Mary Edwards Walker

• Mary Edwards Walker
• Born: November 26, 1832
• Died: February 21, 1919

Physician, Civil War surgeon, and dress reformer, was born in Oswego Town, New York, the fifth of six children and the youngest of five daughters of Alvah Walker, a farmer, teacher, and self-taught doctor, and Vesta (Whitcomb) Walker, also a teacher and a cousin of the agnostic freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll. Her ancestors were early settlers in the New England region. The Walkers had emigrated to Plymouth Colony around 1643; the Whitcombs had served in the French and Indian wars and in the Revolution. Her parents believed that girls should be educated and encouraged their children to pursue professional careers.

Mary Walker began her education in the local district school run by her mother and father. She went on to Falley Seminary in Fulton, New York, leaving in January 1852 to take a teaching post in a village school near her home. From her father she had acquired an interest in medicine and, despite open hostility from a society that accepted professional women only in the field of teaching, she set out to obtain a medical degree. In December 1853 she entered Syracuse Medical College, from which she was graduated in June 1855, the only woman in her class. After practicing medicine for several months in Columbus, Ohio, she moved to Rome, New York. In November of that year she married Albert Miller, a medical student. Although Walker had been raised a Methodist, the ceremony was Unitarian, and the word obey was omitted in the bride’s vows. She did not take her husband’s surname. The couple practiced medicine in Rome for several years until they separated in 1859.

From childhood Mary Walker had felt confined by the form of dress considered proper for women of her era. Her father believed that tight-fitting clothes could impair a girl’s health, and his daughters were not permitted to wear corsets. Thus, when the Bloomer costume appeared (about 1850), Walker quickly adopted the new form of dress, which consisted of a short skirt over long full-length Turkish trousers. She wore this costume to her wedding. In 1856, when Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, an advocate of the costume, began publishing the Sibyl, a reform newspaper, Walker became one of the original subscribers as well as its sales representative in Rome. In January 1857 she began to write regularly for the paper and took part in a dress-reform convention organized by Hasbrouck in Middletown, New York. By December of that year she was a recognized lecturer and writer on dress reform.

Walker expanded her interest into other areas of women’s rights. Speaking out for equal education, she suggested that the money the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association proposed to spend on the renovation of George Washington’s home be used instead to establish a national literary seminary for women. She believed that marriage should be a partnership of equals, attacked antiabortion laws, and urged the adoption by employers of the principle of equal pay for equal work, whether done by a man or a woman. In the spring of 1860 she was elected the third of nine vice presidents of the National Dress Reform Association.

In 1860 Walker moved to Iowa, where she hoped to take advantage of that state’s comparatively liberal divorce law. During her residence there she enrolled in Bowen Collegiate Institute in Hopkinton, but was suspended for attempting to become a member of the all-male debating society. Unable to obtain a divorce in Iowa, she returned to New York, where she was granted a decree in 1869 on grounds of adultery.

At the start of the Civil War Walker tried to obtain an official commission as an army surgeon. While pressing her case in Washington, D.C., she worked as a volunteer in the Patent Office Hospital and assisted in the organization of the Women’s Relief Association, whose objective was to help female visitors to Washington find safe lodgings. She returned to New York and took a refresher course at the Hygeio-Therapeutic College.

In the fall of 1862 Walker became an unofficial doctor in the makeshift army field hospitals in Warrenton and Fredericksburg, Virginia. The following September she moved on to Tennessee and, despite protests, was officially appointed assistant army surgeon with the Fifty-second Ohio Regiment, then stationed near Gordon’s Mills. There she took to wearing a military uniform similar to that of her male counterparts, with gold-striped trousers, felt hat, and jacket. She not only worked with Union soldiers but often crossed behind Confederate lines to care for the civilian population.

In April 1864 Walker was captured and sent to Richmond, Virginia. After several months of imprisonment, she was freed in a prisoner exchange—”man for man,” she once recalled. Returning to Washington in August, she was appointed acting assistant surgeon and was placed in charge of the women prisoners’ hospital in Louisville, Kentucky; she next headed an orphanage in Clarksville, Tennessee. Antagonizing her staff in both places, she was sent back to Washington early in 1865 and soon after left government employment. For her services she was awarded the Medal of Honor on the recommendations of Generals George H. Thomas and William T. Sherman.

After the war Walker worked briefly on a New York newspaper. She then returned to Washington, where she tried to establish a medical practice, but was drawn back into the women’s movement. Taking up the case of military pensions for Civil War nurses, she presented petitions to Congress suggesting that they also had earned, and should be granted, the right to vote. Walker also resumed her work in the dress-reform movement. Arrested in New York City for disturbing the peace by wearing the Bloomer costume in public, she was brought before the police court. The court upheld her right to wear pants in public, and thereafter women in New York City no longer faced arrest for wearing pants in the street. In 1866 she served as president of the National Dress Reform Association. She is said to have made one important improvement to men’s shirts—the addition of an inner neckband to prevent the collar button from irritating the skin.

Walker was invited in September 1866 to be a delegate at the Social Science Congress in Manchester, England. During her stay abroad she lectured on dress reform, on her Civil War experiences, and on temperance. Returning to the United States in 1867, she joined the Washington-based lawyer Belva Ann Lockwood in working for the women’s movement and especially for suffrage. She became a member of the Washington Central Women’s Suffrage Bureau, appeared before congressional hearings, and undertook a public speaking tour in New England, the Midwest, and the South. Walker was a participant in the Cincinnati Suffrage Convention of 1869 and three years later tried unsuccessfully to vote in her native Oswego Town.

But Walker’s views on a federal suffrage amendment led to a split with the mainstream of the movement. She believed that women already possessed the right to vote under the Constitution and refused to support the proposed amendment, to the displeasure of most suffragists. Most of her influence was gone by the time she published her views in 1907 in a pamphlet entitled Crowning Constitutional Argument.

Her attempts to receive compensation for her war service won only limited success. In 1882 she was appointed to a government post in the Pension Office mailroom, but she lost the position the next year for insubordination. Over the years her behavior became increasingly eccentric. Her predilection for wearing masculine attire alienated more moderate dress reformers. Her medical credentials were questioned, and she never received professional recognition.

Walker returned to Oswego Town in 1890 and took over the running of her family’s farm, preoccupied with litigation with relatives and tenants. She was the founder in 1897 of a community for women, Adamless Eve. Her Medal of Honor was withdrawn in 1917 as unwarranted; she continued to wear it, however. In 1977 the medal was restored by the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records.

In 1917 Walker fell on the steps of the Capitol in Washington. She never completely recovered from the injury and died two years later at the age of eighty-six in Oswego. She was buried—attired in her customary black frock coat—in the cemetery in Oswego Town.

Works by Mary Walker included Woman’s Thoughts about Love and Marriage, Divorce, Etc. (1871); Hit (1871); and Unmasked, or the Science of Immorality (1878). The standard biography is C. M. Snyder, Dr. Mary Walker: The Little Lady in Pants (1962). See also J. C. Farrell, “Dr. Mary Walker, Civil War Physician,” North Country Life, Winter 1962; “Dr. Mary Edwards Walker Gets [Her Congressional Medal of Honor] Back,” American Heritage, December 1977; A. Lockwood, “Pantsuited Pioneer of Women’s Lib,” Smithsonian, March 1977; Notable American Women (1971); and The Dictionary of American Biography (1936). For additional information on her medical career see Medical Woman’s Journal, October 1946, and Philadelphia Medicine, March 18, 1944. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, February 23, 1919.