What is clear is that the goal Walker had pursued throughout her post-war life — women voting in federal elections — was achieved sixteen months after her death. She did not cast a vote in a federal election. The women who first voted under the Nineteenth Amendment in the 1920 elections were doing something Walker had spent decades arguing they had the right to do.
## The 1982 Stamp and Other Posthumous Recognitions
The pattern of posthumous recognition for Mary Edwards Walker — beginning with the 1977 Medal of Honor restoration and continuing through subsequent decades — reflects the broader cultural process of recovering figures whose significance had been undervalued in their own time.
The U.S. Postal Service issued a 20-cent commemorative stamp in Walker’s honor in 1982, five years after the Medal of Honor restoration. Commemorative stamps of this period were issued for figures considered significant in American history, and the Walker stamp indicated her arrival in the mainstream of recognized historical figures rather than the contested, eccentric-seeming presence she had been in life.
She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2000, an honor that placed her in the company of other figures from American women’s history whose contributions had been systematically undervalued. The Hall of Fame, based in Seneca Falls, New York — the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton had presented the Declaration of Sentiments — is the most prominent institutional acknowledgment of women’s contributions to American history.
A Liberty ship, the SS Mary Walker, had been named for her during World War II — a recognition made during the war itself, when the naming of Liberty ships for significant American figures was both a production milestone and a form of national acknowledgment. Walker was considered significant enough to name a ship after during a war in which she was still not on the Medal of Honor rolls.