SOURCE: "Florence Nightingale's Revisionist Theology: 'That Woman Will Be the Saviour of Her Race'," in Reclaiming Myths of Power: Women Writers and the Victorian Crisis, Bucknell University Press, 1995, pp. 30-63.

In the following essay, Jenkins probes Nightingale's theological thought, which, she argues, attempts to reclaim God's ethics for the marginalized feminine.

[Florence Nightingale] seems as completely led by God as Joan of Arc. ... it makes one feel the livingness of God more than ever to think how straight He is sending his spirit down into her, as into the prophets & saints of old.

—Elizabeth Gaskell

In 1852 Florence Nightingale wrote that "Women [have] passion, intellect, moral activity . . . and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised," that the "unity between the woman as inwardly developed and outwardly manifested" no longer exists.¹ Locating the cause for this discrepancy—between women's talents and social opportunities to...