Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919 (review)

"I am the original new woman," Dr. Mary Walker announced toward the end of her life, reflecting on an iconoclastic career that began with a medical degree in 1855 and concluded with her involvement in the peace movement during Woodrow Wilson's presidency (209). Sharon M. Harris's new biography of this indefatigable nineteenth-century activist presents a richly detailed account of Walker's engagement with myriad reform movements of the period, including abolition, temperance, public health, women's suffrage, marriage rights, sex education, prison reform, and anti-imperialism. Like a nineteenth-century Forrest Gump, Walker seems to have been present at every momentous cultural event from the Civil War to her death in 1919—missing only the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, for she died eighteen months before Congress granted women the right to vote.

Harris's lucidly written, meticulously researched study captures the combination of moral purpose, extraordinary self-confidence, and sheer gumption that propelled Walker into a life of public service and controversy. Born in upstate New York, she likely heard Frederick Douglass give his first antislavery speeches, provided medical care to Union soldiers at Fredericksburg (overlapping with Walt Whitman), attended some of the first women's suffrage conventions, corresponded with presidents, was friends with political luminaries Charles Sumner and Secretary of the Treasury George W. Morgan, and counted eminent figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as compatriots (if not always as friends).

Walker was born into an idealistic family that, as Harris reports, helped to plant the "Seeds of Radicalism" that would grow into their youngest daughter's lifelong commitment to social reform (1). After obtaining a degree from Syracuse Medical College—one of the few institutions to enroll women—she began working as a Civil War surgeon for the Union army, despite being denied a commission because of her sex. She eventually penned a letter to Abraham Lincoln himself, requesting a role other than nurse or volunteer. She received, in Harris's shrewd observation, "a true politician's rejection" from a president wishing to avoid a "great national debate over women's war efforts" (50). After her military service, during which she was captured and imprisoned as a Union spy, Walker was finally awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor by Lincoln's successor, the first woman to receive such an honor.

After the war, this radical reformer plunged herself into precisely the sort of "great national debate" that Lincoln had anticipated: the women's suffrage movement and the ideological and tactical conflicts among the different national organizations formed to secure women the right to vote. Harris does not sugar-coat the infighting among these early feminists, which saw friendships turn into bitter rivalries. The outspoken Walker, who practiced what she preached about dress reform by wearing men's attire, proved to be a flash point at suffrage conventions, and she was frequently barred from speaking. The chapters in which Harris narrates divisions within the women's movement as they played out around Walker are invaluable for readers interested in the on-the-ground history of the fight for women's enfranchisement at the end of the nineteenth century.

This biography astutely emphasizes how Walker's status as a physician bolstered her activism. Many delicate or controversial social issues could be addressed in terms of health or hygiene, and she frequently used medical arguments to advocate for dress reform, temperance, and more liberal divorce laws. The clever deployment of medical authority is brought out in Harris's superb analysis of Unmasked; or, the Science of Immorality—published in 1878 "[b]y a Woman Physician"—which addressed such topics as sexual excess, masturbation, menstruation, sexual anomalies, rape, and prostitution. In the book, Walker appealed to physiology to support her call for changes in sex roles: Women's dress reform, she argued, was a way to encourage exercise and combat nervousness, while the imperative for women (rather than men) to initiate sexual...