| Abstract |
"I will always be somebody." This assertion, a startling one from a nineteenth-century woman, drove the life of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only American woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. President Andrew Johnson issued the award in 1865 in recognition of the incomparable medical service Walker rendered during the Civil War. Yet few people today know anything about the woman so well-known -- even notorious -- in her own time. Mary Walker's relentless pursuit of gender and racial equaltiy is key to understanding her commitment to a Union victory in the Civil War. Her role in the women's suffrage movement became controversial and the US Army stripped Walker of her medal, only to have the medal reinstated posthumously in 1977. |
