Mary, Mary Quite Contrary : Great History

Is it true that upon graduation, all female doctors exit the ceremony with a leather-bound degree in one hand and a glossy copy of Glamour in the other? To a significant degree, televised medical dramas, what with the oodles of cleavage spilling forth and size zero pants flitting around, would seem to indicate this. A pioneering doctor in the United States, Mary Edwards Walker, had her fashion sense quite the other way around, perhaps too far around – she dressed as a man for much of her adult life.

With an apparent tendency to overindulge in one’s own sense of mission, much like Wilkie Collins’s Miss Clack, it appears that by the end of her life, Dr. Walker’s eccentricities caused her an ever-growing state of loneliness. Or maybe aloneness is a better word.

Her missions were noble and accomplishments remarkable. In 1855, she graduated from Syracuse Medical School. As a female doctor, she was unable to initially gain an official appointment when the Civil War broke out, so she worked as an unpaid volunteer. It was in 1863, after administering medical care in battle zones, that she received a formal position. Not only did she care for Union soldiers (all the while in a man’s uniform), she would often cross the lines to care for the southern civilian population. It was on one of these trips she was captured in April, 1864. Her release was won through a prisoner exchange in August of that year. In 1865, after she had left government service, she was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for Meritorious Service, only to have it revoked in 1917 (along with other noncombatant recipients it might be noted), and then reinstated in 1977 by Jimmy Carter.

In addition to breaking new ground through her military service, she spoke out against abuses of alcohol, tobacco, and, prior to the war, the restrictive qualities of women’s clothing. Dr. Walker was one of the first to wear bloomers (kulats gone wild) when they became popular in the 1850s. And in 1857, she participated in a dress reform convention and began writing for Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck’s reformist periodical, Sibyl. In 1866, she was elected president of the National Dress Reform Association. It was around this time that she had taken to wearing a full male get-up: top hat, wing collar and bow tie, pants, and shoes. In fact, she was arrested numerous times for impersonating a man.

She alienated her fellow suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone by making the case that an amendment to the Constitution wasn’t necessary because the “We the People” nondiscriminatory phrasing guaranteed women the right to vote; regulations restricting women to vote in the various states simply needed to be nullified.

In spite of her achievements as a doctor, crusader, and author, there seemed to be a grating stubbornness in her personality that inevitably would just turn other people off. As an illustration, she wore trousers to her wedding, refused to take her husband’s name, and omitted “obey” from the vows. Many marriages can survive when both parties decide to wear the pants, or dress as the case may be. Far be it for to me judge, but the unraveling of her marriage within a few years, which she attributed to marital infidelity, may have had something to do with her seeming unwillingness, or inability, to achieve consensus – a problem pervading many aspects of her life beyond just her marriage.

In 1982, a stamp was issued commemorating her achievements. Sixty-three years earlier, in 1919, she died at the age of 87 after having taken a fall two years earlier, a fall she never fully recovered from. The fall itself is partly metaphorical. The last 34 years of her life she spent on an inherited farm, essentially alone and ineffective as a reformer, the revoked Congressional Medal of Honor pinned proudly to the lapel of her sport coat.