She tried to register to vote in 1871, was turned away, and did not get the vote in her lifetime. When she died in 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was fifteen months from ratification. The cause she had spent decades advocating had essentially prevailed — but the specific strategy she had advocated, the one that said women already had the right to vote under the existing Constitution and needed only to exercise it, had not prevailed.
## The Women’s Prison and the Orphanage
After her release from Castle Thunder and after the expiration of her Army contract in August 1864, Walker served in two institutional roles that are sometimes overlooked in accounts focused on the more dramatic elements of her story.
She supervised a women’s prison in Louisville, Kentucky — specifically, the medical care at a facility for women prisoners. The original Medal of Honor citation credits her service as “assistant surgeon in charge of female prisoners of Louisville, Kentucky,” and this service was part of the foundation of the original award.
She also led an orphanage in Clarksville, Tennessee, in the chaotic period as the war was ending and the South was beginning the disorganized process of post-war reconstruction. The orphanage work was institutional service in a region where the established social structures had been disrupted by four years of war, in conditions where children whose families had been disrupted or destroyed needed care.
Both roles were extensions of the same medical and humanitarian vocation that had brought her to the Patent Office Hospital in 1861 and to the lines of the Army of the Cumberland in 1863. The circumstances were different — a prison, an orphanage rather than a field hospital — but the basic work of caring for people who could not fully care for themselves remained the same.