The clothing was part of this. Alvah Walker disapproved of the tight corsets and restrictive dresses that mid-nineteenth century fashion imposed on women and girls, believing they caused physical harm. His daughters wore boys’ clothing while working the family farm because dresses were impractical for farm labor. Mary Walker grew up understanding that women’s clothing was not a natural fact but a social choice, and that the choice frequently harmed the people it was imposed on. She would spend the rest of her life acting on that understanding, often at personal cost.
She attended Falley Seminary in Fulton, New York, with two of her older sisters, completing her studies there in 1852. She worked as a schoolteacher in Minetto, New York, saving money for the next step. The next step was medical school, which in the early 1850s was a genuinely unusual ambition for a woman — unusual but not impossible, since the previous decade had seen the first American women break into formal medical education.
Elizabeth Blackwell had graduated from Geneva Medical College in New York in 1849, becoming the first woman in the country to earn an M.D. from an American institution. The path she broke was narrow and contested; most medical schools continued to exclude women entirely for decades. Syracuse Medical College, founded in 1849, was one of the small number of institutions willing to admit women. Walker enrolled there in December 1853.
She was the only woman in her class. She graduated with honors in June 1855, one of a small cohort of formally trained American women physicians — by one estimate, only the second in the nation after Blackwell. She had studied under the college’s founder, Dr. Stephen Potter, interned with a licensed physician, and worked as a subscription agent for Potter’s medical journal to help finance her education.