Dr Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919)
Mary Edwards Walker was the youngest of five daughters (with one younger brother) and was born in the state of New York in 1832. From being very young she shunned ‘female’ clothes in favour of more masculine garms, she worked on the family farm and found them more practical and comfortable. Her father supported this practical mode of dress for women, he also believed in a good education for girls as well as boys, and Mary and all her sisters attended the local school where their mother taught. He was also an abolitionist and freethinker, and general all round good guy I think it’s fair to say.
Like Nettie (from WHM Day 13), Mary became a teacher in order to save up enough money to put herself through higher education. In June 1855 Mary, the only woman in her class, graduated from the eclectic Syracuse Medical College, the nation's first medical school that accepted women and men on an equal basis. She graduated at age 21 after three 13-week semesters of medical training which she paid $55 each for, this put her in the small, but steadily growing ranks of female doctors in the US.
Keeping up her interests in women’s rights, advocacy for women to wear trousers (or bloomers as they were coming to be known), Mary set up in New York as a doctor at a practice with her new husband Albert, another physician. It’s fair to say that Mary wore the trousers in the relationship, quite literally. During this time, in the evenings, she would lecture on women’s rights while wearing full men’s evening dress.
In 1861 the American Civil War broke out, and Mary was keen to sign up and use her medical skills. Mary went to Washington and tried to join the Union Army. Surprise, surprise she was denied a position as a medical officer, but volunteered anyway, serving as an assistant surgeon, the first female surgeon in the US Army. Later, she worked as a field surgeon near the Union front lines for almost two years; of course she used this opportunity to wear an adapted military uniform!
In April, 1864 she was captured by Confederate troops and arrested as a spy and imprisoned for four months. She was eventually released back, but spent the rest of the war practicing at a Louisville female prison and an orphanage in Tennessee. She was paid $766.16 for her wartime service. Afterward, she got a monthly pension of $8.50, later raised to $20.
In 1865 Mary was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour for Meritorious Service (the USA’s highest military award), in recognition of her contributions to the war effort. She was the only woman ever to receive it. However, in 1917 Congress took away her medal, along with the medals of 910 others, when the Medal of Honour standards was reviewed to only include only “actual combat with an enemy”. But Mary refused to hand over her medal, wearing it every day until her death in 1919. A relative told the New York Times: "Dr. Mary lost the medal simply because she was a hundred years ahead of her time and no one could stomach it." The US Army reinstated Walker's medal posthumously in 1977, citing her "distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex." Damn straight!!
After the war, Mary lectured (usually in top hat and tails), and wrote books and articles on such subjects as suffrage, dress reform and health. She was ahead of her time in pointing out the health risks of smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol. She must have got something right as she lived to the ripe old age of 86. In 1919 she died of natural causes in her home state of New York. At her funeral an American flag was draped over the coffin in true hero style. She was, of course, buried, as always, in her smart black suit.
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