For this month’s Badass Woman, I am going way outside my comfort zone thanks to a podcast i listen to regularly called The History Chicks. (Definitely check them out if you haven’t already!) Normally I do women who interest me, or whom I profoundly identify with, but when I heard Mary Edwards Walker’s story, I couldn’t not share it here as well.
Born in upstate New York in 1832, Walker is the only woman to this day to have been awarded the Medal of Honor. She went to medical school at Syracuse Medical College, something out of the ordinary for a woman to do in that time. This is due to the way she was raised by her parents: free thinkers, they taught both their sons and their daughter to question gender roles and the restrictions faced by various groups of people. They divided farm work equally among both the boys and girls, and taught all of their children independence and a sense of justice.
After receiving her medical degree, she started a private practice but soon began volunteering when the Civil War broke out. Although the gender discrimination of the time only allowed her to volunteer as a nurse, Walker was not discouraged. After obtaining another degree from the New York Hygeio-Therapeutic College, she was finally appointed assistant surgeon, and continued with her war efforts. She was held as a prisoner of war by the Confederate army for five months, and for this and all her work during the war, she received the Medal of Honor. She is perhaps most famous for refusing to return the medal when the requirements to be awarded it changed, wearing it until her death in 1919. The medal was posthumously re-awarded to her by then-President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
In her later years, Walker toured the country lecturing on subjects such as dress reform for women–she often wore men’s clothing–and women’s suffrage, which she believed was inherent in the Constitution itself. She is remembered as an ardent feminist who broke ground in her field and made the way for more women to study medicine and become doctors.