The remaining 47 cases outside the Maine group were individual rescissions, of which Walker’s was one. These were different in character from the Maine cases: they were individual people whose specific awards were reviewed against the board’s criteria and found wanting. Walker’s case was decided on the civilian contractor ground. Other cases presumably involved different factual and legal questions.
The scale of the Maine rescissions tends to dominate how the 1917 action is described — 911 is a dramatic number, and the story of the Maine regiment is itself interesting. But this framing can obscure the fact that Walker was not part of a mass action but an individual case. She was not swept up in a systematic correction of a procedural error. She was individually reviewed and individually found by the board to be ineligible under the new criteria.
## The Clothes and the Argument
The physical practice of wearing men’s clothing — which Walker maintained consistently from at least early adulthood through her burial — was not, in her framing, an argument for the right to dress unusually. It was a practice based on the conclusion that the conventional framing of the question was wrong.
The conventional framing was: there is men’s clothing and women’s clothing, and each sex should wear its own. Walker rejected the premise. The clothes she wore were not men’s clothes; they were her clothes. The category “men’s clothes” was a social designation imposing a restriction on women, not a physical property of the fabric and stitching. If she wore a suit that was cut to her measurements and suited her purposes, the suit was hers, and describing it as “men’s clothing” was applying a social prohibition rather than making a factual statement.