June 22

“I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons), of the jargon, namely, about the ‘rights’ of women, which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon that urges women to do nothing that men can do, merely because they are women, and should be ‘recalled to a sense of their duty as women’, and because ‘this is women’s work, and that is men’s’, and ‘these are the things that women should not do’, which is all assertion and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries. For what are they, bot of them, the one just as much as the other, but listening to the ‘what people will say’, to opinion, to the ‘voices from without’? And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without. . . . Go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

“For it is beautiful only to do the thing we are meant for.”