At the same time, Clara was worried about her father's health. When he was again sick in February, she became so distraught that she exhausted herself, as she had so many times before, nursing him.80 When she at length looked up from his sickbed she found the winter nearly over. Another season had passed without profit or serenity.
At home, Barton received no support, comfort, or even understanding for her misery. Friends and kinfolk thought her foolish for pampering Irving and Mattie and believed she had brought her troubles on herself. They could not understand why Clara did not take a teaching job, settle down, and rid herself of her nervous affliction. Julie Barton seemed concerned that her sister-in-law would become a permanent charge, for Clara had not been able to pay for her board for several months. Furthermore, Clara was—or felt she was—socially shunned. She had no idea what was expected of her, did not know how to fit in, felt every move was the wrong one.81 “I work all day to keep things as straight as possible and cry half the night…,” she wrote, adding sarcastically, “now you will naturally see that things look ‘bright to me.’”82
Well aware that she needed to get away, find work, and recapture her self-esteem, Barton wrote, “I must not rust much longer…[but] push out and do something somewhere, or anything, anywhere.”83 Just what she would do was another question. She would consider the subservient and poorly paid life of teaching only as a last resort. “I gave outgrown that, or that me,” she recognized. “I have no desire to do it now.”84 Having ruled out the most easily obtainable position, she wearied of mulling over the other limited possibilities. Clerking, starting a school, and escaping to South America were all considered. Frustration mounted as she used her influence to gain lucrative positions for Bernard, Elvira Stone, and other friends, and saw herself still empty-handed. After two jobs—a clerkship and an administrative job with a school—failed to materialize, Clara's emotional state became so desperate that she was immobilized by panic. She had, she acknowledged, “added more than ten years right into my life in the last two months.”85
Her frustrations were heightened by the difficulty she was experiencing because of her sex. The very clerkships that Barton's influence gained for Bernard were not open to her. It was a fact of which she was acutely conscious and which increasingly rankled her. The outright discrimination she had suffered in Bordentown and the prejudice of the official policy during her years in Washington had done a good deal to politicize her feminism. Like many other early women's leaders, personal experience gave bite to the shadowy liberal notions with which she had been raised. Knowledge of her own capabilities and the way in which these were bound by society began to give her reason to believe a radical change in the social structure must be accomplished. She was angry that she could not win the same political favors her untried nephew could, simply because she “couldn’t wear broadcloth.” Barton acknowledged that her political friends had always encouraged her to call on them for aid. There was a difference, however, between such hearty reassurances and the actual initiation of some help. Still shy when asking favors, Clara did not see how she could approach her friends and was thus reluctant to ask them “until some change should open the way.”86
Perhaps, she surmised, a permanent government appointment was too much to expect. Then, in a burst of fury, she recognized her own tendency to limit her expectations to the level of the men around her. She vented her anger to Bernard, in one of the most succinct statements she was to make about the oppression she felt surrounded her and others of her sex:
When you have pictured my past life and habits and training for the past number of years, you will…forgive such an aspiration in me. Were you in my place you would feel it too, and wish and pine and fret in your cage as I do, and if the very gentlemen who have the power could only know for one twenty-four hours all that oppresses and gnaws at my peace, they could offer me something to do in accordance with my old habits and capabilities before I am a day older, but they will never know and I shall always be oppressed no doubt. I am naturally businesslike and habit has made me just as much so as a man (and were I a man I would never do a four penny business).…I should be ‘perfectly happy’ today if someone would tell me that my desk and salary were waiting for me—that once more I had something to do that was something.87
But the prejudice continued to haunt her. On yet another job search in official quarters she found to her dismay that “the registrar says he has no room for ladies…and fears to have papers taken out of the office to be copied.”88
Word from Irving was as discouraging as her search for a job. He was dissatisfied, in need of money, and weaker than ever. Clara, her patience strained to the limit, could not see how he and Sally could run through so much money. Clara was not a natural altruist, and much of her pleasure in helping was bound up in the gratitude, love, and dependence that were shifted back to her. She resented those who did not give her this recognition, and the news from the Vassalls was thus doubly exasperating. Irving complained so much of Minnesota and its negative effect on his condition that his aunt dryly allowed that “the child's disease must have removed from his lungs to his head.”89 Feeling that for all her good intentions she was to blame for Irving's plight, Barton's nerves gave way. Once again suicidal thoughts crept upon her. “I wished we were all at rest…,” she remarked upon receiving yet another sad epistle from the West. “I am not quite myself and don’t know when I shall be again…. I am weak and nervous ever since, and I am good for nothing at all.”90
Barton now had virtually no money to send Irving and Sally. Her long-term finances had taken a turn for the better in February when Captain Barton sold her twenty acres of valuable timberland at a bargain-rate price. He took a note for the property, though she felt obliged to pay him for it later in the year.91 But this transaction did nothing to help her immediate need for cash. To make ends meet she returned to Boston in late April for another brief tour as a companion to an older woman. This was little better than doing nothing; its only advantage was to remove her from the critical eyes of Julie and David.92 She endured it for a month, then, deciding that she must take control of her life and earn some money, she suddenly packed her bags and left for New York.
Barton was sick and nervous when she left North Oxford, “in a better condition,” she admitted to a friend, “to go to bed than New York City.”93 She had hoped to look for a job in the business community, but she arrived barely able to make it to the offices of her old friend, phrenologist L. N. Fowler. He took her in hand, charted her personality traits (giving her high marks for friendship, low for self-esteem), and sent her to a hotel run by a son of the Bertrams, bidding her rest and get well before trying to find work.94
After a week the hotel proprietor decided to send her home to his parents. Determined to go “where I could be sick and feel that I was not committing an unpardonable sin thereby,” she retreated to the Bertrams, where she was received with open arms.95 The contrast between her treatment there and that afforded her by her own family could not have been sharper. “I was almost cheated in belief that I had come home and had a home to come to,” she told Bernard sadly.96 For two months they harbored her, pampering her, encouraging her to stay with them indefinitely. They again tried to talk her into starting an academy or teaching in their area “It is really a temptation, Ber,” she told her nephew, “if it were anything but teaching I would.”97 She was more relaxed with the Bertrams, yet she knew it was only one more temporary stopping place. And with no immediate prospect of work, home, or any sense of permanence, she could not quite shake her morbid thoughts. In late July she was still feeling that there was “nothing…so welcome as perfect rest.” She was happy when she slept and, she noted, had felt “for long years…that when the command should come, Lay down thy burden and rest, it must be the sweetest hour of my whole existence…sometimes my stubborn heart rebels and I murmur to myself, how long Oh Lord how long.”98
six
In rooms that were the “cosiest
