She supplemented the pension with lecture fees and writing income, neither of which was reliably substantial. Lecture circuits of the period could be profitable for established, well-connected speakers, but Walker was not Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass. She was a figure with a distinctive story and a recognizable presence, but she did not command the fees that the most prominent speakers of the period could charge.
The two books she published — *Hit* in 1871 and *Unmasked* in 1878 — did not become popular successes. They found their audiences in the reform community and among people already interested in women’s rights, but they did not cross into broader popular reading in the way that some reform-minded books of the period did.
She also occasionally used her notoriety in ways that generated income: appearing at events, lending her name to causes, the occasional short-term appointment. The specific economic texture of her post-war life is not comprehensively documented, but the picture that emerges from various sources is a woman who was never financially secure and who managed, through decades of work, to sustain herself without accepting the economic dependency on a husband or family that conventional women’s lives of the period often involved.
The financial difficulty was itself a consequence of the same barriers that had frustrated her medical career. If she had been able to practice medicine on equal terms, she would have had a sustainable professional income. The impossibility of doing so on equal terms, combined with the pension that compensated her for a service-connected disability but not for the service itself, meant that she spent the second half of her life in economic circumstances that did not reflect the significance of what she had done in the first half.