Barton was in her mid-30s when she came to Washington in 1854, taking a job at the U.S. Patent Office. She started as a copyist — copying documents by hand — but was quickly promoted to clerk, becoming the first woman to receive a government appointment, according to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. She made $1,400 a year, the same as the male clerks.
But then the patent commissioner who had promoted her left, and his replacement was hostile to the idea of women in the workplace. He was also being pressured by Interior Secretary Robert McClelland to get rid of all female federal workers.
First, she was demoted back to copyist, which meant a steep pay cut. Then she was harassed, according to the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum. Rumors abounded among the men in her office that she was having an affair with her boss, and that the never-married abolitionist had biracial children. She also suffered from bouts of malaria and depression. After three years, she quit.
Barton went to her childhood home of Oxford, Mass., to recover from the ordeal. It was a pattern she had followed much of her life. Years earlier, sexism had derailed her first career as a teacher, too. She had worked tirelessly to open a public school in Bordentown, N.J., but when a new building was constructed, a male principal was brought in at twice her pay, and she was made his assistant.
“I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay,” she later said.
Barton returned to the Patent Office in 1860, just before President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration and the outbreak of the Civil War.
Barton’s next career started with the Baltimore Riot on April 19, 1861. Fighting between the Massachusetts militia and Southern sympathizers resulted in what is considered the first bloodshed of the Civil War. Wounded soldiers were brought to the District and laid out in the unfinished Capitol building.
Barton raced to the Capitol to see how she could help and was shocked to find some of the wounded men were former students of hers. Something ignited in her that would animate the rest of her life.
Barton and several other women organized medical supplies, food, clothing, bedding, prayers, letter-writing — anything that could bring comfort to the wounded. There was little formal training to be a nurse back then, so Barton quickly picked up what she needed to know, and invented the rest.