The Clara Barton Museum Blog

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Posts Tagged ‘Women’s History’


Washington, D.C.’s ‘Working Girls’

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Step into Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office for a discussion about D.C.’s 19th century working women: from government clerks to prostitutes.



Harriet Jacobs

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Born a slave, Harriet Jacobs became an unstoppable truth teller, activist, and reformer.


Weeping No More

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Photograph of the Pension Office, now the National Building Museum, courtesy of the LOC

Southern black women artfully navigated the U.S. pension bureaucracy to gain recognition as Union widows.


“Ready for Mischief”

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Medical kit used by Dr. Mary Walker. Courtesy of the National Museum of Health and Medicine

Dr. Mary E. Walker of New York embarked on a crusade to become a surgeon in the Union Army.



Cornelia Hancock

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Photo of Cornelia Hancock

Largely forgotten today, Cornelia Hancock was one of the best known and beloved nurses of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.  Throughout the war, from the Battle of Gettysburg to Appomattox, she maintained a long association with the 14th Connecticut Volunteers through her work in 2nd and 3rd Corps […]



Washington DC’s Working Girls

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A political cartoon from 1869 depicts the new Secretary of the Treasury opening a door to find a bunch of female employees doing anything but working.

Learn about the 19th century’s working girls: those in the workplace for the first time, and those working in the world’s oldest profession.


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