Tag Archives: Women’s History Month

Mary Ann Payne, MD, First Woman President of the New York Academy of Medicine

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by Judith A. Salerno, MD, MS, President

During Women’s History Month, we at the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) are celebrating the contributions and accomplishments of women in medicine and health. Dr. Mary Ann Payne (1913–2010) broke new ground as the first woman to lead NYAM, serving as its 63rd president from 1987 to 1988. She stepped in at a critical time in NYAM’s history and successfully led the restructuring of the organization to better serve the health of the public in New York City.


“Mary Ann Payne,” painted by Neill Slaughter, 2011, at the New York Academy of Medicine

Mary Ann Payne was born on August 29, 1913, and grew up in Braddock Heights, Maryland. She attended Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, and then taught high school for four years after graduation. She then went on to further her education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she received her MA and PhD in endocrinology, and finally to Cornell University Medical College where she graduated with an MD degree in 1945. Her entire medical career was spent at the college (now Weill Cornell Medicine), where she was a clinical professor of medicine and attending physician at New York Hospital.(1) Highlights of her early career included receiving the Major Arnold H. Golding Fellowship, for research on the mechanism of high blood pressure, and having an audience with Pope Pius XII in 1947.(2) Payne rose to become a member of the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell. She also spent time working with the Communicable Disease Center, caring for members of the Navajo and Hopi tribes with hepatitis and treating tuberculosis among Alaska Natives.(3)

Payne became a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1953 and served as a member of its Committee on Medical Education, vice president, and trustee. In 1987 she assumed the presidency as the first woman to hold that office. Hers was the third-to-last presidency under NYAM’s former structure.(4) Since 1847, the presidency had been a two-year honorary position. The incumbent was a Fellow and chiefly worked with other Fellows. By the early 20th century, NYAM staff reported to an executive director, and William Stubing had taken on that role in 1986. In the words of the official history, upon his hire he “visited a number of Foundation executives to discuss the potential of the Academy as an institution that could make a positive contribution towards alleviating health problems in the City. He was quite candid in his approach to these individuals, indicating the Academy had great potential that was not being achieved primarily due to its financial constraints.”(5) The trustees, the NYAM governing body responsible for fiscal affairs, led by Dr. Payne, secured the services of an outside consultant, Cambridge Associates, Inc., to review the organization’s finances. Its report recommended a series of reforms, which Payne and the trustees accepted in October 1987—a scant 10 days after Black Monday, when the stock market suffered a 25% drop in its value! NYAM’s financial reforms only pointed to a deeper problem within its structure, however. The same day that the trustees accepted the financial report, Payne reported to the Council—the NYAM governing body that oversaw its medical and public health activities—that “in her judgment, the Academy’s existing resources were insufficient to support its present program.”(6) Change was needed.

The Council set up a Committee on Strategic Planning with Payne as chair, tasked to “examine and redefine the Academy’s mission; review existing programs, consider new initiatives and establish new priorities.”(7) Everything was on the table! Cambridge Associates was reengaged to assist in this broader reassessment and provided a sobering report to the Council in March 1989. Addressing a lack of clear management structure, the report called for significant changes, most significantly establishing a full-time president with overall authority for the Academy and significantly reducing the large number of committees that had a hand in governance. The dual structure of a Council and a Board of Trustees would be eliminated, retaining just the Board. Although Payne’s presidential term had ended three months earlier, she continued to lead the process as chair of the Committee on Strategic Planning. Throughout 1989 the Fellows debated the proposals; they were overwhelmingly adopted at a special meeting on August 7, 1989. On July 1, 1990, Dr. Jeremiah A. Barondess took office under the new structure as the first full-time president of the New York Academy of Medicine.(8)


“Mary Ann Payne, M.D.” undated, published when she received the Academy Plaque in 1991. (“Academy Plaque,” 635.)

Mary Ann Payne retired in the late 1970s or 1980s—the date is not clear—while retaining attending privileges at New York Hospital. In retirement she undertook voyages to the Antarctic and Tierra del Fuego to help band penguins as a volunteer for the American Museum of Natural History.(9) NYAM honored her contributions with the Academy Plaque in 1991. At his presentation speech, Dr. Martin Cherkasky, former chair of the Board of Trustees, noted that “the very fact that she was able to overcome the conservatism of this body in matters of leadership indicates what a powerful, impressive figure she is.”(10) In 1998 Payne moved to a retirement home in Ithaca, New York, where she died on March 24, 2010.

_____

Notes

1. Obituary; “Academy Plaque.”

2. “Gets Golding Fellowship”; “Catholic Information from Abroad.”

3. Obituary.

4. Lieberman and Warshaw, 252.

5. Lieberman and Warshaw, 253.

6. Lieberman and Warshaw, 255.

7. Lieberman and Warshaw, 256.

8. Lieberman and Warshaw, 263–64, 272.

9. “Academy Plaque,” 636.

10. “Academy Plaque,” 634.

References

“Catholic Information from Abroad,” The Catholic Herald, 18 July 1947, p. 8: http://archive-uat.catholicherald.co.uk/article/18th-july-1947/8/catholic-information-from-abroad

“Gets Golding Fellowship for Medical Research: Mary Ann Payne,” The New York Times, January 9, 1949, p. 30: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1949/01/07/84186377.html?pageNumber=30

Martin Cherkasky, MD, “Presentation of the Academy Plaque to Mary Ann Payne, M.D.,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 67 (Nov–Dec 1991): 634–37: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1809858/pdf/bullnyacadmed00011-0130.pdf

Marvin Lieberman and Leon J. Warshaw, The New York Academy of Medicine, 1947–1997: Enhancing the Health of the Public (Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 1998).

“Mary Ann Payne, M.D.” Obituary, The Miami Herald, via Legacy.com: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/herald/obituary.aspx?n=mary-ann-payne&pid=143125822

Janet Doe, NYAM’s First Woman Library Director

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By Paul Theerman, Director

Janet Doe (1895–1985) spent 30 years with the New York Academy of Medicine, from the opening of its new building in 1926 until her retirement in 1956. In retirement she continued to shape the profession, as consultant and expert. Her contributions to medical librarianship led to her being honored through the establishment in 1966 of the Medical Library Association’s most prestigious lecture, the Janet Doe Lecture, for “unique perspectives on the history or philosophy of medical librarianship.”1

Janet Doe, circa 1949.

Doe came to library work right after World War I. A 1917 Wellesley graduate in science, she entered a nursing training program at Vassar, followed by clinical training at Presbyterian Hospital, where she attended the rush of influenza patients.2 At the same time she took up work as an untrained aide at the New York Public Library. After a knee injury cut short her fledgling nursing career, she moved full time to the NYPL library school. With formal training in librarianship and a background in medicine, she was recruited in 1923 to the library of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University). Three years later, she moved to NYAM as head of periodicals; in 1929 she was appointed Assistant Librarian, and upon Archibald Malloch’s retirement in 1949 she became Librarian, as the director’s title was then known. Doe held this position for the next seven years, until her own retirement in 1956. Looking back on her tenure as the first woman to lead the Academy Library, she reported “no special difficulties whatever” because of her gender.3

During her 30-year tenure at the Academy, Doe saw many changes. She began soon after the Academy’s new building opened in 1926, and she was here when the extension to that building was constructed in 1933, with new stacks and offices and its jewel, the Rare Book Room. As head of periodicals and carrying on into her supervisory roles, she oversaw the main work of the Library: meeting the information needs of physicians.4 The Library met these needs chiefly through its extensive medical journal holdings, maintaining subscriptions to some 2,500 titles and welcoming anyone, not just Academy Fellows, to use them.5 All along, the Library continued to add contemporary medical books and reports, building up a “comprehensive research collection . . . its most important contribution.”6 The Library continued to add to the historical collections as well. It purchased the Edward Clark Streeter Collection of rare books in 1928; the Margaret Barclay Wilson collection on food and cookery came by donation in 1929; and the John Greenwood collection, including George Washington’s dentures, came to the Library in 1937.7

In many ways, Doe’s tenure was the last where the Library—indeed, any research library—functioned as essentially a stand-alone institution. Users came to the books; the books—or the information contained therein—did not come to them. Still in the future was the large-scale national and international sharing of information and resources that automation and then the internet made possible. Above all, the country lacked a truly national medical library with coordinating responsibilities for all medical literature. These developments came about after Janet Doe retired. Part of her story is how she helped to them to be realized, through raising the skills of librarians and supporting newer medical libraries, and by helping to establish the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

A great impetus came from the significant expansion of medical libraries that she saw during her career. Some were medical school libraries; many were hospital libraries. Of the latter, Doe reported that “[they] were poor; they had mostly untrained librarians and were only perhaps open half time.”8 As president of MLA in 1949 she shepherded through a certification program for medical librarians as a way of raising the skills and capacities of the profession. While MLA’s continuing education courses helped train a new generation of specialized medical librarians, this was not enough. To supplement those courses in 1942 she developed the Handbook of medical library practice,9 for which she served as editor, as well as co-editor of the 1956 second edition. Doe also supported new medical school libraries. In 1949 she facilitated the donation of 12,000 duplicate medical books and journals to the library of Southwestern Medical College in Dallas, Texas, founded just a few years previously.10

Janet Doe is far right in this photograph of Honorary Consultants to the Army Medical Library, from Betsy L. Humphreys’s Janet Doe Lecture: “Adjusting to progress: interactions between the National Library of Medicine and health sciences librarians, 1961–2001.”

Doe was also instrumental in establishing the Army Medical Library as the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Starting in 1944, she was one of the “surveyors” of the Army Medical Library, leading to The National Medical Library, Report of a Survey of the Army Medical Library.11 This work guided reform at that library and began the campaign to transform it into a national medical library; Doe remained active as a consultant. On April 10, 1956, in her last public appearance before her retirement, Doe testified before Congress on behalf of a bill to establish NLM, and later she worked to secure its grant-making authority.12

Three of Janet Doe’s publications deserve further mention: the Bibliography of the works of Ambroise Paré 13 was her foray into classic bibliography; in a 1953 article, “Opportunities for women in medicine: medical librarianship,”14 she both acknowledged that most medical librarians were women and saw that field as a path for career development; and, in a work done after her retirement to Katonah, New York, a village in northern Westchester County, “The Development of Medical Practice in Bedford Township, New York, Particularly in the Area of Katonah,”15 she provided a survey from colonial times to the present. Doe died in 1985, at the age of 90.

Notes

All links current as of March 10, 2021.

1For a précis of Doe’s career and significant publications, please see the Medical Library Association’s “Doe, Janet,” https://www.mlanet.org/blog/doe,-janet, and for a summary of her MLA oral history, “Doe, Janet (AHIP, FMLA),” https://www.mlanet.org/p/bl/et/blogid=52&blogaid=333. The language describing the Janet Doe Lecture is from https://www.mlanet.org/p/cm/ld/fid=26.

2Pat L. Walter, “A small window on Janet Doe’s life,” Bull Med Libr Assoc. 2001 Jan; 89(1): 83. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC31711/.

3“MLA Oral History Committee Interview with Janet Doe,” Medical Library Association Oral History Program, interview by Estelle Brodman, July 20, 1977; approved August 19, 1977; https://catalog.nyam.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=30365

4“The library exists first and foremost for the physicians, their needs are what it is designed to meet, and towards which its major energies are spent.” Janet Doe, “The Library of the Academy of Medicine,” November 15, 1951, talk and broadcast. On November 15, 1951, Doe spoke to a group of physicians in the Academy lecture series “For Doctors Only.” The talk was eventually broadcast on WNYC, the city’s publicly owned station, and NYPR Archives has digitized it: https://www.wnyc.org/story/the-library-of-the-academy-of-medicine/.

5Journals form the bulk of the Library’s collections, and the Library’s catalog contains bibliographical entries for over 22,000 journal titles. The figure of 2,500 active journal subscriptions comes from Doe’s talk on November 15, 1951. Since 1878, the Academy Library has been open to the public.

6Doe, “The Library of the Academy of Medicine”: “This last function, that of the comprehensive research collection, is for certain, its most important contribution. There are many other working medical libraries in New York City, some 60 or so at least, for every live medical institution of any size must have a library of sorts. But the broadly based reference library possessing the seldom called for, but occasionally indispensable report is a necessity for a research center such as New York has become.”

7For Library history highlights, please see the Library Timeline.

8Here and below the content is from “MLA Oral History Committee Interview with Janet Doe.”

9Janet Doe, ed. Handbook of medical library practice (Chicago: American Library Association, 1942).

10“Medical News,” JAMA 1949 Nov 19; 141(12): 854.

11Keyes D. Metcalf, Janet Doe, Thomas P. Fleming, et al., The National medical library; report of a survey of the Army Medical Library, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and made under the auspices of the American Library Association (Chicago: American Library Association, 1944).

12“MLA Oral History Committee Interview with Janet Doe”; Kent A. Smith, “Laws, leaders, and legends of the modern National Library of Medicine,” J Med Libr Assoc. 2008 Apr; 96(2): 121–133.

13Janet Doe, Bibliography of the works of Ambroise Paré: premier chirurgien & conseiller du roy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1937).

14Idem, “Opportunities for women in medicine: medical librarianship,” J Am Med Women’s Assoc. 1953 Dec; 8(12):414-6.

15Idem, “The Development of Medical Practice in Bedford Township, New York, Particularly in the Area of Katonah,” Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1961 Jan; 49(1 Pt 1): 1–23.

Women’s Work in “Behind the Scenes in a Restaurant”

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By Carrie Levinson, Reference Services and Outreach Librarian

We tend to take labor laws for granted nowadays. There are limits in many jobs to how many hours one can work, minimum wage determinations, and other protections for those in the workforce. However, this was not always the case, particularly for certain kinds of workers. In the early twentieth century, for example, these laws had nothing to say about women in many professions, such as those working in restaurants. This resulted in long, grueling hours for many women, without respite or protection from exploitation.

Eight hours of work versus fifteen for restaurant workers

Fig. 1. Diagrams showing the normal working day versus a restaurant worker’s day. Consumers’ League of New York City (1916). Behind the scenes in a restaurant: A study of 1017 women restaurant employees. New York, NY: Author.

The Consumers’ League of New York City was alarmed by this, and decided to conduct a study, which turned into the pamphlet “Behind the Scenes in a Restaurant: A Study of 1017 Women Restaurant Employees.” The study had three aims: to find out the actual labor conditions in New York State restaurants; to determine whether these labor conditions led to a “wholesome, normal life” for the workers in these restaurants; and to see how these conditions impacted society as a whole (1916, pp. 3-4).

One thousand seventeen women were surveyed for this over the course of five months, in different locations such as their homes, their workplaces, and employment agencies. In New York City, all the interviews were given at the Occupational Clinic of the Board of Health (Consumers’ League of New York City, 1916, p. 3).  The workers came from all types of restaurants, allowing the League to get a representative sample of participants. Women of all ages were asked, as well as women of different nationalities (though women of color were noticeably absent). The largest group interviewed here was “Austro-Hungarian” (39%), followed by “American” (presumably meaning non-immigrants) (33%), German (8%), Irish (7%), Russian (4%), “Other”, (4%), English & Canadian (3%), and Polish (3%). While there is clearly an effort to be inclusive, there is still racist/ethnicist ideology that creeps in:

The largest single group is made up of Austro-Hungarians. The demand for cheap, unskilled labor in this occupation calls for the kind of service which these girls and others of the European peasant class can give. The outdoor life in the fields of their native land fits them for the hard labor required in a restaurant kitchen (Consumers’ League of New York City, 1916, p. 8).

Despite this language, the League was extremely concerned over the exploitation of these workers, noting that many worked 15-hour days (Fig. 1). Seventy-eight percent of workers exceeded a 54-hour week (Fig. 2), which was prohibited for women who worked in stores and factories. One of the participants, a 20-year old woman, worked 122 hours a week (Consumers’ League of New York City, 1916, p. 13)!

Consumers_BehindtheScenesinaRestaurant_1916_diag5_watermark

Fig. 2. Weekly hours of labor of women employed in restaurants. Behind the scenes in a restaurant… (1916).

The long hours (Fig. 3) were not the only thing this report examined. Other issues included tipping, irregularity of work, and the low wages earned by many in the profession. Such practices prevented these women from having regular social or family lives and had deleterious effects on their health.

The Consumers’ League argued that because of these conditions, a regular working day for restaurant workers was “not only reasonable, but…essential to the best welfare of their people as a whole” (1916, p. 28). They recommended a legislative amendment under the already-existing Mercantile Law.

Consumers_BehindtheScenesinaRestaurant_1916_movie_watermark

Fig. 3. A movie of the restaurant worker. Behind the scenes in a restaurant… (1916).

Did restaurant workers in New York State get the protections they so desperately needed after this report was published? Not immediately. By 1933, a New York law limiting the amount of hours women could work was passed, but then it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1936. Women restaurant workers had to wait until the federal Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938 to have the right to a minimum wage and overtime (Hart, 1994).

Although it did not instantly better the situations of women working in restaurant positions, this report and others like it raised awareness of what it was like to be working in these conditions, and they remain as a testament to those who toiled for long hours to clean, prepare, and serve food to so many others.

This book and other recent acquisitions will be on display and available for “adoption” at the Celebration of the Library night, also featuring a lecture by New Yorker author John Colapinto. Join us on April 11th at the Academy!

References

Consumers’ League of New York City (1916). Behind the scenes in a restaurant: A study of 1017 women restaurant employees. New York, NY: Author.

Hart, V. (1994). Bound by our Constitution: Women, workers and the minimum wage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Women’s Courage: Clara Barton in Peace and War

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By Paul Theerman, Associate Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, February 15, 1898, Clara Barton was within earshot:

The . . . work of that fifteenth day of February held [us] busy at our writing tables until late at night. The house had grown still; the noises on the street were dying away, when suddenly the table shook from under our hands, the great glass door opening the veranda, facing the sea, flew open; everything in the room was in motion or out of place—the deafening roar of such a burst of thunder as perhaps one never heard before, and off to the right, out over the bay, the air was filled with a blaze of light, and this in turn filled with black specks like huge spectres flying in all directions. . . . A few hours later came the terrible news of the “Maine.”1

Clare Barton. From The Red Cross in Peace and War, 1899.

Clare Barton. From The Red Cross in Peace and War, 1899. Click to enlarge.

Barton (1821–1912) was doing what she did best: ministering in the midst of catastrophe, bringing aid and comfort, “always going where suffering humanity most needed her.”2 The list of her engagements is a roll call of later 19th-century history. In addition to Cuba (1898) were the battles of Second Bull Run and Antietam (1862), the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the Johnstown Flood (1889), Russian famine relief (1892), the Armenian massacres (1895–1896), and the Galveston hurricane (1900), among others. What better time to remember her achievements than Women’s History Month and Red Cross Month?

During her extended stay in Europe from 1869–1873, she became acquainted with the Red Cross movement, which she brought back to the United States and formalized with a charter for the American Red Cross in 1881. Yet although she headed this organization until 1904, she remained in the field from her early 40s until she was almost 80.

Humanitarian work brought her to Cuba. Spanish policy established camps to control the discontented rural Cuban population beginning in 1895. These turned into disastrous places of human suffering, and in January 1898 President William McKinley formed a President’s Committee for Human Relief (also known as the Central Cuban Relief Committee) for the camp sufferers, or reconcentrados. The Committee included a Red Cross representative, Barton’s nephew, Stephen E. Barton. By shedding this duty, Clara was free to go to Cuba, to enter the field, in her words, “simply as a willing assistant . . . an individual helper in a work already assigned.”1 She was anything but! Barton was on the ground in Havana assessing the situation starting February 9. As part of her fact-finding mission, two days before the explosion of the Maine, she lunched aboard the ship with its captain.2 On the day after the explosion, she wired McKinley, “I am with the wounded”—as indeed she was.2

"I am with the Wounded." Originally printed in The Christian Herald and reprinted in The Red Cross at in Peace and War. Click to enlarge.

“I am with the wounded.” Originally printed in The Christian Herald and reprinted in The Red Cross in Peace and War. Click to enlarge.

Though she was devoted to impartially aiding human suffering, Barton’s efforts in Cuba got swept into the maelstrom of politics. Spanish authorities resisted her investigations, and her reports of the reconcentrados’ suffering helped push the United States into war. Her relief efforts were then caught up by that war: back from Cuba by March, she tried to return on April 25 with relief supplies, but war had been declared two days before. Her ship, the State of Texas, was held at Tampa; providing food and medicine to Cuba was the last thing that the belligerent American government now wanted.

A photo montage of Barton's return to Cuba and time on the ship The State of Texas. From The Red Cross in Peace nad War. Click to enlarge.

A photomontage of Barton’s return to Cuba and time on the ship the State of Texas. From The Red Cross in Peace and War. Click to enlarge.

Barton with Keenan, a close-up from the State of Texas montage.

Barton with Keenan, a close-up from the State of Texas photomontage. Click to enlarge.

Only on June 20 did the ship follow the American fleet as it set out to engage the Spanish, and only in mid-July did it enter Santiago harbor, leading the American flotilla, with Barton “standing on the forward deck, . . . queenly and majestic.”2 She pushed to get her nurses access to the war wounded on both sides, organized relief aid delivery to Santiago, and established soup kitchens, clinics, and orphanages. As journalist George Kennan observed: “I did not happen to see any United States quartermaster in Cuba who, in the short space of five days, had unloaded and stored fourteen hundred tons of cargo, given hot soup daily to ten thousand soldiers, and supplied an army of thirty-two thousand men with ten days rations. It is a record, I think, of which Miss Barton had every reason to be proud.”2

"A Group of Red Cross Sisters." Photo taken by Barton and published in The Red Cross in Peace and War. Click to enlarge.

“A group of Red Cross sisters.” Photo taken by Barton and published in The Red Cross in Peace and War. Click to enlarge.

By all accounts Barton was both a master logistician and a compassionate presence in the face of human suffering. Doing so—being so—was a point of pride and identity for her, the touchstone of her feminism. This was shown even some six years before Cuba. Barton gave voice to “women’s ministering presence” in a poem, “The Women Who Went to the Field.” Composed for a November 18, 1892 Washington banquet of the Woman’s Relief Corps (an auxiliary group of the Civil War veterans organization, the Grand Army of the Republic), Barton celebrated the female battlefield nurses of America’s terrible war. Indeed, being at the battlefield was the point, as she lifted up an ideal of women’s courage, while caustically calling into question common assumptions about women and battle:

The women who went to the field, you say,
The women who went to the field; and pray
What did they go for? Just to be in the way!
They would scream at the sight of a gun, don’t you see?
…
They might pick some lint, and tear up some sheets,
And make us some jellies, and send on their sweets,
And knit some soft socks for Uncle Sam’s shoes,
And write us some letters, and tell us the news.
And thus it was settled by common consent,
That husbands, or brothers, or whoever went,
That the place for the women was in their own homes,
There to patiently wait until victory comes.

But the Civil War experience put the lie to these assumptions:

But later, it chanced, just how no one knew,
That the lines slipped a bit, and some ’gan to crowd through;
And they went,—where did they go?—Ah! where did they not?
Show us the battle,—the field,—or the spot
Where the groans of the wounded rang out on the air
That her ear caught it not, and her hand was not there;
…

What was women’s role in battle?

And these were the women who went to the war:
The women of question; what did they go for?
Because in their hearts God had planted the seed
Of pity for woe, and help for its need;
They saw, in high purpose, a duty to do,
And the armor of right broke the barriers through.
Uninvited, unaided, unsanctioned ofttimes,
With pass, or without it, they pressed on the lines;
They pressed, they implored, till they ran the lines through,
And that was the “running” the men saw them do.
…

That is, women ran into battle, not away!

And then she tied women’s courage to the Red Cross movement:

And what would they do if war came again?
The scarlet cross floats where all was blank then.
They would bind on their “brassards” and march to the fray,
And the man liveth not who could say to them nay;
They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then,—
The nurses, consolers, and saviors of men.2,3

Hers was a noble vision, founded on the battlefields of Bull Run and Antietam. Barton found a nursing and consoling role for women at those battlefields. She also found a logistical role for women in relief organizations, but for her, the presence of women in battle—her own presence in battle—remained defining. That presence was contentious in her time; today, the debate continues over whether to draw the line between men’s and women’s roles in battle. Yet one wonders, with Barton, whether the issue of women’s courage lies at the bottom of this debate.

References

1. Barton, C. (1899). The Red Cross in peace and war. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/cu31924074466842.

2. Pryor, E. B. (1987). Clara Barton: Professional angel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

3. U.S. National Park Service. (n.d.). The Women Who Went to the Field – Clara Barton National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service). Retrieved March 11, 2014, from http://www.nps.gov/clba/historyculture/fieldpoem.htm.