Outside the entrance to the town hall in shady Oswego, New York, stands the statue of a woman, dressed in billowy trousers and gesturing towards a medal on her chest. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, posed as an orator in mid-speech, leans on a lectern that bears the winged caduceus of the Army Medical Corps above an inscribed quote from Walker herself.

“I have got to die,” it reads, “before people will know who I am and what I have done.”

Walker died in 1919, but the story of who she was, and what she did during her life, remains largely unknown. Oswego itself is a small town of fewer than 8,000 people, located at the edge of Lake Ontario between Rochester and Watertown.

Today, upstate New York, which skews largely red on election maps, is not known for its progressive political culture. But by contrast, the upstate New York in which Alvah and Vesta Walker raised Mary Edwards Walker and their other six children in the 1830s was just emerging from the decades of religious revivals that gave the region the nickname “the Burned-Over District,” and it remained a hotbed for reform and progressive movements throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Alvah and Vesta themselves established Oswego’s first free schoolhouse when Mary was a child, and they modeled nontraditional gender roles by sharing both domestic and manual labor on their farm. When Walker entered the progressive Falley Seminary as a teenager, she did so wearing the same sensible short skirt and trousers she had worn throughout her youth on the farm, and armed with a sense of her own potential often kept from young women of her time.

In the early years of Walker’s education, a new movement for the liberation of women took shape in central New York State. Known today as the “dress reform movement,” the proposition that conventions of dress for women had the potential to either reinforce or reform not only gender roles but medical problems found expression in a number of groups based in upstate New York as the century neared its midpoint. According to reformers’ critiques, traditional women’s dresses—long, heavy, and breathtakingly tight—constrained a woman’s freedom of movement, collected garbage and dust from the streets, and could even imperil her health by putting constant pressure on her ribcage and internal organs.

In 1848, the women of John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, recently founded a mere sixty miles from Oswego and dedicated to the principles of communalism and experimental sexual relationships that members referred to as “complex marriage,” adopted outfits of short skirts worn over billowy pants to allow themselves more freedom of movement and equality with men. At the same time, the popular Water-Cure Journal of hydrotherapy began publishing proposals for alternative, healthier outfits for women, encompassing the same shorter skirts and trousers favored by the women of Oneida. In 1850, women’s rights activist Elizabeth Smith Miller discovered dress reform and introduced it to her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, along with her neighbor and fellow activist Amelia Bloomer, adopted the short pants that soon took on the name “bloomers.”

By 1853, when Mary Edwards Walker enrolled at Syracuse Medical College to pursue her M.D., the “reform costume” of women’s rights activists had become something of a national joke. Leaders of the feminist movement including Stanton, Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony elected to drop the dress reform issue in order to focus on other pressing issues facing women: political enfranchisement, access to education, and rights within the institution of marriage. Wearing clothes deemed ridiculous by the general public, however convenient and freeing they might be, appeared too great a distraction from such crucial problems.

Walker, on the other hand, quickly gained a reputation in medical school for her unconventionally masculine dress reminiscent of the reform costume. A short skirt over bloomers was her everyday wear, and in spite of the sharp decline in the outfit’s popularity, she continued to wear it throughout her medical studies and after her graduation in 1855, as she opened a medical practice, married and then divorced fellow medical student Albert Miller, and traveled to the Midwest seeking further educational opportunities.

As Walker passed through Iowa and Ohio, tensions across the country mounted, eventually culminating in the outbreak of civil war in the spring of 1861. Seeing an unparalleled opportunity to apply her medical expertise to the care of wounded soldiers, Walker sped to the battlefront, serving at the first Battle of Bull Run and at the Battles of Fredericksburg and Chickamauga as an unpaid, unofficial field surgeon with the Union army. In 1863, her stubborn persistence and success in treating the wounded earned her an appointment as “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian),” making her the first officially recognized female surgeon in the Union army. Throughout her wartime service, Walker continued to shun the long dresses of her peers, finding convenience and comfort in her customary “masculine” dress.

Early in 1864, Walker was captured by Confederate troops and imprisoned for several months until her release as part of a prisoner exchange. Following this ordeal, the Army sent her to experience prison life from the other side, as the female supervisor of a women’s prison in Tennessee. An angry letter she wrote to a superior from January 1865 reveals the chaos of this environment, where women were often imprisoned along with their children: one woman with “two children under 4 years,” she wrote, “would allow them to cry and scream in their filth and wish them dead…. Another was about to hang her niece with a rope to scare her into obedience when I condemned such proceedings.”

While Walker struggled to maintain order in a setting violently opposed to it, the civilian world continued to struggle over the question of gendered social order and the role clothing might play in controlling it. The National Dress Reform Association, founded in 1856 to champion the role of dress in public health even as women’s rights activists rushed to drop the issue, ceased publication of its popular newspaper The Sibyl in 1864, and held its last convention the following year. But Walker, even in the midst of war, maintained her connection to the struggling movement, as evidenced by her correspondence with a dress reform proponent named Addie Hitchins.

In a letter to Walker on February 6, 1865, Hitchins opened with thanks for Walker’s correspondence, but complained of her insistence that advocates for reform dress should back up their speech by wearing the outfits they championed in private letters and in the press. “Perhaps,” Hitchins wrote,

you think so strong an advocate of the costume should adopt it forthwith. If so,
permit me to say, my friend, that altho I know nothing of the circumstances which led
you to the adoption of such dress yet I venture to say that you did not so until you
had built up around you conditions favorable thereto.

Hitchins insisted that, once she too had built around herself sufficient support, she would follow Walker’s example and leave behind her long skirts: “Next fall I have designated as the time in which to take this step.” One can only imagine Walker, newly returned from the horrors of the Tennessee prison to wintry Philadelphia, shaking her head at the suggestion that her radical insistence on reform dress relied on “favorable conditions” rather than personal resolve.

Walker left the service of the Union army in June, and in November of 1865 she became the first and only woman to receive the Medal of Honor.¹ The following year, she became president of the nearly defunct National Dress Reform Association, and continued, despite arrests and ridicule from both opponents and former advocates of reform dress, to wear masculine clothing for the remainder of her life.

Walker died in 1919, in relative obscurity and disgrace. Divided from a coherent feminist movement in support of non-traditional dress for women, Walker appeared not as a radical, but as an eccentric. As her sartorial tastes became ever more uncompromisingly masculine—she often appeared in public wearing a top coat and hat typically worn by male physicians—her advocacy for women’s rights to dress, work, and live as they choose became obscured, as early reformers had feared, beneath the spectacle of her appearance. Today, outside Oswego’s quiet Town Hall, Walker pairs a flowered hat and a tasteful skirt with her trousers. “I have got to die,” she reminds each person who enters the building, “before people will know who I am and what I have done. It is a shame that people who lead reforms in this world are not appreciated until after they are dead; then the world pays its tributes.”

¹ Walker’s name was deleted from the Army Medal of Honor Roll, along with hundreds of others, in 1917. Her medal was restored in 1977 under the Carter Administration, and she remains the only woman to bear the medal.