Miss Nightingale was at this period a pioneer of her sex and a decidedly “advanced” woman, but the desire for freedom of action was tempered by a naturally well-balanced nature. She put forward the plea on women’s behalf that they should be encouraged to seek occupation and properly trained for their work. In _Kaiserswerth_ she deals more particularly with the vocation of a nurse or deaconess, but as a prelude to the little work she refers to the position of women in her own century. There is “an old legend,” she writes, “that the nineteenth century is to be the century of women,” but she thinks that up to the present (1851) it has not been theirs. She magnanimously exempts man from blame. The fault, has not been his, for “in no country has woman been given such freedom to cultivate her powers” as in England. “She [woman] is no longer called pedantic if her powers appear in conversation. The authoress is courted not shunned.” Women, she thinks, have made extraordinary intellectual development, but as human beings cannot move two feet at once, except they jump, so while the intellectual foot of woman has made a step in advance, the practical foot has remained behind. “Woman,” says Miss Nightingale, “stands askew. Her education for action has not kept pace with her education for acquirement. The woman of the eighteenth century was perhaps happier, when practice and theory were on a par, than her more cultivated sister of the nineteenth century. The latter wishes, but does not know how to do many things! The former, what she wished at least _that_ she could do.” It appears that when Miss Nightingale was a young woman, the fashion for extolling the single girl as against her sister who had entered the bonds of matrimony was coming into vogue, but on this point our heroine was racily sincere. “It has become of late the fashion,” she says, “to cry up ‘old maids,’ to inveigh against regarding marriage as the vocation of all women, to declare that a single life is as happy as a married one, if people would but think so. So is the air as good an element for fish as the water, if they did but know how to live in it. Show us _how_ to be single and we will agree. But hitherto we have not found that young Englishwomen have been convinced. And we must confess that, _in the present state of things_, their horror of being ‘old maids’ seems justified ... a life without love, and an activity without an aim, is horrible in idea and wearisome in reality.” Miss Nightingale does not touch on the point that the disparity between the numbers of the sexes makes singleness not a choice but a necessity to many women, and that in the interests of those who must remain unwed, training for a definite calling in life should be given to girls as well as to boys.