She supported women’s suffrage in the most basic sense: she believed women had the same right to vote as men and worked toward the realization of that right for decades. She testified before Congress multiple times on the subject, in 1912 and 1914. She ran, unsuccessfully, for the United States Senate in 1881 and for Congress in 1890. She organized and spoke and wrote on the question throughout her post-war life.
The complication was strategic. The mainstream suffrage movement, led through the National Woman Suffrage Association by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, pursued a constitutional amendment as the route to women’s suffrage — what eventually became the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920. Walker disagreed with this approach. Her argument was that the existing Constitution, properly interpreted, already gave women the right to vote. A constitutional amendment was not necessary; it was a capitulation to the wrong argument. Women did not need a new grant of rights from men because their rights did not depend on men’s permission.
This was not a frivolous position — it was a serious constitutional argument that some legal scholars found worth engaging with. But it was a minority position in the suffrage movement, and it put Walker at odds with the organizations and leaders who had the most influence and resources. Anthony and Walker had a difficult relationship; Walker’s methods were considered too extreme by some in the movement, and her refusal to align with the amendment strategy made her a marginal figure in the movement’s internal politics.