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 […]
