The pattern of deferred recognition is specific to her case in its details but generic in its structure. Recognition deferred long enough that the person recognized does not receive it is not the same thing as recognition given in time. The 1977 restoration was important and correct. It was also posthumous, and the distinction matters.
## Two Hundred Thousand Women and One Medal
The Civil War involved roughly 400,000 or more women in various support and service roles on the Union side — nurses, hospital workers, supply organizers, and in a smaller number of cases, women who served in various other capacities. The organized nursing service, formalized through the work of Dorothea Dix as Superintendent of Army Nurses, numbered in the thousands. Clara Barton’s work as an independent supply organizer and field nurse was widely celebrated.
Of all the women who served in some capacity in the Union effort, one received the Medal of Honor: Mary Edwards Walker. The uniqueness was partly definitional — the Medal of Honor was not primarily given for nursing service, and most women who served in the Civil War served in nursing or support roles rather than in the physician role Walker held. But it was also a function of the specific combination of factors in Walker’s case: the formal contract appointment that gave her a recognized status in the Army’s medical service; the experience of capture and imprisonment; the recommendations of generals Thomas and Sherman; and the presidential authorization in 1865.
The uniqueness has persisted for more than 160 years. No woman has received the Medal of Honor since Walker. This fact is partly a consequence of the history of women’s exclusion from combat roles, since the Medal of Honor since 1917 has been almost exclusively awarded for combat valor in combat situations where women were not present. The integration of women into combat roles in recent decades has not, as of this article’s research, produced a Medal of Honor for a woman in any recent conflict.