From the Archives: Florence Nightingale Does the Math
Florence Nightingale is best known for her heroic efforts in the Crimean War(1), where she threw open windows, scrubbed filthy floors and equally filthy men(2), bullied doctors and officers on the spot, fought with the British Army’s military director, and saved lives.
She returned home a heroine. Victorian Britain loved to celebrate a celebrity. Nightingale was the recipient of hundreds of poems extolling the Lady with a Lamp. Opportunists printed her picture on souvenirs of every kind: including pottery figurines, lace mats, prints, and paper bags. If Bobblehead dolls had existed at the time, she’d have been Bobbled for sure.
At first Nightingale tried to keep a low-profile. She even traveled home under the unimaginative pseudonym of Miss Smith. She soon came to realize that she could use her celebrity to effect change. With the help of Queen Victoria, who was one of her biggest fans, she convinced the government to set up a Royal Commission to study the health of the army.
One of the lesser known facts about Nightingale is that she was a STEM girl. As a child she loved organizing data. She catalogued her shell collection with precisely drawn tables and lists. When her parents took her and her sisters on a tour of Europe, she collected population statistics . Later she studied mathematics with a personal tutor–not a normal choice for a young woman at the time. She once claimed that she found the sight of a long column of numbers “perfectly reviving.”
Rather than leaving the question of the army’s health to the Royal Commission, Nightingale analyzed the army data herself, working with leading statistician William Farr and sanitation expert John Sutherland of the Sanitary Commission. She reached the conclusion that 16,000 of the 18,000 deaths in the Crimean War were the result of preventable diseases.
Nightingale knew that her love for the clarity of numerical tables is not shared by all. She decided to present her data in a revolutionary way: statistical graphics. (3) Her “rose diagram”, a variation on the modern pie chart, presented her figures in a dramatic and easily understood form.
She went on to spearhead other reform campaigns, using a combination of statistical analysis and expert advice. She prepared by reading the best information available, collecting her own information if good studies didn’t exist, interviewing experts, and testing her recommended changes before releasing her results. The “Lady with the Lamp” gained a new nickname, “the passionate statistician”.
Florence Nightingale: founder of modern nursing, social reformer, grandmother of the info-graphic.
(1) Publicized by the indefatigable William Howard Russell as part of his outraged news reports on the condition under which British soldiers fought and died in that war.
(2) Or more accurately, caused others to scrub.
(3) Farr thought it was a bad idea: “You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.”
Barbie and Ruth
Back in March, Stacy Cordery made a comment that stuck with me:
“As a classroom professor and a woman’s biographer, it had been clear to me for years that female entrepreneurs are largely missing from history. Most of us can name at least a handful of Gilded Age or Progressive Era captains of industry (or robber barons; take your pick). But few of us teach our students about women of vision and grit who overcame the odds in the overwhelmingly masculine world of business.”
I’ve been thinking about women entrepreneurs and how their stories are told ever since.
I decided to start with Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her by Robin Gerber, which at 250 pages was a little less daunting than Cordery’s own biography of Elizabeth Arden.*
Barbie and Ruth is definitely the story of a woman who was a successful entrepreneur, but the title is too small for its subject. Ruth Handler (1916-2002) didn’t just create Barbie, she created Mattel, which became the largest toy company in the world under her leadership. She introduced revolutionary changes in how toys (and ultimately other consumer goods) are sold. (She was also indicted by a federal grand jury, along with several other Mattel executives , on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, and giving the Securities and Exchange commission false financial statements. She pleaded no contest. And left the company. )Several years after leaving Mattel, inspired by her experience of breast cancer, Handler founded a second successful company that created lifelike protheses for breast cancer survivors marketed as Nearly Me. She was fond of saying “I’ve lived my life from breast to breast.”
I have mixed feelings about both the book and Handler. In Gerber’s hands, Handler is a charming steamroller—which I suspect is an accurate depiction. I was bothered by the time Gerber spent on Handler’s failings as a mother—which I have no doubt is accurate. But I wonder whether a biographer of say, Walt Disney (1916-1966), would spend the same amount of time assessing Disney’s success or failure as a parent.**
At some level, the book felt more like a leadership case study than a biography. Perhaps it’s time for someone to write a Big Fat Biography of Ruth Handler. (Not me, though.)
*Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to dive into a Big Fat Biography on an interesting subject, but my reading commitments have gotten a little overwhelming in recent months. I did it to myself by taking on the challenge of reading my way through the various history and heritage months on top of reading wildly and widely in pursuit of my possible book topics. I have no regrets, but occasionally I have to acknowledge limitations of time and energy. (Some of you who know me in real life are gasping to hear me admit this.)
**It would be easy enough to answer the question. But I’m not prepared to drop everything and read a biography of Disney—the best of which qualify as Big Fat Biographies. At least not right now.
The Exodusters
In 1870s, after the failed promise of equality and opportunity under Reconstruction had ended, thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans headed to Kansas and other Western states, hoping to take advantage of the opportunity to own land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres of federal land to anyone who agreed to farm it.. The large-scale migration, which came to be known as “the Great Exodus,” predated the better-known Great Migration from Mississippi to Chicago by a quarter century. The people who participated in it were called “Exodusters.” Between 40,000 and 60,000 Black Americans left the South and migrated westward. Some were part of organized efforts to establish black settlements. Most settled in Kansas.
Why Kansas?
In part, the choice was practical. Getting to Kansas was simpler and less expensive than traveling further west or north, though still daunting .
There was also an emotional element to the choice of Kansas as the New Promised Land. Between 1855 and 1859, “Bleeding Kansas” was the site of violent conflicts in which abolitionists, supporters of slavery and free staters literally fought over whether the state would allow slavery or not. The most well known of these incidents was the raid led by John Brown against pro-slavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek. In many ways it was a dress rehearsal for the civil war that would follow. The events gave Kansas the aura of holy ground for many Black Americans. As one made from Louisiana wrote in a letter to the governor of Kansas, “I am very anxious to reach your state, not just because of the great race now made for it but because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for the cause of black freedom.”
The migration began in 1873, when Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, calling himself the “Moses of the Colored Exodus,” led the people he called “Exodusters” from Tennessee to found a small African-American town in Cherokee County called “Singleton’s Colony.” The gradual exodus turned into “Kansas Exodus Fever” in 1879, following political changes in Louisiana that threatened to escalate violence against former slaves. By early March, about 1500 “exodusters” had passed through St. Louis to Kansas. Thousands more crowded the wharves on the banks of the Mississippi waiting to get passage on a northbound steamboat. Many arrived in St. Louis with no resources and no idea how they would get across Missouri into Kansas. St Louis clergy and businessmen organized committees to collect food and funds to help them on their way.
Roughly 6,000 Black Americans arrived in Kansas in the spring of 1879, most of them from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Other Exodusters made their way to Oklahoma, Colorado, Ohio, Nebraska, the Dakotas, New Mexico, Arizona and Montana . The exodus began to slow down by early summer, but continued through the 1880s. By 1880, the Black population of Kansas had grown to some 43,000..
***
An interesting side note: Although much of what we know about the Great Exodus comes from newspaper accounts of the Exodusters on the move—accounts that are laden with the racist language of the period even when sympathetic to the cause of the migrants, we also have first hand testimony from some of the Exodusters themselves in interviews taken as part of a n 1880 Senate investigation into the cause of the migration. These interviews are an earlier counterpart to the better-known Works Progress Administration interviews with formerly enslaved peoples recorded during the Great Depression. In addition to their personal testimony, many of the witnesses brought additional evidence to the stand in the form of letters and affidavits from other community members. Who knew? Not me.