Nurses have been integral to the success of the American Red Cross since Clara Barton established the organization in 1881. Barton, who never married, disliked and resisted proudly the limitations placed on women in her day, as her book, The Red Cross in Peace and War, explains.
Born in 1821 and raised on a farm in North Oxford, Massachusetts, she learned how to handle guns and horses. She became a teacher while still in her teens and in 1852 established a free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey. In 1854 she moved to Washington City (now Washington, D.C.) and became a copy clerk for the U.S. Patent Office, the only government agency in Washington that hired women.
When the Civil War began in 1861, she was distressed to learn that the Union Army had made almost no medical preparations. The wounded and dead lay exposed on the battlefields while warehouses, churches, and schools were hastily converted into temporary hospitals. Barton turned her attention to helping the soldiers encamped in Washington City. Although she had no formal training in nursing, as a child she had cared daily for an older brother during his serious illness and long convalescence.
In 1861 the Union Army appointed one of Barton's contemporaries, Dorothea Dix, as superintendent of women nurses. But female nurses in the military weren't permitted to serve on the battlefield, and Barton didn't join. Instead she rallied women throughout Massachusetts to collect food, clothing, whiskey, and medical supplies, delivering them directly to soldiers on the battlefield. She began providing basic nursing care as well, to the soldiers of both armies, and her reputation as an independent battlefield nurse grew. One surgeon who served at the Battle of Antietam described her as "the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield." 1
But by 1864 the military bureaucracy had grown larger and more powerful, and independent relief workers like Barton found their services were no longer encouraged. She started helping to locate and label the graves of the nearly 13,000 Union soldiers who had died at the prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia, which would eventually be declared a national cemetery.
The International Red Cross was started in 1863 by a Swiss citizen, Henry Dunant, who'd witnessed the suffering caused by war during the War of Italian Unification, and four others. It called for the first Geneva Convention, an international meeting aimed at finding ways to make war "more humane." Twelve governments signed the original treaty, 2 which Barton described as providing for the "neutrality of all sanitary supplies, ambulances, surgeons, nurses, attendants, and sick or wounded men, and their safe conduct when they bear the sign of the organization, the Red Cross." 3 Others soon followed, with each nation founding its own independent Red Cross.
Although it had sent two delegates to the Geneva Convention, the United States did not initially sign the treaty. Barton was instrumental in achieving this, though it took years. In 1869 she went to Europe to recover from typhoid fever; while there she learned about the International Red Cross. On her return home in 1873, she mounted a prolonged campaign to get the United States to sign the treaty, and she lobbied President Rutherford B. Hayes for support for an American Red Cross. It took years, but in 1881 the American Association of the Red Cross was formed (today its official name is the American National Red Cross) and, at age 60 Clara Barton volunteered to serve as its first president. In 1882, after a visit from Barton herself, U.S. President Chester Arthur signed the Geneva Treaty. (Editor's note: in this article and in the accompanying main article, unless otherwise specified, "Red Cross" refers to the American organization.)
During peacetime, schools were established by several European Red Cross organizations to educate women in caring for the sick and wounded on the battlefield and in hospitals. These nurses were released from their civilian positions to serve during times of war. In 1893 the first and only American Red Cross school of nursing, the New York Red Cross Hospital and Training School for Red Cross Sisters was opened. 4 (The first general training program for nurses in this country was instituted at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, which opened in 1872.) Most Red Cross nurses trained for their profession in civilian hospitals, then volunteered to become Red Cross nurses, as they do today. Red Cross nurses served in military camps and hospitals during the Spanish-American War in 1898; they also cared for victims of the yellow fever epidemic and of natural disasters.
Twelve governments signed the original treaty. During World War I, more than 29,000 American Red Cross nurses served as civilian volunteers with the Army or the Navy Nurse Corps at home and overseas. Many eventually decided to join one of these corps, and as the number of regular military nurses increased, the need for Red Cross nurses in war-zone hospitals diminished. The Red Cross continued to provide nurses' aides, and during World War II the Civil Service Commission hired these aides to supplement nursing staff in military hospitals.
The Red Cross has continued recruiting and preparing nurses as unofficial reservists for service during wars or other emergencies ever since. 5
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