“We must have a strong woman in Washington! There is too much at stake now to take any chances and I feel in my very soul that you are the person for the place.”
-Jane Delano, in an appeal for Clara Noyes to join the administrative ranks at the Red Cross
“The sudden death of Clara Dutton Noyes took from the American Red Cross Nursing Service, and from the nursing profession throughout the world, one of the most commanding and influential personalities of her generation. It was, in large part, Miss Noyes’s genius for organization that gave the American Red Cross Nursing Service worldwide renown from the moment this country entered the Great War … Miss Noyes’s death brought personal loss to thousands of nurses who had been strengthened by her courageous loyalty to well-established ideals of service.”
-American Red Cross Resolution on the death of Clara Noyes
“Sensitive to any slight of nurses and nursing, proud of the accomplishments of the profession, watchful of its standards, jealous of its prestige, she was one of the women who ably piloted it through the stress of expansion to maturity, stability and power.”
-Portia Kernodle, The Red Cross Nurse in Action
“War is a spectacular cataclysm, incredibly dramatic, and Miss [Jane] Delano, in her life and death and personality, had matched it. Demobilization with its unrest and reconstruction, with its uncertainty and indecision, called for sanity and an unerring sense of proportion, by means of which the displaced social order might be neatly arranged again into the normal conditions of peace. In temperament and methods of work, Miss Noyes matched the newer need.”
-Lavinia Dock, et al, The History of American Red Cross Nursing