In 1917, a five-man board of retired Army generals struck 911 names from the Medal of Honor rolls. Among them was the name of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman ever to receive the decoration. She had earned it in a war that ended more than fifty years earlier — a war in which she had been denied a commission, worked without pay, crossed enemy lines to treat civilians, been captured and held as a prisoner of war for four months in one of the Confederacy’s most notorious prisons, and continued practicing medicine after her release with partial muscular atrophy from the conditions of her confinement. The board’s finding: she had been a civilian, not a soldier, and the new eligibility standards required actual combat with an enemy. Walker, then in her 80s, refused to surrender the medal. She wore it every day until she died two years later. The country she had served would not restore her honor in her lifetime.
That delay — fifty-two years between the rescission and the restoration, fifty-eight years between the rescission and the year the medal was given back — is the core of this story. But the delay is also inseparable from everything that preceded it: the particular life Mary Edwards Walker built, the particular barriers she ran into, the particular war she served in, and the particular ways she refused to accept the terms the world offered her.
## Who She Was Before the War
Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26, 1832, in the Town of Oswego, New York, one of six children of Alvah and Vesta Walker. She grew up on a farm in a household that operated by principles her parents held deliberately and carefully. Alvah Walker was a country doctor, an abolitionist, a Freethinker who built the first free schoolhouse in the district on his own land in the late 1830s. Vesta taught at that school. Neither parent believed that rigid distinctions between men’s work and women’s work served their family, so the Walker children — five daughters and a son — shared tasks across those conventional lines.