About

“Clara D. Noyes, R.N.: Life of a Global Nursing Leader” is a book written by Clara Noyes’s great-grandnephew Roger Noyes.

In early twentieth-century America, and throughout the world’s nursing profession, Clara Dutton Noyes was known to many as an American Red Cross nursing icon.

Clara Noyes’s New York Times obituary ran twelve paragraphs. It notes, first, her dramatic death at the wheel of a 1936 Chevy, her preparation of more than 20,000 nurses to serve in World War I, and her work directing the Red Cross nursing response whenever “fire, flood and tornado struck at various parts of the country,” during her tenure as American Red Cross Director of Nursing.

It tells of her various service medals; her leadership posts at premier nursing schools (at a time when professional nursing was still new); her pioneering work as president of the American Nurses Association (ANA); and her chairmanship of a “National Committee on Rank for Nurses,” which succeeded in making the case that nurses needed military rank because, as women, their authority was not recognized without it: not by Army officers, nor enlisted men operating in the field of wartime medical relief. In her role as chief of the world’s largest body of professional women – the ANA – Clara Noyes mobilized women to push for recognition of their authority and a bar on their shoulders.

In post-World War I Europe, Clara Noyes developed schools of nursing in scores of countries that did not have nursing schools, at least not by American standards, influenced by Florence Nightingale’s reforms, imported from London. She battled unfair pay practices for military nurses; professionalized the practice of midwives (and helped open the first school for midwives in the U.S.); and fought the medical community’s paternalistic tendencies, as “hospital men,” she called them, were bent on reducing the status of nurses as a means of cheap labor.

She was an individual of exceptional organizing ability and vast knowledge of the nursing profession, in its early stages, who mobilized tens of thousands of her sisters to battle the flu epidemic of 1918, aid refugees during the Mississippi flood of 1927, respond to countless other disasters – and, of course, bring women into their first major experience with war.

It is no exaggeration to say that Clara Noyes’s life work touched just about every major question pertaining to nursing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, with lines of influence affecting larger trends and historical currents during wartime America.

All of these efforts intertwined with broader themes about the role of women in public life and, more specifically, the cause of women’s suffrage, in which nurses played a pivotal advocacy role. This work also collided with questions about race: the role of African-American women in both the nurse professionalization movement and the war effort during an era of entrenched segregation affecting all areas of public life.