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FOR SOCIAL WORK

FAMILY CASE WORKERS

CHILD WELFARE WORKERS
VISITING TEACHERS
ATTENDANCE OFFICERS

COMMUNITY SERVICE WORKERS
PROBATION OFFICERS
PSYCHIATRIC SOCIAL WORKERS

MEDICAL SOCIAL WORKERS

Summer Session--July 5, 1923

THE DIRECTOR -:- SMITH COLLEGE : NORTHAMPTON, MASS

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Twenty-one hours a week field work training under professional executives.

SECOND YEAR, SPECIALIZED

Psychiatric and General Medical Social Service training given by the Social Service Department of The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

College graduates eligible for M. A. degree after completing the two years' course.

For circulars address T. R. BALL, Registrar

THE FAMILY is worth binding
BINDERS

of black buckram, lettered in gold, will be
supplied at $1.30 each. With extra fas-
teners so that each binder will hold two
volumes-$1.40

ADDRESS

THE FAMILY, 130 EAST 22D STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y.

THE FAMILY-March, 1923. Vol. IV, No. 1. Published monthly, except August and September, by the American Association for Organizing Family Social Work. Publication office, Commonwealth Press, Worcester, Mass. General office, 130 East 22d Street, New York, N. Y. Two classes of subscription: Standard, at $1.50 a year, and Full, at $3.00 a year. Single copies, 20 cents. Entered as second class mail matter August 12, 1922, at the post office at Worcester, Mass., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright 1923, by the American Association for Organizing Family Social Work.

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LORENCE Nightingale is not usually
described as a social worker, but as
the founder of trained nursing. I
hope, however, to be able to prove that she
exemplified in her own person the practice
of all the different forms of social work-of
case work, group work, social reform, and
social research, and that she did this before
the terms "social work" and "social worker"
had even been coined.

One who is himself an accomplished biog-
rapher tells us that "no biography is to be
accepted as final." We know it to be true
that past history is always being rewritten
in the light of that present which is its
latest fruit, and it would appear to be the
same with the lives of the great dead. In
their own age, they are seen at such short
range that many things of small significance
are made too much of. Later, they fare
better; though it must be confessed that,
in times such as our own, any illustrious
man or woman of another century may be
selected as the subject of a new biography
for no better reason than to illustrate the
latest craze in pseudo-science. An extreme
example, and one that should be a warning
to me, is the Biographical Clinics published
some years ago by an optometrist, wherein

it was made to appear that the famous peo-
ple of the nineteenth century who happened
to have been handicapped by ill-health were
all sufferers from nothing but eye-strain.

Your true biographer, of course, holds

all such preconceived theories lightly, setting

himself instead to study the evidence with

care and then "describe alike the life and

the character, the work and the methods"

of his subject. He must be able to give

himself up without reserve to a sympathetic

appreciation, but can ill afford to suppress

the evidences of imperfection in his subject

if he would make him live once again.

Unfortunately, however, some recent biog-

raphers go farther, and contrive to belittle

and attack the men and women generally

recognized as great.

Lytton Strachey, for example, tells us

that "it is as difficult to write a good life
as to live one"; and then, while setting him-
self the task of laying bare the facts about
Eminent Victorians "dispassionately, im-
partially, and without ulterior intentions,"
proceeds without proof to condemn Dr.
Arnold and Florence Nightingale, the former
for crippling the life of Strachey's distant
family connection, Arthur Hugh Clough,
and the latter for causing his death. Sidney

Herbert, according to Strachey, was another one of Miss Nightingale's victims.

Fortunately, one of the best of the series of biographies that have enriched English literature during the last quarter of a century is Sir Edward Cook's Life of Florence Nightingale. It is a model of frankness and thoroughness, which does not conceal the fact that, while Miss Nightingale worked unceasingly in the cause of sanitary reform, she expected those associated with her to do the same. But neither in Cook's pages nor in the lives of Clough and of Herbert can evidence be found to justify Strachey's savage onslaught. Apparently, Sidney Herbert was a well man in 1859, after having devoted many years to the plans of medical and army reorganization in which Miss Nightingale was also interested. There is ample evidence that Herbert's interest in these subjects was a personal one and in no sense superimposed. In 1860, as head of the War Office, he made 200 speeches in the House of Commons, and was deeply pained, moreover, by changes in his relations with his political chief, Mr. Gladstone. To accuse Miss Nightingale of his death in the following year in order to make her conform to Strachey's idea of a Victorian philanthropist is as absurd as to accuse Mr. Gladstone of that death, or to blame Herbert with having caused Miss Nightingale's prolonged illness, because het sent her to the Crimea, where she overworked. As regards the death of Clough, there is even less evidence. His Victorian family might imaginably have felt aggrieved over any public claims that had absorbed his attention, and might have fastened upon those claims rather than upon more personal ones as the cause of his breakdown. But to find a man of Strachey's gifts reacting after this fashion is indeed a disappoint

ment.

Sir Edward Cook's Life appeared in 1913, three years after Miss Nightingale's death at the advanced age of ninety. Its pages should be studied by every social workerby social case workers, who from the very nature of their task are makers of contem

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It is quite possible that a psycho-analyst will ransack Sir Edward Cook's pages some day, and attempt to account for the events of a remarkable life in the lingo of his own trade. Meanwhile, students of the family can find, between the year of Miss Nightingale's birth in 1820 and that of her departure for the Crimea in 1854, some striking illustrations of conflict within a family in which there was no lack of affection, but varying ideals of life in the older and the younger generation. Here was one for whom the temptations and difficulties of daily living, as well as its advantages, were greater than those falling to the lot of social workers in our own day. The temptations were those of tradition, wealth, ease, and social position; the advantages were those that came early from travel, study, and intercourse with interesting and capable people, some of the choicest of whom were of her own kindred. The difficulties, on the other hand, were due in part to family prejudice, in part to the social conditions of her time.

Out of a deeply personal religious experience, with beginnings dating back to her seventeenth year, Florence became eager for a life of exacting and beneficent service. The form that this service took in her mind was the care of the sick. "Do you know," she remarked to a friend of later

years, as they faced the large and ornate mansion in which the Nightingales lived, "what I always think when I look at that row of windows? I think how I should turn it into a hospital, and just how I should place the beds."

Naturally enough, the family had other plans for their home and for this daughter. Her mother and older sister were scandalized at the thought of this delicately reared and brilliant girl becoming a nurse. Nurses in the England of 1820 to 1854 were not only ignorant and uncleanly; too often they were drunken and disreputable. Socially, they ranked with kitchen maids.

Mrs. Nightingale had surrounded herself by her exertions with "the best society in England." Within her range, she was a woman of genius. Her elder daughter (there were only the two children) was highly gifted both as an artist and as a writer, and Florence, the younger, seemed to speak a language foreign to both of them. With every desire to understand that language, they could not. The father of the family, though he was devoted to Florence and proud of her intellectual interests and studious habits, followed, on the whole, the lead of his wife and older daughter. As a county magistrate, he had more administrative wisdom than was always developed in that school and was able to write later (1853) to Florence, when she had just become superintendent of a nursing home and he had reason to fear that she might be carrying her masterfulness too far, "You will have to govern by a representative system after all. In England we go this way to work, and a good way it is, for a good autocrat is only to be found at intervals. Despots do nothing in teaching others. Republicans keep teaching each other all day long."

The no-thoroughfare situation as between Florence and her family had continued. almost without a break until 1852. Her home, with all its charm, was a gilded cage. "A profession," she writes, "a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties . . I have always longed for, consciously or not."

There had been some weeks of service and training at Kaiserswerth in 1851, but the family were still opposed to the logical next step of a full-time position in some hospital or nursing home.

Into this difficult family situation, however, there entered a sister of Mr. Nightingale, who was Florence's favorite aunt-a philosopher, diplomat, and, be it added, a born social case worker. Aunt Mai realized that to overcome Mrs. Nightingale's opposition was to win the whole family. "Your mother," she reported, "would, I believe, be most willing that you undertake a mission like Mrs. Fry or Mrs. Chisolm, but she thinks it necessary for your peace and well-being that there should be a Mr. Fry or Captain Chisolm to protect you, and in conscience she thinks it right to defend you from doing anything which she thinks would be an impediment to the existence of Mr. F. or Captain C." Here was a possible loophole of which the aunt took prompt advantage. If, at the age of thirty-two, Florence was not yet married, at what age would it be respectable for her to head some philanthropic movement or institution? And if she was to be fully prepared at this unnamed age, was it not high time that she took further training immediately? This logic won for Florence an opportunity for the further study of nursing in France. Meanwhile, the Aunt had had to deal with impatience on the other side and convince Florence that she had only to be fully prepared to be sure that work somewhere was being made ready for her. Close upon the heels of this prophecy followed the superintendency of the home on Harley Street and then-the Crimean war.

During her earlier or "gilded cage" period, there had been no lack of suitors. Florence had been attracted to one of these, who happened, moreover, to have been a suitable candidate from a worldly point of view. But their marriage would have meant an establishment and a position to maintain in all respects as exacting as the establishment and position of the

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