For Ladies’s Historical past Month, right here’s a brief piece I posted on Fb about costume reformer, military surgeon, writer, and eccentric Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919). (She doesn’t seem in The Queen of the Platform, as I’ve no proof that she and Ernestine Rose ever met, however it could have been enjoyable to overhear a dialog between these two girls if their paths ever did cross.)
Born right into a freethinking, abolitionist household that supported her ambitions, Mary graduated from Syracuse Medical Faculty in 1855. Having married a fellow medical pupil, and entered into observe with him, she left her husband after he proved untrue. It might take her years to acquire a divorce.
An early advocate of girls’s costume reform, who wore what turned often known as the “Bloomer costume,” Mary was one of many few who by no means returned to traditional girls’s clothes; as an alternative, she moved within the different path and in her later years wore natty tailor-made fits and prime hats. (On a number of events, she can be arrested for carrying “male apparel.”)
In the course of the Civil Struggle, Mary served as a military surgeon–and a spy, which finally led to her imprisonment in Richmond’s Citadel Thunder in 1864. After a couple of months, she was launched as a part of a prisoner trade, after which she took up posts at Louisville’s Feminine Navy Jail and on the Refugee Home in Clarksville, Tennessee. She attended the trial of these accused of conspiring with John Wilkes Sales space to assassinate President Lincoln; her Bloomer outfit prompted appreciable amusement on the a part of a few of the male defendants. President Andrew Johnson awarded her the Medal of Honor in November 1865.
Mary supported the ladies’s suffrage motion, however had an uneasy relationship with fellow activists, partially as a result of she believed that the Structure permitted girls to vote with out the necessity for additional modification, partially because of character conflicts. In a ebook known as Hit, she wrote on such topics as costume reform, temperance, and divorce. She advocated for the fitting of married girls to maintain their maiden title and towards baby marriage. In a second ebook, Unmasked, or the Topic of Immorality, printed anonymously, she touched upon the fraught topic of feminine sexuality, suggesting that husbands enable their wives to provoke intercourse. One among her successes was to steer Congress to grant pensions to girls who had served as hospital nurses in the course of the Civil Struggle.
Walker ran for the U.S. Senate in 1881, however attracted no help. (She had supported Victoria Woodhull’s unsuccessful candidacy for President.)
As a result of a coverage change concerning the standards for incomes a Medal of Honor, Mary’s medal (together with these of tons of of male recipients) was revoked in 1917. She refused to return it. (It was restored by President Carter in 1977.)
Mary died on February 22, 1919. Had she lived 18 months longer, she would have seen the passage of the Nineteenth Modification.
There are a number of good biographies of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, together with Sharon M. Harris’s Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919, Theresa Kaminski’s Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil Struggle, and Sara Latta’s ebook for younger grownup readers, I Might Not Do In any other case: The Outstanding Lifetime of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.
