Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War: One Woman’s Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women’s Rights

Kaminski (Angels of the Underground), a historian and reviewer for PW, presents a stirring portrait of a Civil War surgeon and women’s rights activist, Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919), the only American woman to win the Medal of Honor. Presented by President Andrew Johnson in 1865, the award cites Walker’s “patriotic zeal” in serving as a contract surgeon for the Union Army during the Civil War and her endurance during four months’ detainment at a Confederate prison in Richmond, Va. After the war, Walker advocated for women’s suffrage and dress reform (she believed that traditional women’s clothing was unhygienic and constrictive, and was arrested on multiple occasions for wearing trousers). Walker’s activism sparked controversy, and in 1917 her Medal of Honor was revoked as part of a review that stripped 900 other recipients of their awards. Kaminski attributes renewed interest in women’s history in the 1970s and the patriotic surge of the 1976 bicentennial to the restoration of Walker’s Medal of Honor in 1977. Replete with intriguing tidbits about Civil War–era medicine, the suffrage movement, and 19th-century gender politics, this is a rewarding introduction to an influential yet little-known figure in early American feminism. (June)