10 Lessons from Clara Barton’s Life for Living and Making an Impact

Oil painting of Clara Barton by Mathilde Leisenring, 1937.

Clara Barton lived an amazing life with extraordinary accomplishments, as a group of us recently learned on a tour retracing her steps (this will be the final post in the series). But it was an unlikely, even improbable, journey. She was painfully shy, suffered from anxiety and depression, and had to endure discrimination due to her gender, marital status, and age.

Out of these challenges, she became a teacher and started the first public school in New Jersey; was among the first women appointed to government work, serving in the U.S. Patent Office; served as a Civil War nurse; opened an Office for Missing Soldiers after the war; and remained an avid suffragette and abolitionist throughout her life.

She then started the American Red Cross at the age of 59 and convinced the International Red Cross to expand their services to disaster work. Resigning at age 82, […]

2026-05-07T12:02:02-04:00June 12th, 2024|Clara Barton Tour 2024, Nursing, nursing history, Public health, volunteering|0 Comments
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Clara Barton and the Missing Soldiers Office: Meeting a Desperate Need for Information

“I was fascinated to learn the site was discovered in 1996, saved by a government worker who was preparing the site for demolition when he discovered historical documents in the attic!”

Recognizing a need for information and meeting it.

Photo credit: Cynthia Leaver

In the course of our tour following the footsteps of Clara Barton, my admiration for her courage, confidence, and strength in character—yes, fortitude is the word that comes to mind—continues to grow. A trip to the Missing Soldiers Office Museum in Washington, D.C., has only added further confirmation of Barton’s character.

Early in 1865, as the American Civil War drew to a close, over 3 million men had fought, half a million died, with almost as many wounded. From a small boarding house on 7th Street in  Washington, D.C., Clara Barton had been responding to those in need. In the course of her visits to military camps and hospitals to provide nursing care and other types of material support for the wounded, she had noticed bags of unread letters, many of them asking for any bit of information on the injury or death of a loved […]

2024-06-11T15:32:11-04:00June 11th, 2024|Clara Barton Tour 2024, Nursing|0 Comments
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‘Follow the Cannons!’: Clara Barton’s Pioneering Battlefield Nursing at Antietam

Antietam battlefield, seen from the observation tower. Photo credit: Lewis Sandy.

As it happens, this summer’s #1 best-selling book is Kristin Hannah’s The Women, which tells the story of Frankie, a young idealist nurse who volunteers to serve in Vietnam. This harrowing tale takes her fresh out of Army basic training to the Thirty Sixth Evac Hospital, where she and her fellow nurses triage the wounded, provide care for the dying, and stabilize soldiers for further treatment at other hospitals, while coming under attack.

Women at the front? The concept of battlefield triage? The idea of a “field hospital”?

All come from the Civil War, where Clara Barton became known as “the angel of the battlefield.”

Today our tour exploring the career and legacy of American Red Cross founder Clara Barton visited the Pry House Field Hospital Museum, the Antietam battlefields, and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. As a physician, I can only marvel at the advances medicine and nursing have made since then—and note (with mixed feelings) that war often brings on great innovation and […]

2024-06-07T11:31:53-04:00June 7th, 2024|Clara Barton Tour 2024, Nursing, nursing history|0 Comments
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Securing Our Place in History: Nurses and Women’s History

Editor’s note: The text below is from the editorial by Shawn Kennedy published in the March 2015 issue of AJN, “Securing Our Place in History,” and the illustration is that month’s cover image. 

Henry Street Settlement Nurse, Lower East Side, New York City

In 1980, after realizing that women were largely missing from the history books, a group of women formed the National Women’s History Project.

They embarked on a campaign to “celebrate and recognize women’s role in history” and, in 1987, were successful in getting Congress to designate the month of March as Women’s History Month.

Each year, the NWHP chooses a theme and honors women who have made significant contributions to society yet have remained unknown.

The organization also provides educational materials and acts as a clearinghouse for multicultural women’s history information. This year’s theme, “Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives,” reflects the NWHP’s tenet that “[k]nowing women’s achievements challenges stereotypes and upends social assumptions about who women are and what women can accomplish today.”

One might substitute the word nurses for women in this statement.

Most people still don’t understand all that nurses have done—and continue to do—to improve health care. Most would likely recognize the name of Florence […]

2022-03-21T09:36:44-04:00March 21st, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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Nurses Getting Things Done: A Red Cross Volunteer’s Experience

Providing support after a local disaster.

Red Cross volunteer nurse Debby Dailey hugging her client, Janetta Sconiers. Photo by Eddie Zamora for the American Red Cross

Most people are aware of the important role nurses play in the American Red Cross, from its founding by Clara Barton—138 years ago this week—to nurses’ contributions during national and regional disasters. Yet the varied work of these nurse volunteers is often unseen by other nurses, health care providers, and the public.

Within the Red Cross, nurses hold leadership, teaching, and crisis response positions, providing crucial and sometimes long-term follow-up assistance to people who’ve been affected by disasters.

Nurses “are in an ideal position to do this work.”

Debby Dailey is a nurse and former firefighter and emergency medical technician. She currently works as a nursing clinical instructor and has been a Red Cross volunteer for 40 years, responding to national disasters and playing an important role in all aspects of Red Cross work in her region, California’s Central Valley.

This month’s In the Community column, “Advocating for Janetta,” features a rare look inside a Red Cross nurse volunteer’s daily work. In it, Dailey sequentially and […]

2019-05-24T10:28:11-04:00May 24th, 2019|Nursing|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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