This is not purely semantic. Walker’s argument was that the restriction on women’s dress was a form of control over women’s bodies and women’s freedom of movement that served no legitimate purpose and caused real harm. Tight corsets and restrictive dresses limited women’s physical capacity, made physical labor and active professional work more difficult, and imposed a visual and practical marker of women’s subordinate social status. The reform dress movement of which Walker was a part argued for clothing that allowed women to move freely, work effectively, and present themselves in professional settings without the physical constraints that conventional women’s fashion imposed.
Walker was making this argument in public, visibly, every day she appeared in a suit and a bow tie and the Medal of Honor. The argument was not abstract. It was embodied in her choices about how she moved through the world.
The arrests for wearing men’s clothing were the legal system’s enforcement of the conventional framing. Walker refused to accept the enforcement. She was not hiding; she did not change her clothing to avoid arrest. She continued wearing what she wore, was arrested, argued that the charge was illegitimate, and continued.
## Writing and Financial Reality
The post-war decades for Walker were financially difficult in ways that the accounts focused on her advocacy work sometimes understate.
The disability pension — $8.50 per month rising to $20 in 1899 — was not enough to live on comfortably. Walker was not independently wealthy. The failed joint medical practice with Miller had not generated savings. The post-war private practice she attempted faced the same barriers the pre-war practice had, compounded now by her unusual public persona, which made her a figure of controversy rather than a trusted neighborhood doctor.