These roles are not, in retrospect, the most dramatic elements of her story. But they are part of the sustained record of institutional service that the original Medal of Honor citation was recognizing: not a single act of valor but years of devoted work in difficult circumstances for a country that would not give her formal military status.
## The Long Post-War Career: Writing and Lecturing
For nearly four decades after the Civil War ended, Walker made her living and exercised her influence primarily as a writer and lecturer.
She published *Hit: Essays on Women’s Rights* in 1871, a collection of essays that ranged across the interconnected topics she cared about: marriage and divorce, temperance, women’s right to work in professions from which they were excluded, dress reform, the right to vote. The book was not a popular success in the sense of finding a wide readership, but it established her as a writer and thinker with a systematic view of the interconnections between women’s physical freedom (clothing), personal freedom (marriage and divorce), economic freedom (work), and political freedom (the vote).
She published *Unmasked* in 1878, a broader social and political critique. She contributed regularly to periodicals, including *The Sibyl*, a publication devoted to dress reform and women’s rights, and published her “Crowning Constitutional Argument” in 1907, the most systematic statement of her view that women already possessed the constitutional right to vote.
She lectured extensively in both the United States and England. Her English audiences were sometimes more receptive than her American ones. The figure she cut — a woman in men’s formal clothing with a Medal of Honor at her lapel, speaking on women’s rights and constitutional law — was striking enough to draw audiences who did not share all her positions but found her an interesting presence.