Dr. Mary Walker

Today I learned about Dr. Mary Walker, 1831–1919. This post from the National Park Service is an excellent short version of her life story.

Her family was from a farm near Oswego, N.Y. They're described as "freethinkers," and Mary rejected the conventions of women's dress from early in her life. She attended a seminary for young women, then moved on to medical school.

She graduated from Syracuse Medical College (1855), now known as SUNY Upstate Medical University, just a few years after Elizabeth Blackwell — the first woman admitted to a medical school in the U.S. — had been in medical school in nearby Geneva, N.Y.

As the Civil War began, she went to Washington, D.C. to join the Union army, but was denied a commission as a doctor. (I wonder why!) She became an unpaid surgeon at the Patent Office instead until 1862, when she was contracted as an unpaid field surgeon with the Army in Chattanooga. In 1864, she was captured by the Confederates and spent four months as a POW near Richmond, Va.

After the war,

Based on the recommendation of Major Generals Sherman and Thomas, President Andrew Johnson signed a bill on November 11, 1865, to present Walker with the Medal of Honor for Meritorious Service.

Which sounds like it was well-deserved, if medals are generally deserved. But — and this is the part that gets me every time I read it — in 1916/17, just a few years before her death, she was stripped of her medal because she wasn't a commissioned officer. It didn't matter that she had volunteered to be a commissioned officer, or that she served as an unpaid volunteer. No, during World War I someone in the chain of command under Woodrow Wilson decided to revoke this woman's medal.

I don't know if her activism on suffrage, her continued iconoclasm about clothing, or general sexism made those men make that decision. According to her Wikipedia page, the military board that revoked her medal at the same time declined to revoke medals from two male surgeons who were also contract field surgeons.

Walker's medal was reinstated, posthumously, in 1977. Even that wasn't without controversy, according to the summary on her Wikipedia page, though you'd think someone would want to take credit for it by that time. 

She spent the decades of her life after the Civil War, essentially, as an activist and writer:

She became a writer and lecturer, supporting such issues as health care, temperance, women's rights, and dress reform for women. She was frequently arrested for wearing men's clothing, and insisted on her right to wear clothing that she thought appropriate. She wrote two books that discussed women's rights and dress....

Dr. Mary Walker died in February 1919, just months before the 19th Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress that summer. Like other suffragists, she had attempted to register to vote much earlier than that, on the basis that women are citizens, and so should be able to vote. 

She never got to vote in a U.S. election.

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Looking for Mary Walker:

• The medical facilities at SUNY Oswego are named in her honor.
• There's a 900-pound bronze statue of her in front of Oswego's town hall. 
• She's buried (in a black suit) in Rural Cemetery in Oswego.
• The Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C. — which was ground zero in the AIDS crisis for that city — is named in honor of her and Walt Whitman, who was a nurse in D.C. during the Civil War. I lived in Washington for three years in the 1980s, and I never knew about Walker!