Mary Edwards Walker

• 1. Introduction

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  Dr. Mary Edwards Walker had a ready answer for anyone who objected to her wardrobe: "I don't wear men's clothes, I wear my own clothes." She said it to critics who saw her arrested again and again for the way she dressed. Walker was an American surgeon, an abolitionist and a prohibitionist. She is also the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor.

  The Medal of Honor is only the best known of her distinctions, and it raises more questions than it answers. Why would a nation hand a civilian doctor its highest military award, then try to erase her from its rolls? What drove her to walk across battle lines to treat people on the other side? And why did a woman who spent decades demanding the vote end up ignored by the suffrage movement itself?

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• 2. Farm to Diploma

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  Mary Edwards Walker was born in the Town of Oswego, New York, on the 26th of November 1832, to Alvah and Vesta Walker. She had four older sisters and one younger brother. Her parents were devoted Christians, yet they were also Freethinkers who urged their children to question the rules of the various denominations. Chores did not follow the usual lines either. Vesta often took on heavy labor, while Alvah handled general work around the house. Mary worked on the family farm from childhood.

  In the late 1830s the Walkers founded the first free schoolhouse in Oswego. They were determined that their daughters would be as well educated as their son, and the children studied there first.

  Falley Seminary in Fulton, New York, was Mary's next school, and two of her older sisters came with her. The seminary stressed modern reform in gender roles, education and hygiene. At home she spent her free time with her father's medical books on anatomy and physiology, and that reading planted her interest in medicine.

  Minetto, New York, is where she taught school as a young woman. The wages paid her way through Syracuse Medical College. In 1855 she graduated with honors as a medical doctor, and she was the only woman in her class.

  On the 16th of November 1855, shortly before turning 23, she married Albert Miller, a fellow medical student. She wore a short skirt with trousers underneath, refused to say "obey" in her vows, and kept her own surname. The couple opened a joint practice in Rome, New York. It did not thrive, because people of the day did not trust or respect female physicians. The marriage later ended in divorce because of Miller's infidelity.

  In 1860 Walker briefly attended Bowen Collegiate Institute, later renamed Lenox College, in Hopkinton, Iowa. The school suspended her after she refused to resign from its debating society, which had been all male until she joined. The Civil War broke out the following year.

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• 3. Rational Dress

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  By 1861 Walker's usual outfit was a knee-length dress with a tight waist and a full skirt, worn over trousers held up with suspenders. She had arrived at it through years of experiments with skirt lengths and layers, always with men's trousers underneath.

  The habit began on her family's farm. As a girl she refused to wear women's clothing for farm work because it restricted her movement. Her mother backed her up and taught her that corsets and tight lacing were unhealthy. The campaign for sensible women's clothing was then known as rational dress, and Walker became one of its most notorious figures.

  In 1871 she wrote that the greatest sorrows women suffered, physical, moral and mental, came from an unhygienic way of dressing. She disliked long skirts with many petticoats. They were uncomfortable and hard to move in, and she also objected that they gathered and spread dust and dirt. Clothing, she argued, should "protect the person, and allow freedom of motion and circulation, and not make the wearer a slave to it." She held that cause as dear as her abolitionism. She also wrote to a women's journal, The Sibyl: A Review of the Tastes, Errors, and Fashions of Society, blaming fashion for harming health, costing money and helping to break up marriages.

  The price was steady ridicule. While she was a schoolteacher, a neighboring farmer and a group of boys chased her home and pelted her with eggs and other missiles. Female classmates at medical school criticized her choices. Patients stared and teased.

  In 1870 police arrested her in New Orleans because she was dressed as a man, and men mocked her. The arresting officer twisted her arm and asked whether she had ever had a relationship with a man. She went free once someone at the Police Court recognized her.

  Her books and articles on women's rights and dress made her popular with other feminists and female physicians. On the battlefield she said men's clothing simply suited the demands of the work better.

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• 4. Between the Lines

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  At the outbreak of the Civil War, Walker volunteered as a surgeon, and the Army rejected her because she was a woman. Years of private practice made no difference. The Army had no female surgeons, and she was offered a place only as a nurse. She declined and served the Union as a civilian volunteer surgeon.

  The First Battle of Bull Run, on the 21st of July 1861, was her first major test. She then worked at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington, D.C. Without pay, she treated the wounded near the front lines, including after the Battle of Fredericksburg and in Chattanooga after the Battle of Chickamauga.

  In Ward 2 of the Chattanooga hospital lay Frances Hook, a woman who had fought for the Union disguised as a man. As a suffragist, Walker was pleased to see women in uniform, and she alerted the press to Hook's story.

  In September 1862 Walker wrote to the War Department asking to work as a spy. The department refused. In September 1863 the Army of the Cumberland hired her as a Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian), making her the first woman employed as a surgeon by the U.S. Army. She was later appointed assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry. Again and again she crossed battle lines to treat civilians.

  On the 10th of April 1864, Confederate troops captured her and arrested her as a spy. She had just finished helping a Confederate doctor perform an amputation. She was sent to Castle Thunder in Richmond, Virginia, and held there until the 12th of August 1864. Then she was exchanged for a Confederate surgeon from Tennessee. In prison she refused the clothes issued to her, which were said to be more becoming of her sex.

  After her release she supervised a female prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and ran an orphanage in Tennessee. She also received a disability pension for partial muscular atrophy that she suffered in captivity. It paid $8.50 a month beginning on the 13th of June 1865, and it rose to $20 a month in 1899. A far more unusual reward was soon to come from President Andrew Johnson.

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• 5. A Medal by Exception

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  After the war, Walker asked for a retroactive brevet or commission to recognize her service. President Andrew Johnson told Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to look into the legality. Stanton sought the opinion of the Army's Judge Advocate General. The answer was that no precedent existed for commissioning a woman, but a "commendatory acknowledgment" could be issued instead. Johnson then personally awarded her the Medal of Honor as the alternative.

  Because no one had formally recommended her, the path was unusual. That may explain why officials overlooked her ineligibility, which ironically came from lacking a commission.

  The Medal of Honor was the only military decoration of the Civil War, and at the time it was not expressly reserved for gallantry in action. Walker is one of only eight civilians to receive it. Her official citation names her rank as Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian) and says she entered service at Louisville, Kentucky. It also lists one engagement not yet mentioned here, the Battle of Atlanta in September 1864.

  Walker had her own explanation for the honor. She believed it came because she went into enemy territory to care for suffering inhabitants when no man had the courage to do so, for fear of being imprisoned.

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• 6. Struck and Restored

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  In 1916 Congress passed a pension act for Medal of Honor recipients and created separate Army and Navy rolls. A separate bill directed the Army to review earlier recipients. The Army itself had asked for that review so it could retroactively police awards it considered undesirable.

  Those awards were a product of the Army's neglect. It published no regulations for the medal until 1897, and the law set very few requirements. Nearly 900 medals had gone to men whose only act was a non-combat extension of enlistment.

  The Army's Medal of Honor Board deliberated from 1916 to 1917 and struck 911 names from the Army roll. Walker was among them, along with William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Laws passed in 1862-1863 and 1904 had limited the medal to officers and enlisted service members, and Walker had been a civilian contract surgeon.

  The board may nevertheless have treated her unfairly. It declined to revoke the medals of at least two other contract surgeons who were equally ineligible. One was Major General Leonard Wood, a former Army Chief of Staff who had held the same civilian status as Walker when he was recommended. The board's president, General Nelson Miles, had twice recommended Wood himself and knew he did not qualify.

  The Army Judge Advocate General advised that struck recipients need not return their medals. Congress had given the Army no authority to enforce that provision, so repossession and criminal penalties were both inoperative.

  In 1977 the Army restored Walker's medal. Several sources credit President Jimmy Carter, but that is probably wrong. The decision came from the Army's Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, acting on a recommendation from the Board for Correction of Military Records. Both the Ford and Carter administrations opposed the restoration, and the Carter White House responded to the announcement with confusion. A recent historical work argues the board probably exceeded its authority, since it could not override a standing law.

  Garlin Conner's Medal of Honor, awarded in early 2018, shows the contrast. It also began with the Board for Correction, but it went through the President and needed a statutory waiver from Congress.

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• 7. Suffrage Outsider

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  In Washington, D.C., Walker joined the Central Woman's Suffrage Bureau. She also raised money to endow a chair for a female professor at the Howard University medical school. As a writer and lecturer she took up health care, temperance, women's rights and dress reform.

  In 1871 she tried to register to vote and was turned away. Her approach, which the suffrage movement first adopted, held that women already had the right to vote. Congress, in this view, needed only to pass enabling legislation. After years without results, the movement switched to seeking a constitutional amendment. That was the opposite of her position, and she fell out of favor.

  She kept attending suffrage conventions and handing out her own literature, but the rest of the movement largely ignored her. Her masculine clothing, including a top hat, made matters worse. England gave her a warmer reception than the United States did.

  In 1907 she published "Crowning Constitutional Argument." It argued that some states, along with the federal Constitution, had already granted women the vote. She testified on women's suffrage before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1912 and again in 1914.

  Walker died at home on the 21st of February 1919, at 86, after a long illness. She was buried at Rural Cemetery in Oswego, New York, in a plain ceremony, with an American flag over her casket. She wore a black suit rather than a dress. Her death came 544 days before the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.

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• 8. Names in Stone

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  During World War II, the Navy named a Liberty ship, the SS Mary Walker, in her honor. In 1982 the U.S. Postal Service issued a twenty five-cent stamp commemorating the anniversary of her birth. In 2000 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

  SUNY Oswego's medical facility is the Mary Walker Health Center, and a plaque on the same grounds explains her importance to the Oswego community. An Army Reserve center in Walker, Michigan, carries her name, as does the Mary Walker Clinic at Fort Irwin National Training Center in California. The Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C., honors her alongside the poet Walt Whitman, who nursed in the capital during the Civil War. The Mary E. Walker House, run by the Philadelphia Veterans Multi-Service & Education Center, is a thirty-bed transitional residence for homeless women veterans.

  A Belgian comic album, Les Tuniques Bleues 54, titled Miss Walker, appeared from Dupuis in 2010. Willy Lambil and Raoul Cauvin drew her as a comical, combative feminist. Nate DiMeo devoted Episode 76 of The Memory Palace podcast to her in October 2015. In July 2017 the Looking for Lilith Theatre Company produced Nancy Gall-Clayton's play I'm Wearing My Own Clothes! Theresa Kaminski's biography, published by Lyons Press in 2020, follows her journey to the Medal of Honor. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton included her in The Book of Gutsy Women in 2019.

  In May 2012 a 900-pound bronze statue of Walker was unveiled in front of the Oswego, New York, Town Hall.

  On the 25th of August 2023, Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia was renamed Fort Walker. The change was part of the Defense Department's decision to rename bases honoring Confederate soldiers. Walker became the first woman in American history to have a military installation named exclusively for her. In June 2025 the Trump Administration renamed the fort Fort Anderson-Pinn-Hill, also known as A.P. Hill.

  A 2024 American Women quarter shows Walker holding her pocket surgical kit. On her uniform are the Medal of Honor and a surgeon's pin.

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