PANTS
Mary Walker was born on our planet all right, in Oswego, New York, but hers was a whole
different world than ours. When she was born, on November 26, 1832, the only light was the sun by
day, moonlight or fire by night. Nothing went faster than a horse could run. A female who tried to
vote was an outlaw. But it was perfectly legal for Americans to buy and sell people who’d have to do
what they were told. Men wore the pants in Mary’s world and did men’s jobs: Doctor. Engineer.
Lawyer. Lawmaker. Soldier. Preacher. A female who dressed like a man, who tried to break into a
man’s profession, was outrageous and truly scandalous. A woman who pulled on a pair of poufy
pantaloons underneath her knee-length skirt then went outdoors was going against iron-hard
customs, nature, even the dictates of God.
The world of the past is just about unthinkable for us modern types, but it’s not unimaginable.
And the more you imagine, the more you’ll see how remarkable it was, the story of Dr. Mary Walker.
Mary Edwards Walker was used to people’s anger and amazement. From the very beginning,
her parents taught her and her older sisters, Vesta, Aurora Borealis, Luna, and Cynthia; and their
kid brother, Alvah, to think for themselves even if it meant going against society’s customs. They
were dead-set against folks smoking, drinking alcohol, and definitely opposed to enslaving their
fellow human beings. They were for women’s equal right to vote and girls’ right to a good and
thorough education. In fact, the Walkers built a school on their farm, for boys and girls. They
believed in equal comfort, too. Girls’ clothes shouldn’t be so tight and fancy, as was the fashion.
Mary Walker never forgot that lesson. In fact, her ideas about girly dresses would upset people
more than anything!
After more schooling at a nearby academy, Mary became a teacher, a proper job, most folks
thought, for any lady not lucky enough to have a husband to provide for her. To Mary, it was her
way to earn money to study for the job she really wanted: Physician. Three years had passed since
1849, when Elizabeth Blackwell became America’s very first female medical doctor (M.D.). People
still weren’t used to such an upsetting idea. Never mind; Mary was determined to be the second.
She stood out, being the only coed at the Syracuse (New York) Medical School. As she studied
her way through three 13-week terms there, Mary stood out even more because of the ways she
thought and dressed.
How, Mary wondered, could women be taken seriously as equal citizens when society insisted
that they wear unhealthy, impractical, silly dresses? How could a person breathe or move freely, in a
stiff, tight corset, dragging around long, heavy skirts, wire hoops, and petticoats? These were
modern times! This was the 19th century! Old ways had to change!
But not even tough, brave revolutionaries like Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony
could put up with the stares. They were laughed at or cursed as sinful freaks in their shortened
skirts worn over baggy pantaloons. Folks called them “bloomers” after Amelia Bloomer. She and
other “dress reformers” were way ahead of their time. Most of them gave up and put on their long
skirts, but not Mary Walker.
For all her differences, Mary had one thing in common with many a young person before and
since: She fell in love with a fellow student. In 1856, newly graduated doctors, Mary Walker and
Albert Miller, newlyweds, opened a medical practice in Rome, NY, but things went badly. Too few
patients wanted to take their ailments to some radical “bloomerite!” Worse, later on, Mary found out
that Albert was romancing other ladies. It’d be years before she could get a legal divorce from the
man she called “the villain,” but really, by 1860, their marriage was broken. Even worse, their nation
was breaking up, too.
Eleven southern States left the Union to form a separate nation, the Confederate States of
America (CSA), where slavery would be the law of the land. But the new U.S. President, Abraham
Lincoln, wanted the rebellious Americans back in the USA, even if it meant all out war. And so it did:
The first shots were fired April 12, 1861, at Charleston, South Carolina.
In late July 1861, the broad streets of the U.S. capital were full of supply wagons, carts,
carriages, and blue-coated U.S. soldiers. Many were still recovering from the first big fight of the
war, a Confederate victory. It happened earlier that month, some 20 miles away, over at Manassas,
VA, at a creek called Bull Run.
Washingtonians noticed that tall President Lincoln looked tired and worried when they saw him
out and about. Still, he’d tip his tall, stovepipe hat to bonneted ladies, doing their best to keep their
hoopskirts from dragging through puddles or worse, in unpaved avenues full of horses. They may
well have scowled at a short, pretty woman, walking swiftly in her outrageous pants. Dr. Mary
Walker, 29, probably ignored them. Like everyone else in the wartime city, she had a lot on her
mind.
Dr. Walker would be speeding to or from the hospital set up in the big, unfinished U.S. Patent
Office building. As an unpaid volunteer, she had lots to do: writing letters for men unable to do so.
Tending to their bandages, fevers, and coughs. Raising money for poor folks who’d come to visit
their sick, wounded sons, brothers, and husbands. Asking important men to let her join the medical
corps as an official Army surgeon. Being told NO.
Women – Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, and young Louisa May Alcott, for instance – were nurses,
not doctors. So ambitious, patriotic, stubborn Mary went home to New York to get more training
and earn some money. How? By giving speeches about healthy fashion and her experiences in the
nation’s capital. Then she went back to the terrible war, unaware that she was heading into the
great adventure of her life.
Sure, there were officers who saw Mary as a pretty-but-pesky, attention-seeker, but they
couldn’t deny the tragic obvious. The war kept producing sick, shattered soldiers by the hundreds
of thousands and they needed care. Mary did her best to give it, at field hospitals from
Fredericksburg, Virginia, to Chattanooga, Tennessee. She met with considerable abuse over her
persistent demands to be made a surgeon – and considerable respect for her hard work.
Mary presented herself at the Virginia headquarters of Major General Ambrose Burnside. in
November 1862, and was taken on as a field surgeon, although still on a volunteer basis. As such,
she treated the wounded at Warrenton, VA, and at the terrible battle of Fredericksburg, in
December 1862. At last, in September 1863, her work became official. Major General George H.
Thomas appointed Dr. Mary E. Walker to the U.S. Army of the Cumberland in the 52nd Ohio
Regiment – a first for the military and a first for women.
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(photo from the US Army Medical Department,
Office of Medical History) |
Mary tailored an officer’s coat down to size. Under her calf-length skirt she wore gentlemanly
trousers. She tied a green sash, indicating her surgeon’s status, around her narrow waist and put
on a jaunty feathered hat. Grabbing her doctor’s bag and a pair of pistols, she set off on horseback
to wherever her services were needed. In makeshift hospitals, sometimes out where bullets were
flying, Mary doctored infantrymen, artillery troops, drummer boys – even civilians who needed
looking after, sometimes behind shifting enemy lines. Most of her patients were U.S. fighters, but
more than one fallen “Rebel” found himself being treated by a little “Yankee” lady-surgeon.
Some folks said that Dr. Walker was a spy. One particular fellow, a Rebel sentry, was so sure of
it that he pointed his rifle at her and cried, “Halt!” Mary was under arrest!
It was April 10, 1864, in Georgia, not far from the Tennessee line. Mary was looking for
wounded men, left behind from the fighting thereabouts, when she was captured. It wasn’t long
before Dr. Mary Walker, prisoner-of-war, was on a train bound for Richmond, Virginia. There, in
the Confederate capital, she was installed in Libby Prison, in what once had been a tobacco
warehouse. Now "Castle Thunder" was home to a thousand-or-so prisoners plus many a rat and
creepy-crawly.
Through the spring and summer of 1864, Mary wrote letters and pleaded for better food for
herself and her fellow prisoners. Cabbage, for instance, to go with their usual bits of rice, peas,
cornbread, and bacon. Less than 75 miles away, tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers led by
U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant and C.S. General Robert E. Lee were dying in battle after battle. In
August, as U.S. General William T. Sherman’s army was closing in on Atlanta, Georgia, Union and
Confederate officials worked out a prisoner exchange. So it was that on August 12, 1864, Dr.
Walker was free.
A flag of truce fluttered over the steamboat that carrying Mary and hundreds of other freed
prisoners down the James River to the Union fort at Hampton Roads, Virginia. She went on to
Washington, to find what her future held. She wanted to go back to the battlefields, but it was not
to be. Until June 15, 1865, when her military career ended, Mary spent her time looking after the
health of women prisoners in Kentucky and orphans and refugees in Tennessee. She gave
speeches, campaigning for President Lincoln’s reelection (he won), celebrated the end of the hellish
Civil War (the U.S. won), and mourned, along with all of the exhausted soldiers, newly freed slaves,
and stunned Americans, when a liquored-up, racist actor, handsome John Wilkes Booth, murdered
President Lincoln.
Less than a year later, on January 24, 1866, Dr. Mary Walker received a letter:
Whereas it appears from official reports that Dr. Mary E. Walker, a graduate of medicine, "has
rendered valuable service to the Government and her efforts have been earnest and untiring in a
variety of ways," and that she was assigned to duty and served as an assistant surgeon in charge of
female prisoners at Louisville, Ky., upon the recommendation of Major Generals Sherman and
Thomas, and faithfully served as contract surgeon in the service of the United States, and has
devoted herself with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and
hospitals, to the detriment of her own health, and has also endured hardships as a prisoner of war
four months in a Southern prison while acting as contract surgeon; and
Whereas by reason of her not being a commissioned officer in the military service, a brevet or
honorary rank cannot, under existing laws, be conferred upon her; and
Whereas in the opinion of the President an honorable recognition of her services and
sufferings should be made:
It is ordered, That a testimonial thereof shall be hereby made and given to the said Dr. Mary E.
Walker, and that the usual medal of honor for meritorious services be given her.
Given under my hand in the city of Washington, D.C., this 11th day of November, A.D. 1865.
Andrew Johnson, President
Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War
No woman before (or since) had ever won the Medal of Honor. Mary would wear it with with
pride for the rest of her life – no matter what.
After the war, audiences in America and abroad paid to hear Mary tell about her imprisonment
and her Civil War service and to see her in her notorious, gentlemanly suit. It caused scenes – even
got her arrested! Some might have given up and put on a dress, but not Mary. “I wear this style of
dress from the highest, the purest and the noblest principle!” She was making no mere fashion
fashion statement. Dr. Mary Walker was determined to be a living manifesto the health, freedom,
and equality for women.
In the years to come, she applied herself to medicine, politics, and lobbying the U.S.
Government for veterans' benefits. Despite her service as a surgeon, it took Mary more than thirty
years of asking before she received her monthly $20. Because of her gender and her nontraditional
training, Mary was never able to make much of a living as a physician. Though she passionately
believed in votes for women, her contrary ways alienated mainstream suffragists. She headed the
National Dress Reform Association, in 1866. Despite her political involvement, party officials turned
her down – twice – when she offered herself as a Democratic candidate for Congress. Still, her work
led to a job with the U.S. Department of the Interior (1882-1883), but her stubborn outspokenness
got her fired. It served her better as a writer and speechmaker.
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Mary Edwards Walker
(photo from National Library of Medicine,
Images from the History of Medicine, B010947) |
At heart, Mary was a crusader. She lobbied the U.S. Congress on behalf of her many causes.
And she published her many views in books: Hit (1871) and Unmasked, or the Science of
Immorality, (1878). In her trademark suit and top hat, she traveled and lectured, even in museum
sideshows for anyone who’d bought a 10¢ ticket. Between journeys, Mary spent more and more
time on her family’s farm, tending her garden, her cow, horse, and chickens. She doctored her
Oswego neighbors. Some, who knew nothing of the peculiar old lady’s glorious past, made fun of
her and pulled pranks, to see her lose her famous temper. Always hard up for money, Mary
dreamed up ways to make her farm pay. A school for girls? A sanitarium for folks with tuberculosis?
In 1917, when the U.S. was about to enter World War I, the elderly veteran invited Germany’s
emperor to come visit. She’d arrange a peace conference. Millions of lives might be saved! Alas,
none of her schemes blossomed.
She was quite elderly when, on one of her trips to Washington, D.C. when the frail crusader
suffered a pair of dreadful setbacks at the U.S. Capitol. For one thing, in 1917, Dr. Walker was
badly hurt in a fall on the Capitol's marble steps. For another, the important men Inside decided
that hundreds of Medals of Honor, including Dr. Walker’s, had been improperly awarded. Did Dr.
Walker accept this judgment meekly? What do you think? Over her dead body would she return her
beloved Medal. Indeed, she wore it to the end of her long life, which came on the 21st of February,
1919, when she was 86 years old.
One can only hope that Dr. Walker heard the news from beyond the grave: That the American
people ratified the 19th Amendment, in 1920. At last, female citizens could vote for their nation’s
leaders. And, in time, they did so, wearing jeans, shorts, and all manner of PANTS.
Moreover, on June 10, 1977, President Jimmy Carter restored the Medal of Honor to Dr. Mary
Edwards Walker. After all, she had stubbornly served her nation - with valor.
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