Florence Nightingale's 1850 essay entitled “Cassandra” has received an immense amount of scholarship.
It's about the absurdity, horror, evil, and counterproductiveness of trying to exclude women from full life, which I believe basically to be a form of mass murder.
The essay is concentrated, passionate, deeply insightful and intelligent, and based on experience.
The version which I have just read is about thirty pages long, from The Feminist Press. Strangely, I have been able to find only a very few brief excerpts and abridgments online, even though it was written in 1850.
I think that this essay contains all the essentials of the problem, the problem of the devaluation and exclusion of women, the problem which I think is the most fundamental, important, problem in the world.
Here is just one short passage that struck me strongly:
We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of
souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the
schoolmaster. The governess is to have every one of God's gifts; she
is to do that which the mother herself is incapable of doing; but our
son must not degrade himself by marrying the governess, nor our
daughter the tutor, although she might marry the medical man.
But my medical man does do something for me, it is said, my
tutor has done nothing.
This is true, this is the real reason. And what a condemnation
of mental science it is! Low as is physical science, that of the mind
is still lower.
Women long for an education to teach them to teach, to
teach them the laws of the human mind and how to apply them - and
knowing how imperfect, in the present state of the world, such an
education must be, they long for experience, not patch-work
experience, but experience followed up and systematized, to enable
them to know what they are about and where they are “casting
their bread” and whether it is “bread” or a stone. (p.
39)
