Kickass Women in History: Edith Cavell

This month in Kickass Women, it’s time to examine the life of Edith Cavell, a nurse who was famously executed by the Germans in WWI and who turned into a symbol of English heroism.

Edith Cavell was born into a very conventional village family near Norwich, England, in 1865. Her father was a vicar, and her family seems to have been strict but loving.

Her first job was as a governess for a family in Brussels. Edith had limited choices regarding a profession. She could teach, she could be a governess, she could be a companion to an older woman, or she could marry. Edith does not seem to have had any suitors or to have considered marriage seriously. However, after the Crimean War, a new profession opened up – nursing.

Prior to the Crimean War and the efforts of Florence Nightingale to reform the nursing profession, nursing was not considered to be a desirable or a respectable job. However, by the time Edith was ready to move on from being a governess, nursing had become considered a noble vocation for a woman. Nightingale had established schools of nursing throughout England that emphasized cleanliness, prevention of contagion from one patent to the other, compassionate care for the sick, and high standards of behavior from nurses, both on and off the job.

Edith worked in several hospitals and private positions in England. She worked with new mothers, amputees, and fever patients. She knew how to feed a newborn baby and she knew how to lay out the dead. Edith seems to have been a person who craved order, structure, and a sense of humanitarian purpose, and nursing gave her those things as well as a sense of community with her fellow nurses, although she had few close friends.

In 1907, Edith agreed to head a nursing school in Brussels. This was a huge challenge. Her goal was to extend the English ideals of nursing to Belgium, which had not yet adopted them in the kind of scope seen in England. She had a hard time finding pupils, because respectable parents did not want their daughters to be nurses. The hospital in which they worked and learned was impractical. There were language barriers. Still, by the time WWI rolled around, the school was doing well and Edith was justifiably proud of her work.

Edith was very strict and avoided becoming too close to the students, who all lived together in a combination boarding house, school, and hospital. However, she had a tendency to take in stray pets and lost people. At the request of a local chaplain, she became the godmother of a thirteen-year-old runaway, Pauline Randall. Pauline became Edith’s maid, and Edith paid for her education and took her with her when she went on vacations. Edith also gave permanent care to a woman named Grace Jemmett who was addicted to morphine and suffered from mental illness (possibly bi-polar disorder).

In 1910, Edith rescued a dog, Jack, who followed her everywhere. Jack hated all people except for Edith. He must have also had strong herding instincts, because when it was time for the nurses to line up and proceed down the hall for bed, he would follow them and nip their ankles if they walked too slowly. Needless to say, the student nurses were not as fond of Jack as Edith was.

In one of those cruel-in-retrospect moments of history, Edith was in England when war was declared (she was visiting her mother). Being Edith, she rushed back to Brussels where she remained even as the Germans invaded. Edith was well known for treating soldiers of different nationalities and alliances with equal care.

She was eventually caught and executed by the Germans in 1915 for helping English, Belgian, and French soldiers and civilians escape to the Netherlands. She did this work as part of a large network of a great many kickass men and women, including some of her fellow nurses, the Princess de Croy, Jeanne de Belleville, and Louise Thuliez (who were imprisoned with Edith), and Philippe Baucq (who was executed along with Edith). No one knows how many people Edith had a hand in saving, but the number seems to be around 200 at the very least.

After Edith’s death, she became a propaganda figure for the Allies in a manner that she probably would have vehemently disliked. As a 49-year-old woman in a “motherly” profession with no sexual ties, she was the anti-Mata Hari. Mata Hari, who was executed by the French for espionage in 1917, was the epitome of the spy as a sexual serpent of deception (she was also probably innocent). Edith Cavell could be presented as sexless, selfless, and saintly, thinking only of others (although she was also guilty of at least some of the things she was accused of). Her story also reinforced the image of German barbarity that was so important to WWI Allied propaganda at the time. These two women epitomized British, French, and American attitudes towards the spies of the enemy and their own women of resistance.

Edith was not a saintly person; in fact many people found her to be very annoying. She was also not jingoistic. Her most famous quote is “Patriotism is not enough,” but the full quote is “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” She saw her attempts to get soldiers out of Belgium less as an act of patriotism and more as an extension of her nursing work. People needed saving, so she saved them. If that meant changing their sheets and giving them a bath, then she did that. If it meant hiding them in a shed and spiriting them out of the country, then she did that instead.

I know you are all thinking, “What happened to Edith’s dog after she died?” I am pleased to say that Cavell’s biographer, Diana Souhami, devotes considerable space to this question. At first, Jack was kept at Edith’s nursing school, but no one could manage him. He snapped at everyone and howled constantly. Finally the Dowager Duchess (mother of the Princess de Croy) offered to take him in. His first move upon arriving at her home was to bite her and to bite the kennel maid as well, but luckily for Jack, the Dowager and kennel staff were understanding and devoted a great deal of time to winning him over. Eventually he settled in and got along well with the people and animals of the château, where he lived out the rest of a long life. The Dowager Duchess described him as “as good and gentle as any other dog. He was most attached and loving. But he remained dangerous to strangers.”

My source for this post is the biography Edith Cavell, by Diana Souhami. Souhami describes the exterior details of Edith’s life in great detail. She provides a lot of information about Edith’s war work and the trial that followed her arrest. The chapters about the routines of nursing in England are particularly interesting. However, Souhami struggles to convey Edith’s inner life, because Edith didn’t share her inner life with anyone. Edith was an extraordinarily private person. Some people adored her and others found her cold and unapproachable. Nursing was not her job, it was her vocation, and she seems to have taken to it with complete devotion. If she was ever in love, she kept it a secret. If she ever wished for marriage or children, she kept quiet about it.

However, we do know that Edith cared, passionately, about her work. Her last letters were full of concern for Grace, Pauline, her mother, and Jack. She was also concerned with the details of the school and with making sure it could continue to run in her absence. Her letters aren’t about how she hoped the Allies would win the war. They are about making sure the dusting gets done “by ten,” reminding the nurses to study for their exams, and requesting that some money owed to her be used to buy a new clock for the school hallway. Edith was not a person who ran around yelling, “God Save the King,” nor was she a woman who was super warm and fuzzy. Instead, she was organized, efficient, and laser-guided on a single goal. There are many memorials to Edith, inscribed with phrases such as “Martyr” and “Angel.” But they might more accurately read: “Edith Cavell: A Woman Who Got Shit Done.”