Then Maria picked up her spoon.
“Can we eat now?”
The soup was excellent, although none of the women were quite sure what was in it. Beatrix suspected it was some kind of mushroom. Lilian thought leek. Elsie insisted there was barley in it. Maria said she didn’t care what was in it provided that everyone stopped dissecting the bloody soup and ate it. Florence found herself smiling. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done that.
There was another thing that was odd about the room. Time seemed to behave strangely here. Dates didn’t seem important. Neither did death. Nobody asked how they had arrived there or where they had come from. And nobody mentioned that, according to any sensible calendar, they should not all have been sitting at the same dining table.
The second course arrived without anyone bringing it. It was just simply there. Beatrix noticed first, staring suspiciously at the roast potatoes.
“Who cooked these?”
Nobody knew.
“Then I’m not eating them!” she pouted, crossing her arms.
“You ate the soup.” said Maria.
“That was before I realised that we didn’t have a cook.”
“Perhaps the rabbit did it,” Lillian giggled.
Beatrix gave her a stare that had probably once turned a publisher to rubble.
“Peter Rabbit Cannot Cook!” Beatrix enunciated each word clearly, as if speaking to a particularly distracted child.
“How do you know?”
“Because I wrote him!”
Lilian picked up her cutlery and began to poke at the food on her plate. “Doesn’t mean you know everything he gets up to…” she muttered. Elsie laughed so hard that she nearly spilled her wine.
Florence decided that she liked Lilian Bland.
Dinner continued slowly, as did the conversation. It began with the harmless things. Weather. Books. Animals. Travel.
Then someone mentioned hospitals and that was when thigs began to get really interesting.
“You were told to go home?” Florence asked incredulously.
Elsie nodded. “By the War Office, yes. Apparently women doctors were surplus to requirements.”
Florence’s mouth tightened. “So you went elsewhere?”
“France.”
“Of course you did.”
“And Serbia.”
“Of course you did.” Florence repeated.
“They gave me an order.”
Florence stared at her for several seconds. Then, raising her glass she said,
“To ignoring idiotic men.”
Every woman seated at the table raised hers. Even Beatrix.
Especially Beatrix.
“To ignoring idiotic men.”
They drank.
After that there was no stopping them.
Lilian told them about building the Mayfly.
“You called your aeroplane Mayfly?” asked Eglantyne.
“Yes,” Lilian replied. “Because it may fly…”
“And if it didn’t?”
“Then presumably I’d have renamed it Maynot.”
Maria nearly choked on her wine.
Beatrix talked about fungi. Not rabbits or Aylsbury ducks wearing blue bonnets. Fungi. She talked about drawing them, studying them, trying to present her scientific work and discovering that being both knowledgeable and female was apparently an intolerable combination.
Florence understood that particular irritation very well.
“So they remember the rabbits,” she said.
“They remember the rabbits.”
“Not the science?”
Beatrix swirled her glass, staring into it as though she might find an answer there.
“Oh! Occasionally the sheep!” she smiled.
“The sheep?” said Florence, “I don’t recall…?”
“I bought farms!” Beatrix cut in, quickly.
“Why?”
“To stop people ruining them.”
Lilian nodded approvingly. “Good.”
Beatrix looked pleased.
Then Maria told them about animals in war. Not sentimentally, she wouldn’t allow that. She spoke of dogs pulling the wounded from the rubble. Pigeons carrying messages through gunfire. Horses, cats and creatures who had no understanding of nations or medals or why human beings had suddenly decided to tear the world apart.
“They served,” Marie said. “That was enough for me.”
“And so you made them a medal?” Elsie asked.
“I made sure someone did.”
“Same thing.”
Maria pretended not to hear her.
Eglantyne spoke last. She told them about children. Hungry children. Children who had belonged to the enemy and therefore, according to some people, deserved to remain hungry.
“They were children.” she said. Nothing more. She didn’t need anything more.
The table became quiet.Florence looked at the six – no, five – faces around it. Her eyes moved towards the empty chair.
Still there. Still laid. Te untouched plate had changed with every course. Soup and dinner, both untouched and removed by unseen hands. Nobody had sat there and yet the place remained. Ready.
Waiting.
“Who is that for?” Florence asked.
This time everyone looked.
“I’ve been wondering,” said Elsie.
“So have I,” said Beatrix.
Maria frowned, “I assumed one of you knew.”
“No.”
Lillian leaned sideways and looked beneath the table.
“What are you expecting to find?” asked Eglantyne.
“I don’t know.”
“Is anyone there?”
“No.”
“Useful.”
Lilian sat upright again. “It was worth checking.”
Dessert arrived. Nobody questioned it anymore. Apple crumble with custard. Maria took seconds. Then coffee appeared. Florence approved of that.
They talked long after the plates had vanished. About what they had done and about what they had failed to do – that surprised Florence.
History, she thought, liked finished things.
Achievements and dates, institutions and books, hospitals, aeroplanes, medals and declarations. It rarely recorded the days when things didn’t work. The letters that went unanswered and the doors closed. The humiliation of being dismissed and the sheer exhaustion. The doubt. The mornings when getting dressed had felt more difficult than changing the world.
“I nearly gave up,” Lilian said,serious now.
“So did I,” said Beatrix.
Elsie nodded.
Maria stared into her coffee.
Eglantyne said nothing.
Florence looked around the table. “But did we?”
Beatrix smiled, “No.”
The fire had burned low. The clock still showed seven ‘o clock. It all seemed impossible, but impossibility had rather lost it’s meaning in this room. Then Eglantyne looked towards the empty chair.
“I think I understand.”
The others followed her gaze. The seventh chair remained untouched.
“Understand what?” Maria asked.
“The invitation.”
Florence reached into her pocket. She still had hes.
Dinner. Seven ‘o clock. Come as you are.
Beatrix produced an identical card. Then Elsie, Maria, Lilian, Eglatyne. Six invitations. Seven chairs.
“There should be another card,” said Florence.
“Yes,” said Eglantyne. “Who has it?”
Eglantyne looked towards the door which, for the first time that evening, had begun to open.
Beyond it was not a corridor or a street. Or London, Cumbria, Ireland, Serbia or anywhere else any of them had known. Instead, there were thousands of rooms.
Classrooms. Bedrooms. Kitchens. Offices. Workshops. Hospital wards. Libraries. Laboratories. Studios. Fields. Factories. And in them were women.
Girls.
Some were reading or working. Some were caring for children or animals. Some were staring at calculations nobody else understood.
One was drawing. Another was writing. One girl was taking apart a machine. Yet another was standing outside a closed door, gathering the courage to knock again.
One was being told “No.”
One had just been laughed at.
One had failed.
One had succeeded and nobody had noticed.
One had an idea she had not yet told anybody about.
One believed she was just ordinary.
The six women stood, nobody spoke for a while. Then Beatrix smiled.
“Oh.”
Florence understood.
The seventh chair had never belonged to somebody missing from the table. It belonged to somebody who hadn’t arrived yet. To somebody whose name would perhaps be printed in books. Perhaps not. History could be peculiar about such things.
History liked monuments and anniversaries. It liked famous names. History like deciding afterwards which moments had mattered.
But history was not made afterwards.
It was made in kitchens and workshops and hospital wards. At desks. In laboratories. On bicycles, In muddy fields and beside sickbeds.
With pencils and petitions and sheer, bloody stubbornness.
Sometimes, history was made with aeroplanes that might fly.
And sometimes history was made by a woman who had absolutely no idea that what she was doing mattered.
Florence walked to the empty chair. She pulled it away from the table.
The others watched.
Somewhere beyond the open door, another woman was being told that she couldn’t.
Florence smiled. She had heard that before. They all had.
She looked through the doorway. Maybe, somehow, the woman on the other side could see them.
Six women at a table and one empty place. Waiting.
Florence rested her hand upon the back of the chair.
“Well?” she said.
“Are you going to sit down?”
#BeatrixPotter #EglantyneJebb #ElsieInglis #FeministHistory #FlorenceNightingale #ForgottenWomen #historicalFiction #InspirationalWomen #LilianBland #MariaDickin #MysteriousTimes #RemarkableWomen #ShortStorySunday #StrongFeminineEnergy #TheSeventhChair #WomenSHistory -
Florence Nightingale
Ask anyone to picture Florence Nightingale and chances are they all describe the same image. A dark hospital ward, rows of wounded soldiers and Florence, sleeves rolled to her elbows, moving quietly between the beds with her lamp casting a comforting glow over the poor souls lying there. The Lady with the Lamp. Gentle, caring, selfless… almost saintly.
By After Henrietta Rae – https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0006579.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-29): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zggypp55 CC-BY-4.0, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31233676It’s a lovely image. It’s also done Florence Nightingale a bit of a disservice. Because while she absolutely was compassionate, compassion alone does not reform military hospitals, establish professional nursing or force the British Government to acknowledge that an awful lot of it’s soldiers were dying because the system supposed to look after them was failing spectacularly. For that you need intelligence, influence, money, an alarming quantity of paperwork and the sort of stubbornness that makes people in authority develop a nervous twitch when they see your name written on an envelope and Florence had all those things.
She was born in Florence, Italy on 12 May 1820 and, rather conveniently, named after the city. Her parents, William and Frances Nightingale, were wealthy and well connected, which meant Florence and her sister received an education far beyond that available to most girls at the time. Florence was able to study history, philosophy, languages and mathematics, and she was particularly good at the latter. Although what exactly a respectable young Victorian woman was expected to do with all this education was another question entirely. She was supposed to marry well, run a respectable household, entertain the right people and perhaps occupy herself with a little genteel charity work. Florence, however, had other ideas.
In 1837, when she was sixteen, she experienced what she described as a calling from God. Not a vision telling her to wander round hospitals looking picturesque with a lamp, but a conviction that she was supposed to devote herself to useful work. And Florence took that calling very seriously. Unfortunately, the useful work she eventually settled upon was nursing. Today, nursing is a respected profession requiring considerable training and skill. In Florence’s time, it was not considered a suitable occupation for a wealthy young woman. Hospitals could be dirty, chaotic and dangerous places, and nurses didn’t yet have anything like the professional standing the would later acquire. Her family were horrified, but Florence persisted. This persistence would become something of a theme. After studying at Kaiserwerth in what is now Germany and gaining practical experience elsewhere, Florence became superintendent of a London institution caring for sick gentlewomen in 1853. She proved very quickly that she wasn’t just good at caring for patients. She could organise. She reorganised working practices, improved conditions and demonstrated a formidable talent for administration.
Then came the Crimean War.
By 1854, reports were reaching Britain describing appalling conditions among wounded soldiers. At the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, in what is now Istanbul, men were packed into overcrowded wards without adequate food, bedding, clothing or medical supplies. The sewage system was dreadful. Ventilation was poor. Disease was everywhere. The Secretary at War, Sydney Herbert, asked Florence to lead a group of nurses to the military hospitals. She arrived at Scutari in November 1854 with thirty-eight women, and not everybody was thrilled to see them. Military hospitals were run by men accustomed to military hierarchies, and a determined woman arriving with thirty- eight nurses and some very definite opinions about how things ought to be done was not universally regarded as a blessing.
There were supplies, but bureaucracy could make actually getting hold of them absurdly difficult. Medical officers protected their authority and Florence had to negotiate, persuade, cajole and occasionally bulldoze her way through the whole mess – So she did. She organised kitchens to provide proper food for sick men. She established laundries so patients could have clean linen. She found clothing, bedding and equipment. She improved record keeping and created better systems for distributing supplies. She also wrote letters for the soldiers and arranged for their money to be sent home to their families – and yes. At night she walked through the wards checking on them. With a lamp. The soldiers adored her. The newspapers apparently loved the lamp. Hence ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ But the lamp isn’t actually the most interesting thing Florence Nightingale carried into battle. That would be the statistics. The death rate among soldiers during the Crimean War was horrific. Men certainly died from battle wounds, but enormous numbers died from diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery. In some circumstances, surviving the battlefield only to end up in hospital was not necessarily an improvement.
When I was researching this article, I found a lovely, neat version of Florence’s story where she arrives in Scutari, rolls up her sleeves and cleans everything and the death rate immediately plummets. Her actual story is considerably messier. As history so often is. In reality, deaths remained terribly high during her first months there. The problems went far beyond dirty sheets and badly organised wards. Blocked drains, defective sewers, contaminated water and poor ventilation had created perfect conditions for disease. It wasn’t until 1855 when a government Sanitary Commission arrived and carried out essential work on the drainage, sewage and ventilation systems that mortality fell dramatically.
But that doesn’t diminish Florence’s role – quite the opposite, in fact. Because she understood what it meant. Clean linen and good nursing could only do so much if the water was contaminated, the drains didn’t work and hundreds of sick men were being crammed into an unhealthy building. So Florence returned to Britain determined to find out exactly what had gone wrong. She gathered data. lots and lots of data. She collected and analysed figures showing when soldiers died, where they died and what had killed them. There was just one problem. You can hand a politician a table full of inconvenient numbers and there is always the distinct possibility that the table will disappear beneath another pile of paperwork. Florence needed something harder to ignore. Enter the famous polar-area diagram, often called her rose diagram.
By Florence Nightingale – https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/h6xid2, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1474443The diagram shows the causes of death among soldiers in the East, with coloured sections representing the scale of mortality. The enormous areas representing deaths from preventable disease dwarfed those representing deaths caused by wounds. It made the problem visible.
Florence did not invent the pie chart, despite a claim you will still occasionally see repeated. What she did do was understand the enormous persuasive power of presenting statistics visually, and the message was brutally simple. Disease had killed far more British soldiers than Russian weapons had. And those deaths weren’t inevitable. They were preventable.
In 1858, Florence became the first woman admitted as a member of the Statistical Society of London. She used her influence to campaign for reform throughout the armed forces, helping to drive changes in military sanitation, hospital design, record keeping and the treatment of sick soldiers.
Rather ironically, the women remembered for walking endlessly through hospital wards spent much of her later life confined to her rooms by chronic illness – but that didn’t stop her either. From her bed or sofa she produced reports, examined hospital plans, answered correspondence and fired detailed instructions at ministers, doctors, administrators and reformers. She cultivated useful allies and knew exactly how to use them. Florence Nightingale may have disappeared from public view, but behind the scenes she was still very much at work.
In 1859, she published Notes on Nursing, which dealt not only with nursing itself but with ventilation, cleanliness, light, noise, diet and careful observation of patients. She argued, essentially, that the first requirement of a hospital was that it should not make sick people sicker. Which sounds painfully obvious but unfortunately, Victorian hospitals had provided rather a lot of evidence that it needed saying. The Nightingale Training School for Nurses opened at St Thomas’ Hospital in London in 1860, funded by money donated by an admiring public. It’s graduates carried new standards of nursing across Britain and beyond.
None of this means Florence invented nursing. She didn’t. Women had been caring for sick people for centuries, and religious communities already had long traditions of organising nursing. Nor did Florence single-handedly fix the Crimean hospitals. Mary Seacole was there. So were nurses from religious orders, doctors, sanitary engineers and countless hospital workers whose names have disappeared from history. There is room for all of them. History doesn’t have to ration extraordinary women.
Florence’s interests eventually stretched far beyond British military hospitals. She spent decades studying sanitation and mortality in India despite never actually visiting the country, analysing reports and campaigning for improvements to water supplies, drainage, irrigation and public health. She was also very much a woman of her period. Her work existed within the machinery of the British Empire and sometimes reflected the paternalism and assumptions that came with it. She could be difficult, impatient and absolutely convinced that she knew best. The gentle angel wandering around with her lamp was probably easier to live with. But she would also have achieved considerably less.
In 1907, Florence Nightingale became the first woman to receive the Order of Merit. She died at her London home on 13 August 1910, aged ninety. Her family declined an offer for her to be buried at Westminster Abbey, and she was instead laid to rest at St Margaret’s Church in East Wellow, Hampshire.
And still we remember the lamp. Because the lamp gave Victorian Britain exactly the heroine it wanted. She was feminine, gentle, nurturing, safe. You could admire the Lady with the Lamp without having to think too hard about the rather more troublesome woman standing behind her. That woman challenged military authority and exposed government failure. She understood statistics well enough to turn them into a weapon against complacency and recognised that people weren’t simply dying because they were injured or sick. They were dying because the systems had failed them.
Florence Nightingale did indeed walk through the darkness carrying a light, but that wasn’t her greatest achievement.
She worked out why it was dark in the first place.
Then she set about fixing it.
#BritishHistory #CrimeanWar #FlorenceNightingale #HistoricalMyths #medicalHistory #NursingHistory #PublicHealth #Statistics #StrongFeminineEnergy #VictorianWomen #WomenInScience #WomenSHistory -
Robertine Barry: Canada's Feminist Pioneer
Robertine Barry, writing under the name 'Françoise,' became one of Quebec’s first female journalists in the 1890s. A bold advocate for women's education and suffrage, she used her pen to champion social justice and amplify women's voices in public life. 🇨🇦 #Canada #WomensHistory #Quebec #RobertineBarry
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/robertine-barry-francoise
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The Observer: Heritage and Research Center begins archival work. “The Heritage and Research Center has completed renovations along the Avenue and has begun receiving archival collections from 10 congregations — focusing on Catholic religious women. The center, which began as an idea discussed among congregations in 2018, is now transitioning from construction into the process of preserving, […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/09/11/the-observer-heritage-and-research-center-begins-archival-work/ -
"Portrait of a Woman," Berthe Morisot, 1872-5.
Morisot (1841-95) was a pioneering member of the Impressionists, and one of the "grandes dames" of the movement. While not as admired in this country as her friend Mary Cassatt is, she is still a very respected artist.
The sitter for this portrait is unknown, but many feel it's Morisot's sister Edma (1839-1921), herself an artist and very close to Berthe. Edma and Berthe were trained together and had a studio together, but Edma married and decided to scale back her painting. She did sit for her sister multiple times.
Sadly, only two known paintings by Edma survive; for unknown reasons, she destroyed most of her work after her marriage.
Happy Portrait Monday!
From the Courtauld Gallery, London.
#Art #BertheMorisot #Impressionism #WomenArtists #WomenInArt #WomensHistory
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My blog about two sisters who enlisted together, served together as drivers in the Red Cross and lived together after the war.
#WomensHistory
#WW1
historicalclues.blogspot.com/2026/ -
💖 What would women’s lives look like today if Gloria Steinem had never been here?
Women would still have fought, but the fight might have been less visible, less connected, and easier to ignore. Gloria Steinem helped turn experiences women were expected to keep private into public demands for change.
A look at the light she left behind and what we do with it now. 🔥🗽
https://shorturl.at/o3WMJ#GloriaSteinem #Feminism #WomensRights #WomensEquality #MsMagazine #WomensHistory #HowIHonorGloria
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"Moonlight, Study," Fanny Churberg, 1878.
Churberg (1845-92) was a Finnish landscape painter.
The daughter of a doctor and fiercely proud of her Finnish heritage, she began artistic training in 1865 after the deaths of both her parents, and moving in with an aunt, along with her brothers. She was an industrious painter, doing 300 canvases in a 15-year career.
While her style was strictly in the Dusseldorf School (an extension of the Romantic movement, with a focus on meticulously detailed landscapes, often with religious or moral allegory), she did differ from them a slight bit with her short brushstrokes and energetic style. She was passionate about the Finnish landscape and sought to translate such events as an approaching thunderstorm, or moonlight on a cloudy night, as accurately as possible.
She stopped painting in 1880; some say it was her own declining health and the death of her brother Torsten from TB. Others say it was harsh reviews of her work. But she remained involved in the artistic world, encouraging other painters, until her death at 46,
She has been rediscovered in the last 20 years and now is valued for her passionate depictions of turbulent nature.
From the Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki.
#Art #FannyChurberg #DusseldorfSchool #Landscape #WOmenArtists #WomensHistory #Romanticism
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Just found this amazing website containing loads of photos,info and biographies re QMAAC.
Brilliant
woolerwarmemorials.weebly.com/qmaac.html
#WW1
#WomensHistory -
"Self-Portrait with a Red Cap," Ottilie Roederstein, 1894.
German-Swiss painter Roederstein (1859-1937) was a trailblazer in many ways; it was not the done thing for women in central Europe to receive education and training in art, and yet she went for it. She was inspired when a portrait artist did some paintings of her family; she ended up being apprenticed to him for a while, but quickly exceeded him in skill and talent.
She led an unconventional and self-directed life, and achieved success as a portrait artist, exhibiting all over Europe and receiving many commissions. She was known for her precise, realistic style, and strong depictions of women.
She and her longtime partner Dr. Elisabeth Winterhalter founded Frankfurt's first school for girls, and was an outspoken supporter of education and independence for women.
The red beret here was a bit unusual for women at that time, but Roederstein was always unconventional. Painter Gwen John, who sat for her, was fascinated at how Roederstein wore a jacket, vest, and fob watch while she worked!
Happy Portrait Monday!
From the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.
#Art #OttilieRoederstein #SelfPortrait #PortraitMonday #WomenArtists #WomenInArt #WomensHistory #QueerHistory
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I’ve just found some illustrations by a well known female war artist tucked away in a photo album online as well as photos of her
Olive Mudie-Cooke
The story of my sleuthing is here!
#WomensHistory
#WW1
historicalclues.blogspot.com/2026/ -
Lovely article about female artists of #WW1 who served with the Red Cross
#WomensHistory
www.redcross.org.uk/stories/our-... -
Searching is increasingly awful, so I’m bringing back an old-web solution: the blogroll.
Mine is a list of smart, interesting places to read about manuscripts, women, music, history, material culture, archives, and more.
Way better than doomscrolling!
silencesandsounds.blogspot.com
#blog #Research #AcademicChatter #AmReading #Browsing #musicology #WomensHistory #blogroll