Clara Louise Maass was born in East Orange, New Jersey, the eldest of nine children in a German immigrant family.
Clara Louise Maass was born on June 28, 1876, in East Orange, New Jersey, to German immigrant parents Robert and Hedwig Maass. As the eldest of nine children in a working-class household, she grew up with significant family responsibilities from a young age, often helping to care for her younger siblings.
This early experience of caregiving is often cited by biographers as a formative influence that steered her toward a career in nursing, a profession that, in the late nineteenth century, was only beginning to professionalize in the United States. Nursing schools modeled on Florence Nightingale's principles were spreading, offering young women like Maass a path to structured training and a respectable career outside the home.
Her German-American heritage also connected her to the Newark German Hospital, an institution serving the immigrant community, where she would later train and briefly work. The circumstances of her birth — modest means, a large family, and an immigrant community with strong ties to mutual aid institutions like ethnic hospitals — set the stage for a life defined by service, culminating in one of the most consequential acts of medical self-sacrifice in American history.
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