She wore the Medal of Honor throughout this period. It was part of her public identity — both a symbol of her recognized service and a visual element of the persona she had constructed, in which men’s formal clothing and the military decoration she had earned combined to present a figure that defied conventional expectations about how a woman should look and what she should be.
The dress question was not incidental. Walker was arrested multiple times across the decades of her post-war life for wearing men’s clothing. In New Orleans in 1870, officers arrested her for wearing a man’s suit in public. Her response, in various accounts, was characteristic: she was not wearing men’s clothes, she said, she was wearing her own clothes. The clothes she wore belonged to her, fit her purposes, and caused no demonstrable harm to anyone. The legal category of “men’s clothing” was not a physical description of fabric but a social prohibition on women’s freedom, and she did not accept the legitimacy of that prohibition.
She tried to register to vote in 1871, was turned away, and kept pressing the case in ways that put her at odds with the mainstream suffrage movement. Her argument was that women already had the right to vote under the existing Constitution, properly interpreted. This diverged from the approach of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s National Woman Suffrage Association, which was pursuing a constitutional amendment as the route to women’s suffrage. Walker and Anthony disagreed publicly and sometimes sharply. Walker thought the amendment strategy conceded something that did not need to be conceded — that women’s rights required a new grant from men rather than a recognition of rights they already possessed.