Clara Barton: A Centenary Tribute to the World's Greatest Humanitarian / Founder of the American Red Cross Society, Author of the American Amendment to the International Red Cross Convention of Geneva, Founder of the National First Aid Association of America

by Charles Sumner Young

LOOKING FOR A JOB—EQUAL SUFFRAGE

Among the ancients, controlling the certain affairs worthy of man, were many goddesses; of these, Venus, Ceres, Juno, Diana, Pomona, Minerva. Such man’s inherent respect for femininity that feminine names in classic days were given to temples of worship; to the continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, and later to America.[^[4]] Feminine names with few exceptions, also, have been given to all countries,—“she” and not “he,” likewise the word used to identify great things mechanical and useful. Long and hard has been the contest for woman to achieve in fact what in spirit seemingly comports with womanhood. In this contest through the last half of the nineteenth, and the first half of the twentieth, century Clara Barton was conspicuous.

[4]. In 1507, by Martin Waldseemuller, the name of America was given to the then newly discovered continent.

THE SCHOOL HOUSE
Built of brick, in 1839, where Clara Barton taught school in 1853. See page [47].

THE DESK USED BY CLARA BARTON
See page [47].

HISTORIC IN EDUCATION

Bordentown, N. J.

THE CLARA BARTON MUSEUM
The old school house reconstructed. See page [47].

Alone in the world, dependent upon her own efforts for a living and looking for a “job,” the following is what in letters Miss Barton says of herself in 1854 and 1860 respectively:

In a letter to her friend Miss Lydia F. Haskell, Washington, D. C., January 20, 1854, Clara Barton said:

“Well, I am a clerk in the United States Patent Office, writing my fingers stiff every day of my life.... The truth is, I have written nights until one or two o’clock for the last two weeks. I shall not be so very busy long. I am just now fitting the mechanical report for the press; that off my hands and I shall be quite at ease, I suppose.”

In a letter to Frank Clinton, Bordentown, New Jersey, dated January 2, 1860, Clara Barton said:

“I can teach English, French, drawing and painting.... I am a rapid writer or copyist, and have the reputation of being a very good accountant ... and if, in your travels through the South, you see an opening for me, tell me.”

As the pioneer woman in Government service Clara Barton was the object of commiseration. And only because she was a woman, she suffered through jeers and hoots and cat-calls, and tobacco smoke in her face, and slanderous whisperings in the hallways and boisterous talks about “crinoline”—all sorts of offensiveness, on the part of Government employees. Clara Barton in the public school, in the patent office, in the Civil War, in the Franco-Prussian War, in the Cuban War, in national disasters, in the presidency of the Red Cross, now filled by the President of the United States, is a series of object lessons of the greatest significance in the progress of womankind in the public service. Clara Barton the intruder among men in the patent office in 1855, and Jeannette Rankin, the honorable among men in Congress in 1918, are the exponents respectively of two conditions of American sentiment as to the public function of women in the United States.

Possibly because of her sad experience as a woman in the public service, she became one of those who, with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragettes, blazed the way to equal rights for women—equal rights now approved by the President, the United States Congress and the American people. At a meeting of the American Suffrage Association held in Washington, D. C., in language most caustic and argumentative, in part in a public address Clara Barton said:

A woman shan’t say there shall be no war—and she shan’t take any part in it when there is one; and because she doesn’t take part in the war, she must not vote; and because she can’t vote she has no voice in her Government. And because she has no voice in her Government she is not a citizen; and because she isn’t a citizen she has no rights, and because she has no rights she must submit to wrong; and because she submits to wrong she isn’t anybody. Becoming optimistic, she said, the number of thoughtful and right minded men who will approve equal suffrage are much smaller than we think and, when equal suffrage[^[5]] is an accomplished fact, all will wonder as I have done, what the objection ever was.

[5]. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution proclaimed August 26, 1920.