While tending to the medical needs of southern Civil War casualties, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was kidnapped by confederate soldiers. She was taken, under guard, from Georgia to Richmond, Virginia and thrown in a cell. It was April 1864, and Mary was serving as assistant surgeon in the Union Army.
Her place of imprisonment, the notorious Castle Thunder, was very uncomfortable: The rations she was given were “of a disgusting character,” the vermin “very annoying.” She often gave her rations to the rats. What she was most thankful for during the four months she was held was the press, since she used newspapers to cover the room’s filthy furniture. By August, her safe return had been successfully negotiated, and she was exchanged for a gentleman surgeon.
A lady surgeon being exchanged for a gentleman of the same profession was absolutely “unparalleled in the annals of warfare,” an attendant at one of Mary’s later speeches noted.
Mary was born in Oswego, New York in 1832. Her family were progressive abolitionists. They were so dedicated to fully educating their five daughters that they opened their own school. Mary was the only woman in her class when she graduated with a medical degree from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. She was one of only a handful of women who’d managed to earn an MD at a traditional medical school (as opposed to a women’s college.) And even then, there were but a few women’s medical college graduates at the time. Most women interested in practicing medicine would have done so as a homeopath or other “irregular” medical sect.
Short and slim with dark hair, a round face, dainty features, and tiny hands, she made for a deft surgeon and empathetic doctor. She married one of her classmates a few months after graduating, and they set up a medical practice together in Rome, New York. Their business didn’t thrive; patients were uneasy about consulting a woman doctor. After four unhappy years, Mary uncovered the truth about her husband’s extensive philandering. They separated and she attempted to secure a divorce. One was never granted, but she did maintain her medical practice until 1861. She also began lecturing: speaking passionately on topics like medicine, temperance, and dress reform.
When the Civil War broke out, she requested to be commissioned as a medical officer, but was denied. She began volunteering as a nurse in a Washington, DC hospital. After discovering several wives and mothers of soldiers sleeping on park benches throughout the city, she helped establish the Women’s Relief Association. In 1862, she began working as a volunteer physician with the Union Army in Virginia and Tennessee. In March 1864, she was finally appointed as a contract surgeon for the Union's 52nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. She wore a bloomer uniform she’d designed herself.
After returning home as a former prisoner of war, Mary became the first woman ever to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. She remains the only woman to receive the award.
Her selfless character is most evident in an anecdote about an incident at the House of Representatives: “I was making a visit to see Congress in session in the House when I was called by Dr. Mary Walker, who beckoned me and said ‘I want you to help me.’,” Elizabeth Stack related. “I followed her immediately into the ladies' restroom and found her with her coat off trying to check a hemorrhage of a poorly dressed colored woman. I assisted her in her efforts to make the patient comfortable until she could be taken home.” This incident had such an impact on Elizabeth that she decided to pursue a career in medicine.
Now that the war was over, Mary could focus her energy on speaking out and organizing around women’s rights issues. She regularly petitioned state and federal governments on topics of concern to her, and spent much of her time traveling the U.S. and England lecturing. Mary’s opinions regarding marriage, divorce, and dress were quite progressive, but she was a staunch opponent of alcohol and tobacco use.
Mary famously wore a long jacket and trousers and was also a vocal participant in the women’s dress reform movement. She was elected president of the National Dress Reform Association in 1866.
“There is much that is novel in Miss Walker’s appearance. Her dress consists of a black cloth tunic, reaching to the knee, and black pantalettes of the same material, the tunic having a gimp trimming down the front and around the bottom of the skirt. On her left breast she wears the medal of honor for special services in the United States Army,” a British attendant at one of her lectures remarked in a March 29, 1867 newspaper report.
But not every woman in medicine at the time approved of women wearing bloomers or anything approximating men’s dress. When Dorothea Dix was appointed superintendent of army nurses in 1861, she banned bloomers from army hospitals.
In 1870, Mary was actually arrested for being dressed like a man. Her response? “I don't wear men's clothes, I wear my own clothes.” She believed herself to be one of the earliest women to eschew heavy skirts and harmful corsets in favor of pants or bloomers: “I am the original new woman,” she declared in 1897. “Why, before Lucy Stone, Mrs. Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were—before they were, I am. In the early '40's, when they began their work in dress reform, I was already wearing pants… I have made it possible for the bicycle girl to wear the abbreviated skirt, and I have prepared the way for the girl in knickerbockers.”
To make ends meet throughout her life, Mary wrote. She authored stories that appeared in Sybil magazine and published Hit in 1871 and Unmasked or the Science of Immortality in 1878.
Her services and offbeat clothing choices were all well and good—laudable even—while she wasn’t asking for money. She began to be seen as a nuisance when she asked for financial assistance.
“Dr. Mary is a remarkable woman. During the war she rendered great service to the Union Army. She asked no compensation for her work and received none,” a September 23, 1889 newspaper article stated. “Shortly afterward she hung out her shingle and entered on the practice of medicine, still wearing the bloomer costume.” She was awarded a disability pension for muscular atrophy that she suffered while imprisoned, but she later pressed for more. “She succeeds in making a complete nuisance of herself. She demands the rights accorded to those who wear the male costume, but insists upon her privileges as a woman. She has been known to order a man to drop the cigar he was smoking because its fumes offended her and because he had ‘no right to smoke in the presence of a lady.’”
So selfish of her not to want to live in poverty or have smoke blown in her face, and to want to wear trousers instead of a heavy skirt and restrictive corset!
In 1917, the government rescinded her Congressional Medal of Honor. She refused to relinquish it. She died on February 21, 1919, at the age of 86. Those who met her lament she was not laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery. Her Medal of Honor was reinstated in 1977.
Further Reading:
Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights. By Theresa Kaminski, June 2020.
“Mary Walker, the ‘Original New Woman’” By Bethanee Bemis, March 25, 2020. Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
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