Mary Edwards Walker
During the 19th century, American women like Mary Edwards Walker struggled for both equal rights and individual freedom. While Walker’s individual interests were sometimes controversial, her struggle for recognition made her an American hero in more ways than one.
Mary Walker was born to a farm family in Oswego Town on November 26, 1832. She received her early education in her family’s common school and attended the Falley Seminary in Fulton. Mary took advantage of new career opportunities for women and graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. Her early practice took her from Columbus, Ohio, to Rome, New York, where she worked alongside her husband, another medical student.
As a progressive young woman, Walker embraced new ideas about women’s public role and their public appearance. She became a “Bloomer Girl,” adopting the skirt-and-pantaloon costume popularized by Amelia Bloomer. Mary herself wrote articles supporting the Bloomer costume, and encouraged more comfortable, practical clothing for women throughout her life.
Walker also struggled with the many remaining limits on women’s rights. In 1860 she was expelled from an Iowa college for trying to join an all-male debating society. One year earlier, she had separated from her husband, but because the law defined very limited grounds for divorce, it took her a decade to be legally free from him.
When the Civil War broke out, Walker went to Washington, D. C. to organize aid societies for soldiers’ families. She really wanted to serve her country as an army surgeon. She did volunteer work in field hospitals near the Virginia battle lines while lobbying the government to give her an official commission. She finally received one in 1863, and was assigned as assistant surgeon to the 52nd Ohio Regiment in Tennessee.
Besides tending to Union soldiers, Walker often crossed enemy lines to treat sick civilians. On one such trip in 1864, Confederate soldiers arrested her as a suspected spy. She was confined in Richmond, the Confederate capital, until a prisoner exchange freed her. She ran a hospital in Louisville and an orphanage in Clarksville, Tennessee, before the war ended.
Mary Walker wanted to continue serving her country, but was denied a permanent commission. To honor her accomplishments, however, the government awarded her the Congressional Medal of Honor for meritorious service. She is the only woman to receive this military award.
In peacetime, Walker worked as an inventor, a journalist, and a women’s rights activist. She continued to advocate more practical women’s clothing, serving as president of the National Dress Reform Association and risking arrest for wearing men’s clothes in public. She went to trial on one occasion to win women the right to wear pants in New York City, but her individual crusade made her a fringe figure in the women’s rights movement.
As her health and fortunes declined, Walker was stripped of her highest honor when the government retroactively revised the standard for Medal of Honor winners in 1917. She died two years later, but in 1977 a reappraisal of her pioneering work led to the restoration of full honors to Mary Edwards Walker as an American hero.
For more information about Mary Edwards Walker and the history of other women in military service go to www. history.army.mil/news/2016/160200a_ maryEdwardsWalker.html .