For Ladies’s Historical past Month, right here’s a brief piece I posted on Fb about gown reformer, military surgeon, creator, 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 will have been enjoyable to overhear a dialog between these two ladies 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 follow with him, she left her husband after he proved untrue. It will take her years to acquire a divorce.
An early advocate of girls’s gown reform, who wore what turned often called the “Bloomer costume,” Mary was one of many few who by no means returned to standard ladies’s clothes; as a substitute, she moved within the different route and in her later years wore natty tailor-made fits and high hats. (On a number of events, she could be arrested for sporting “male apparel.”)
Throughout the Civil Warfare, Mary served as a military surgeon–and a spy, which finally led to her imprisonment in Richmond’s Citadel Thunder in 1864. After a number of months, she was launched as a part of a prisoner change, after which she took up posts at Louisville’s Feminine Army 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 brought on appreciable amusement on the a part of among 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, partly as a result of she believed that the Structure permitted ladies to vote with out the necessity for additional modification, partly attributable to character conflicts. In a ebook known as Hit, she wrote on such topics as gown reform, temperance, and divorce. She advocated for the precise of married ladies to maintain their maiden identify and towards youngster 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 permit their wives to provoke intercourse. One among her successes was to influence Congress to grant pensions to ladies who had served as hospital nurses in the course of the Civil Warfare.
Walker ran for the U.S. Senate in 1881, however attracted no assist. (She had supported Victoria Woodhull’s unsuccessful candidacy for President.)
As a consequence of a coverage change concerning the standards for incomes a Medal of Honor, Mary’s medal (together with these of a whole bunch 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 Warfare, and Sara Latta’s ebook for younger grownup readers, I May Not Do In any other case: The Outstanding Lifetime of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.
