She was not, however, a commissioned officer. The distinction between contract civilian surgeon and commissioned military officer mattered legally and institutionally. She was a civilian employed by the Army to perform medical functions, not a soldier with officer rank. The 1917 board’s determination that she was a civilian for purposes of Medal of Honor eligibility was legally defensible on this ground, even if the specific application to her case produced outcomes that the 1977 board found questionable.
The complexity here is real: Walker occupied a category that the legal framework of her time had not fully defined. The Army needed physicians. Walker was a qualified physician. The Army was not willing to commission her as an officer. The Army was eventually willing to hire her as a contract civilian. The resulting legal status was neither fully military nor fully civilian, and the ambiguity in that status has shaped how historians and the military bureaucracy have understood her service ever since.
## The Dress That Was Not Men’s Clothes
The most persistent visual image associated with Mary Edwards Walker is a photograph from sometime in the 1870s or 1880s: a woman in a formal black suit, with a white shirt and black bow tie, the Medal of Honor at her lapel. It is an image that communicates clearly and immediately that this person did not accept the terms that conventional female dress imposed.
Walker began wearing modified dress as a child, in a household where her father discouraged restrictive clothing for his daughters. By the time she was an adult, she was wearing full trousers and a short skirt or coat over them — what reformers of the period called “rational dress” or the “reform dress.” By the time of the Civil War, she was wearing essentially men’s formal clothing. By the time of the photograph, the transformation was complete: she looked, by the visual conventions of her era, like a man in formal dress, except that she described herself as a woman and was recognized as one.