XXXVIII
Clara Barton’s dress was so simple that no one tried to follow her fashion.Alice Hubbard.
For personal adornment Clara Barton cared little, choosing green dresses in her youth; and ornaments of bright red, for cheer, in her older years.Corra Bacon-Foster, Author.
Dress changes manners.Voltaire.
Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.Franklin.
Ridiculous modes, invented by ignorance, and adopted by folly.
Smollett.
Smollett.
Smollett.
Smollett.
To live to dress well indicates a fool.Dr. A. E. Winship.
The plainer the dress with greater luster does beauty appear.
Lord Fairfax.
Lord Fairfax.
Lord Fairfax.
Lord Fairfax.
Beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes plainest.
Sterne.
Sterne.
Sterne.
Sterne.
Those who think that, in order to dress well, it is necessary to dress extravagantly, make a great mistake. Nothing so well becomes feminine beauty as simplicity.George D. Prentice.
A plain, genteel dress is more admired and obtains more credit than lace and embroidery, in the eyes of the judicious and sensible.
George Washington.
George Washington.
George Washington.
George Washington.
Elizabeth, who died the happy owner of 3,000 dresses, issued a solemn proclamation against extravagance in dress.
George William Curtis.
George William Curtis.
George William Curtis.
George William Curtis.
lovelinessNeeds not foreign aid of ornament,But is, when unadorned, adorned most.Thomson—Autumn.
lovelinessNeeds not foreign aid of ornament,But is, when unadorned, adorned most.Thomson—Autumn.
lovelinessNeeds not foreign aid of ornament,But is, when unadorned, adorned most.Thomson—Autumn.
loveliness
Needs not foreign aid of ornament,
But is, when unadorned, adorned most.
Thomson—Autumn.
We sacrifice to dress till household joys and comforts cease. Dress drains our cellar dry and keeps our larder lean.Cowper.
The dress that shows taste and sentiment is elevating to the home, and is one of the most feminine means of beautifying the world.
Miss Oakey.
Miss Oakey.
Miss Oakey.
Miss Oakey.
A lady of genius will give a genteel air to her whole dress by a well fancied suit of knots, as a judicious writer gives to a whole sentence by a single expression.Gay.
A rich dress is not worth a straw to one who has a poor mind.
Az Zubaidi.
Az Zubaidi.
Az Zubaidi.
Az Zubaidi.
’Tis the mind that makes the body rich.Shakespeare.
I wear what I want to.Clara Barton.
Dress is a sentiment, sentiment of an occasion. Dress is an expression of the attitude of the mind as to propriety, necessary to accomplish results. Like smiles, dress is an expression of the intelligence of the wearer. Dress is an art, one of the highest of the arts. Dress has to do with the form divine and, whether dress be for good or ill, depends on the mind that fashions it. Court dress, then the want ofdress, Clara Barton disliked and on one occasion would not conform. She thereby missed the honor of being a guest on a state occasion—proffered her by the world’s greatest queen.
There is an individuality of dress, as of conduct. Clara Barton had individuality. There has been no one else like her, and a famous American woman says we shall never again produce her like. In religion she adhered to no creed; in social life, to no rules; in wearing apparel, to no fashion. In service to the world she wished for something to do that no one else would do—something that no one else thought of doing. “ClaraBarton was Clara Barton,” individual even in her wearing apparel. The first straw bonnet she ever had she made herself. She cut the green rye; she scalded it; she bleached it in the sun; she cut it into lengths; with her teeth she split the straws into strands, flattening them. She braided the bonnet by the use of eleven strands; she fashioned it to suit herself; she wore it; it was Clara’s individual bonnet, and at 86 years of age she regarded it the great achievement of her life.
When advised by a clerk in a store that a woman of her age should wear lavenders and violets, Clara Barton turned to her shopping companion and said, “I guess she doesn’t know I wear what I want to.” While on the lecture platform, to a limited extent, she conformed to custom and wore trains. On a certain occasion, looking her over from head to feet, an obtrusive flatterer said to her “How stunning!” Floating on a breeze several degrees below zero came from Miss Barton’s lips “What did you say!” Nor would she gossip about the dress of others. Says Goethe: The “highest fortune of earth’s children is personality.” Characteristic of her observations on personality rather than of dress, on an occasion when she was a special guest of honor, she thus writes of her hostess: “I want you to know what a beautiful, bright lady I think Mrs. President Hayes to be. She is brilliant and beautiful, brunette with abundant jet black hair, put back over her ears;—she is entirely different from the Grand Duchess of Baden, and stillbrightandfull of life, like her.”
Every human being dresses for effect, as does the actress before the footlights—the greater the intelligence the greater the discrimination. Clara Barton was the designer of her own fashions, the mistress ofher own stitches. In the use of one of her stitches, she taught the women of Corsica to do more work in one hour than previously they had done in five hours. She found forty thousand people in despair, ill clothed. In her “dress-making shop,” she taught large classes of girls to sew. Daily, with these poor girls,
Plying her needle and thread,—Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
Plying her needle and thread,—Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
Plying her needle and thread,—Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
Plying her needle and thread,—
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
she left those people the best clothed people in Europe.
Clara Barton was as proud of her skill with the needle as was Lucretia with the spinning wheel, or Florence Nightingale in the art of nursing. In a western town a lady was discredited, and shunned, because she had been a sewing girl. Appreciating the situation, and ambitious socially, she made her home the center of fashionable sewing circles. She taught fancy crochet, and embroidery stitches; in a very short time she had the aristocratic women at her feet, and became the social leader.
The bright little needle, the swift-flying needle,The needle directed by beauty and art.
The bright little needle, the swift-flying needle,The needle directed by beauty and art.
The bright little needle, the swift-flying needle,The needle directed by beauty and art.
The bright little needle, the swift-flying needle,
The needle directed by beauty and art.
Clara Barton’s apparel was her personal care, and not the care of amodiste. While in charge of relief work on a field of disaster, she said I have no clothing, and couldn’t attend to it if I had.” She fully appreciated also that “rags are royal raiment when worn for virtue’s sake.” She would sew on her own buttons, mend, clean, stitch and hemstitch, make and remake, her own clothes,—not only as a matter of economy but as a matter of personal pride.
W. R. SHAFTERNo governmental red tape system could possibly be as effective as were Clara Barton’s sensible business methods in Cuba.W. R. Shafter.Brigadier-General Civil War; Major-GeneralCommanding the American Army in the Spanish-American War.General Shafter, the kind and courteous officer and gentleman.Clara Barton.
W. R. SHAFTERNo governmental red tape system could possibly be as effective as were Clara Barton’s sensible business methods in Cuba.W. R. Shafter.Brigadier-General Civil War; Major-GeneralCommanding the American Army in the Spanish-American War.General Shafter, the kind and courteous officer and gentleman.Clara Barton.
W. R. SHAFTERNo governmental red tape system could possibly be as effective as were Clara Barton’s sensible business methods in Cuba.W. R. Shafter.Brigadier-General Civil War; Major-GeneralCommanding the American Army in the Spanish-American War.General Shafter, the kind and courteous officer and gentleman.Clara Barton.
Clara Barton received no one until she had donned the, to her, becoming apparel,—the proper bow at the neck, the proper bow in her hair. Everything about her dress must be, to her,au fait. Propriety of dress had been a part of her education. She recognized that a tramp seldom gets by the barking dog at the gate, while the door of the palace opens wide to the person well-dressed. And possibly also she entertained the sentiment of Emerson, “The sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.” She agreed with Walt Whitman that only personal qualities endure, and dress bespeaks personal qualities.
That she succeeded in the art of dress—that her personal qualities were at all times in the ascendancy, is attested by the fact that the press reporter overlooked her dress, in describing the “ladies’ costumes.” He would describe her very dark, bright eyes, her face as the ideal one which conforms to her character, her raven black hair worn in the fashion of our mothers and grandmothers; or “her hair, black as the raven’s wing, does not follow fashion’s ways but is dressed like Longfellow’s Evangeline, low down on either side of her forehead,” and then possibly dismiss her with the simple statement: “Miss Barton was attired in black silk.”