## The Marriage Ceremony as Argument
The wedding of Mary Edwards Walker and Albert Miller on November 16, 1855, was a ceremony that made arguments through its specific choices.
She kept her own name. In mid-nineteenth century American law and custom, marriage involved a woman’s legal identity being subsumed into her husband’s. She became, legally and socially, Mrs. Miller. Walker refused this. She remained Dr. Mary Edwards Walker — both the professional title she had just earned and the surname she was born with. The refusal was deliberate and had practical consequences: maintaining her name required consistent assertion in every professional and legal context where the conventional assumption would have been otherwise.
She omitted “obey” from her vows. The traditional marriage vow included a wife’s promise to obey her husband, reflecting the legal and customary structure of marriage as a relationship in which the husband had authority. Walker and Miller were equal professionals who had trained at the same institution. She was not going to promise obedience to a person who had no superior qualifications, claim, or right to her deference.
She wore trousers and a man’s coat to the ceremony. This was not a surprise to anyone who knew her — she had been wearing this kind of clothing for years. It was part of her consistent practice of wearing clothing that served her purposes rather than clothing that served the convention.
The wedding, in this reading, was not primarily a romantic ceremony but a public occasion at which Walker made clear, in legally binding terms, what kind of marriage she was entering: one between equals who would call themselves by their own names and make no promises of deference to each other.