There is an individuality of dress, as of conduct. Clara Barton had individuality. There has been no one else like her, and a famous American woman says we shall never again produce her like. In religion she adhered to no creed; in social life, to no rules; in wearing apparel, to no fashion. In service to the world she wished for something to do that no one else would do—something that no one else thought of doing. “Clara Barton was Clara Barton,” individual even in her wearing apparel. The first straw bonnet she ever had she made herself. She cut the green rye; she scalded it; she bleached it in the sun; she cut it into lengths; with her teeth she split the straws into strands, flattening them. She braided the bonnet by the use of eleven strands; she fashioned it to suit herself; she wore it; it was Clara’s individual bonnet, and at 86 years of age she regarded it the great achievement of her life.
When advised by a clerk in a store that a woman of her age should wear lavenders and violets, Clara Barton turned to her shopping companion and said, “I guess she doesn’t know I wear what I want to.” While on the lecture platform, to a limited extent, she conformed to custom and wore trains. On a certain occasion, looking her over from head to feet, an obtrusive flatterer said to her “How stunning!” Floating on a breeze several degrees below zero came from Miss Barton’s lips “What did you say!” Nor would she gossip about the dress of others. Says Goethe: The “highest fortune of earth’s children is personality.” Characteristic of her observations on personality rather than of dress, on an occasion when she was a special guest of honor, she thus writes of her hostess: “I want you to know what a beautiful, bright lady I think Mrs. President Hayes to be. She is brilliant and beautiful, brunette with abundant jet black hair, put back over her ears;—she is entirely different from the Grand Duchess of Baden, and still bright and full of life, like her.”
Every human being dresses for effect, as does the actress before the footlights—the greater the intelligence the greater the discrimination. Clara Barton was the designer of her own fashions, the mistress of her own stitches. In the use of one of her stitches, she taught the women of Corsica to do more work in one hour than previously they had done in five hours. She found forty thousand people in despair, ill clothed. In her “dress-making shop,” she taught large classes of girls to sew. Daily, with these poor girls,
Plying her needle and thread,—
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
she left those people the best clothed people in Europe.
Clara Barton was as proud of her skill with the needle as was Lucretia with the spinning wheel, or Florence Nightingale in the art of nursing. In a western town a lady was discredited, and shunned, because she had been a sewing girl. Appreciating the situation, and ambitious socially, she made her home the center of fashionable sewing circles. She taught fancy crochet, and embroidery stitches; in a very short time she had the aristocratic women at her feet, and became the social leader.
The bright little needle, the swift-flying needle,
The needle directed by beauty and art.
Clara Barton’s apparel was her personal care, and not the care of a modiste. While in charge of relief work on a field of disaster, she said I have no clothing, and couldn’t attend to it if I had.” She fully appreciated also that “rags are royal raiment when worn for virtue’s sake.” She would sew on her own buttons, mend, clean, stitch and hemstitch, make and remake, her own clothes,—not only as a matter of economy but as a matter of personal pride.