She was arrested for it repeatedly. The legal charge was typically something along the lines of impersonating a man or wearing men’s clothes — laws that existed in various forms in various states and municipalities to enforce gendered dress codes. Walker’s response was consistent and philosophically precise: she was not wearing men’s clothes, she was wearing her own clothes. The clothes she wore were hers. The category “men’s clothes” was a social designation that expressed a prohibition on women’s freedom of dress, not a physical description that could be meaningfully applied to fabric and stitching.
This was not a rhetorical dodge but a genuine argument that the prohibition was illegitimate. Walker did not try to fit into a category of acceptable female dress and fell short. She rejected the category as the wrong frame for thinking about the question. The clothes she wore served her purposes — practical, medical, professional — and the insistence that she wear different clothes because she was a woman was an insistence that her purposes were less important than the social convention.
The same logic applied to her medical career, to her marriage ceremony, to her refusal to surrender the Medal of Honor, and to her arguments about women’s voting rights. In each case the established convention said: this is not for women, or not on these terms. Walker’s response in each case was to question whether the convention was justified rather than to work around it.
## The Suffrage Movement and the Walker Divergence
Walker’s relationship with the organized women’s suffrage movement was complicated and sometimes contentious.