Mary Edwards Walker — Storied No. 044

In 1917 an Army board went through the Medal of Honor roll and struck off 911 names. One of them belonged to an eighty-four-year-old doctor living on a farm outside Oswego, New York. She had earned hers at Bull Run and Chickamauga, in four months of Confederate imprisonment, and by the signed order of President Andrew Johnson. The board's objection was procedural: she had never been a commissioned officer, because the Army of 1863 had no rank to give a woman. Mary Edwards Walker declined to send the medal back. She pinned it on every day for the two years of life she had left.

Almost everything she did had first been declared not permitted. She took a medical degree when American women barely had them, was refused an Army surgeon's post and served without pay until the Army relented, walked into enemy lines to treat civilians, and was arrested more than once for the crime of wearing trousers. She died 544 days before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. It took the Army sixty years to admit that taking her medal had been unjust.

Oswego to Oswego

The lifeline

1832

Born on the family's Bunker Hill farm near Oswego, New York, to parents who let their daughters skip corsets

1855

Takes her MD at Syracuse Medical College — among the first American women to hold one

1863

Hired by the Army of the Cumberland: the first woman surgeon in the United States Army

1864

Seized on 10 April crossing the lines to treat civilians; held four months in Castle Thunder, Richmond

1865

Andrew Johnson signs her Medal of Honor on 11 November — the only one ever given to a woman

1919

Dies at 86 with her name still struck from the roll; buried in a black suit under an American flag

By the numbers

The measure of her

Woman among the nearly 3,500 Medals of Honor awarded since 1861 — still, today, the only one

4 mo

Held as a prisoner of war in Castle Thunder, Richmond, before being exchanged for a Confederate surgeon

911

Names struck from the Army's Medal of Honor Roll in the 1917 review — hers among them

544

Days between her death and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment she had argued for since 1871

What she did anyway

The service

1861

Turned away, and serves regardless. Refused an Army surgeon's commission and offered a nurse's post instead, she declines the demotion and works unpaid — at First Bull Run on 21 July, then at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington.

1862–63

Unpaid field surgeon near the front at Fredericksburg, and at Chattanooga among the wounded of Chickamauga.

Sept 1863

Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon, Army of the Cumberland — the first woman the U.S. Army employed as a surgeon. Later appointed assistant surgeon of the 52nd Ohio Infantry.

1864–65

After her release, she supervises a women's prison in Louisville, Kentucky, and runs an orphanage in Tennessee.

1871

Publishes Hit, a book of essays on women's rights — and tries to register to vote, and is refused.

1907–14

Publishes Crowning Constitutional Argument, holding that the Constitution already enfranchised women, and testifies on suffrage before House committees in 1912 and 1914.

Taken away, given back

Recognition

In her lifetime

Rejected as an Army surgeon in 1861 because she was a woman
Never commissioned — the medal was issued precisely because no officer's rank could be conferred on her
Arrested more than once for wearing trousers, including in New Orleans in 1870
A disability pension of $8.50 a month for the atrophy she brought home from prison; raised to $20 only in 1899
Struck from the Medal of Honor Roll in 1917, at 84 — she kept and wore the medal anyway

Since

1977: an Army review board called the rescission unjust, and President Jimmy Carter restored her medal
She remains the only woman among all Medal of Honor recipients
A 20¢ U.S. postage stamp, first issued in Oswego on 10 June 1982
2024: her likeness on the American Women Quarter — medal on her chest, surgical kit in hand
A Virginia Army post was named Fort Walker for her in 2023; in June 2025 it was renamed again

The place that made her

Oswego, New York

Her parents bought a farm above Lake Ontario three months before she was born and raised seven children there as free thinkers, told to question everything. Her father Alvah, a carpenter, cleared the land and built the town's first schoolhouse on it so that his daughters would be educated alongside his son. She inherited the farm, came back to it between campaigns in Washington, and is buried a few miles away.

33 acres

The Bunker Hill farm, settled by her family months before her birth

1 school

Built by her father on his own land, so his daughters could learn