The failed practice, the contested marriage, the suspended enrollment for joining a men’s debate — these were not random misfortunes but systematic consequences of being a woman in professional life in antebellum America. Walker understood them as such, and the understanding shaped her politics for the rest of her life.
## The War Begins: Volunteer Without Commission
When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Walker was in her late 20s, an experienced physician with no active practice, and she went to Washington.
Her offer to serve as an Army surgeon was rejected immediately. She was a woman. The Army’s understanding of its own needs did not include female surgeons, regardless of credentials. She was offered a nursing role instead. She declined. She had not trained as a nurse; she had trained as a physician. She was not going to accept a demotion to a subordinate role to satisfy an institutional assumption about what women could do.
Instead, she served as a civilian volunteer, without pay, treating patients at whatever facilities would receive her. The first documented assignment was at the Patent Office Hospital in Washington, D.C., a makeshift medical facility in a building converted for wartime use. She worked under Dr. J. N. Green. Green reportedly tried to get formal authorization for Walker to be employed, sending a request to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Surgeon General Clement Finley. Both refused.
She was present at or near the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, working in the chaotic medical response to a battle that produced far more casualties than the Army had prepared for. The experience of treating those casualties in inadequate facilities, without adequate supplies, with the Army’s medical organization overwhelmed by the scale of the need, confirmed for Walker both the urgency of the work and the institutional barriers that prevented her from doing it on equal terms.