episode 76: Mary Walker Would Wear what she Wanted

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A couple of words before we get started.

First, thanks to regular listeners for your patience.

During this last stretch where I have been doing rebroadcasts while I have been spending time focusing on a memory palace book that will be out some point next year.

I appreciate your patience.

This is the last of those repeats for a while with a new episode coming next time.

But beyond that, this is a story from 2015.

It is a fan favorite.

It is a fun story.

If you have never heard it, you might find a new personal hero in the person of Mary Walker.

But thinking about this story from 19th century America now, in the 21st century, it is insane to me.

and infuriating that here in 2023 there are state legislatures around the United States targeting trans people and drag performers and more.

And I'm not claiming that Mary Walker was trans, I do not and cannot know, different times, etc.

But in these times that people are preventing people from getting necessary health care and as we have recently seen in Tennessee, outlawing the most basic kinds of gender expression.

the clothes people want to wear, the makeup they choose to wear, how they do their hair.

It is cruel and it is dangerous and it has to stop.

So for what it's worth I will be donating the money I earned from this episode to the Transgender Law Center and just wanted you to know that.

Here is Mary Walker would wear what she wanted.

This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

Mary Walker would wear what she wanted.

Her father was the first to say it was so.

He was a farmer and a country doctor, although that didn't mean a ton.

Such were the limits of his medical education, which we gather was learned through the books he'd read when he wasn't tilling a field or building a barn.

But he knew enough about the body to know this.

Women's clothes, women's clothes of the 1830s, made no sense.

He knew enough to know that tying a woman's torso in knots couldn't be good for good things like breathing in and breathing out.

And as a farmer, He knew well that hoop skirts and bustles and petticoats and improbable underwear were completely impractical.

In the fields, in the damp heat of an August afternoon, even the strongest man would collapse beneath the weight of all that femininity.

And besides, Mr.

Walker had five children and only one son.

His girls had work to do.

And so his youngest daughter, Mary, would wear what she wanted.

Pants and shirts and boots.

Boy clothes.

Or as she would call them,

clothes.

There was something in the air there in upstate upstate New York in the years of Mary Walker's youth.

It was a time of spirits and of spirited women, when new religions were founded, Mormonism, Adventism, Shakerism, and ism after ism after ism.

A time when spiritualists and mediums claimed dominion over the world of the dead, and when other women began to stake a claim to their rightful share of this one.

When Mary was 16, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B.

Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and other women of the age met in Seneca Falls, half a day's ride from the Walker Farm, and made speeches and declarations and generally drew the dot that serves as the starting point of just about every timeline that charts progress in the lives of American women.

So there was something in the air then and there.

And unencumbered by a corset, young Mary Walker was free to breathe it all in.

Her parents too.

And when Mary was old enough, they encouraged her to move to Syracuse and enroll in the only medical school in North America that accepted female students.

She met a boy there, a fellow student, and the two of them dreamt of the simple life they'd lead after graduation.

They'd find some small town that could use a couple of energetic young doctors and set up shop.

He'd have his patients.

She'd have hers.

They'd buy a little house.

They'd talk about their days over dinner.

Funny things their patients said.

Maybe sit on the front porch counting fireflies.

A simple life.

Familiar even.

Maybe not all that unlike the one you're living or trying to live right now.

But it wasn't right now.

And to want to live that life then, to make a claim for that simple dream, was a radical act.

And the people of Rome, New York, weren't having it.

They didn't want a female doctor.

And it turned out neither did Mary's husband.

He cheated on her.

And the marriage and the simple dream were over before they had barely begun.

In October of 1861, six months after Confederate flag rose over Fort Sumter, Mary Walker stepped through the puddles left in the mud by slogging soldiers, by cavalry, and carts struggling to find purchase in the furrowed road, while wounded men, fresh from the fight, flinched with each juddering lurch.

as the wagons bearing them made their way to the makeshift hospitals spread out across Washington, D.C.

For days since Marion had arrived, she'd crisscrossed the city, the unfinished Capitol Dome rising above the low-slung buildings, keeping her oriented as she went from hospital to hospital offering help.

The Civil War raged just beyond Washington.

The Army medical staff was overwhelmed and desperate for doctors.

But when she would arrive at their doors, they would look at her clothes and her pant legs caked with mud.

and ask her to put on a dress and a corset and enlist as a nurse.

But Mary Walker would wear what she wanted.

And Mary Walker wasn't a nurse.

She was a doctor.

She'd show them her credentials and letters of recommendation, and they'd show her the door.

Over and over, until she found a surgeon progressive and or desperate enough to take her on, pants and all.

For three months, Mary Walker worked as a ward doctor in a temporary hospital in the patent office of the United States government.

Each morning she'd cross the marble floor, beneath the vaulted ceiling, and passed the displays of patent models, the miniature versions of machines and gadgets sent by their inventors to demonstrate their vision, three-dimensional avatars for devices and dreams their makers hoped would remake the world in ways large and small.

And here was Mary Walker, much the same, a model of a type of life still to come.

from a future when women could prescribe medicine and dress wounds and dress as they pleased.

Her boss was impressed with her and when Mary asked him to write a letter on her behalf and asked the surgeon general for a proper appointment, an official job with a paycheck and a military rank appropriate for an assistant surgeon in the Army, he was happy to do so.

But no appointment came.

So Mary left.

And for the next three years she moved from camp to camp.

battle to battle.

She'd find a desperate surgeon needing an extra pair of hands and not caring for the moment whether that pair of hands was attached to a man or a woman.

And for the next three years, she tended to the sick and the injured.

She sutured wounds, removed bullets and shrapnel and limbs and teeth, held cold cloth to feverish foreheads, held the hands of the delirious and the dying.

And for three years, again and again, she would ask for an appointment and proper pay.

in the uniform of an assistant surgeon in the Grand Army of the Republic.

And she'd be told that women weren't allowed to be doctors in the Army.

She couldn't have a rank, and she couldn't wear the uniform.

But Mary Walker would wear what she wanted, and she made her own uniform, with an officer's coat, and the green sash of a surgeon, and the gold-striped pants of, well, the gold-striped pants of Mary Walker.

The male doctors were confused.

Many were offended.

They didn't know what to do with her.

But they couldn't do without her.

And she kept working.

And in one of history's finest examples of dressing for the job that you want, her commission came.

She was named an assistant surgeon for the Army of the Cumberland and sent to the Western Front.

And when she was later captured and spent four months in a Confederate POW camp and then released in a prisoner swap, she was proud to learn that she had been traded for a major.

And at the end of the war, Dr.

Mary Walker was awarded a Medal of Honor for her bravery in service to her country as a surgeon.

She was given the pension of a nurse.

It was patently unfair, but ultimately useful, because she needed the money.

With the war over, with times less desperate, there was no work for a woman doctor anymore.

Even one who was a bona fide American hero.

The world had gone mad for half a decade.

What it needed now, people said, was order and normalcy and propriety, and men to be men.

and women to be women.

But Mary Walker would wear what she wanted.

And what she wore became the cause of her life.

Some women fought for the right to vote.

Some women fought for the right to work.

Mary Walker fought for the right to wear what she wanted.

She was arrested multiple times in multiple cities, not for chaining herself to a ballot box or barring the door to the city hall, but for simply wearing pants.

But still Mary Walker would wear what she wanted.

Perhaps remember that when you throw on some shorts to go for a run.

Or scrubs to remove a gallbladder.

or leggings to walk to class, or jeans to drop the kids off at daycare before you stop off to vote on your way to the office.

Mary Walker lived to a ripe old age, into the next century.

Long enough, I'm afraid, to receive a letter informing her that the rules governing the distribution of medals of honor had been changed, and since she had never been under direct fire, she had to return hers.

But she didn't,

because Mary Walker would wear what she wanted, and she wore that medal every day until she died three years later in 1917.

This episode of The Memory Palace is written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in 2015.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

The show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collection of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, proceeds from this episodes will be donated to the Transgender Law Center.

You can find more about the work they do at transgenderlawcenter.org.

You can follow me on Twitter or Facebook at TheMemory Palace, and you are always welcome to drop me a line at nate at thememorypalace.org.

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