SOURCE: "A Housewifely Woman: The Social Construction of Florence Nightingale," in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 164-98.

In the following excerpt, Poovey explores Nightingale's conceptualization of nursing as contained in Notes on Nursing and other writings by Nightingale, examining her views in relation to the Victorian womanly ideal of domesticity.

Florence Nightingale's publications on nursing are extremely heterogeneous. They range from her most popular work—Notes on Nursing (1859), which was written for a general audience and sold fifteen thousand copies in just one month—to a series of reports written for Royal Commissions, which were only publicly available in the extremely limited numbers Nightingale had privately printed. That Nightingale's observations on nursing are so various and unsystematic partially reflects the lack of public or official interest in this subject at midcentury: even within the medical community, there...