Heroines in History by Katie Pickles;

Author:Katie Pickles; [Katie Pickles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367902209
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2022-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

Made ill from heroism

Ironically, for heroines who worked in health and well-being, their work could make them sick and sometimes lead to their death. Nursing heroines were particularly vulnerable. For example, explorer Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) died from enteric fever while nursing in the South Africa War. Florence Nightingale caught Crimean Fever and then depleted, took to her bed. Mary Seacole also returned to England from the Crimea in poor health. Bad health did not dominate the narrative of Seacole’s 1857 memoirs, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. 34 This is unsurprising as illness and death was an expected and unremarkable occupational hazard for nurses and doctors. The risk they took was part of their duty and service. If they did get sick or die, while close to martyrdom, it was somehow different as they had made a career choice. As it did not fit with ‘women as embodiments of patriotic motherhood,’ Nataliya Danilova and Emma Dolan consider Scottish Women’s Hospitals doctor heroine Elsie Inglis’s death from cancer was represented as ‘innocent and quiet suffering.’35

Heroines were made ill and exhausted from their metaphorical battles of all varieties. They were ground down by their work, exhausted in body and mind, and subject to wear and tear. For example, New Zealand suffragist Kate Sheppard’s work to make New Zealand the first country in the world to enfranchise women took its toll on her health. She also endured a number of deaths of her nearest friends and family, including the death of her only child Douglas in 1910. In the decades after the 1893 victory, she suffered exhaustion and retreated from public life. She made a comeback in 1919, only to retreat again.36 Indeed, episodes of breakdown in health were part and parcel for heroines who pushed boundaries and had the difficulty of negotiating a place in previously men-only domains. There was much opposition against forging a place for women where they were excluded. For example, Ernest Rutherford, prominent scientist and friend of Marie Curie, wrote home to his mother in New Zealand about Curie that ‘altogether she was a very pathetic figure’ because she was working too hard.37 Science was not considered the place for women to work hard.

Curie is often portrayed as run-down and unwell. Indeed, her job was hazardous. Her doctoral thesis research was on the mysterious radiation emitted by uranium. When it was finished in 1903 she was the first woman in France to gain a doctorate. Uranium had been discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel and, working hard, Marie built on his work. She discovered two new elements that were broken down from uranium – polonium, which she named after her home country, and radium. It was costly work and she was hindered by a lack of funding. Her lab was far from sophisticated, indicatively called ‘the shed.’ It was there that she worked extracting uranium from several tonnes of pitchblende residue. It was a dangerous job and involved working hands-on with hazardous materials. The new elements were 1,000 times more active than uranium.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.