Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War : one woman's journey to the medal of honor and the fight for women's rights Cover Image

Book

Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War : one woman's journey to the medal of honor and the fight for women's rights / Theresa Kaminski.

Kaminski, Theresa, 1958- (author.).

Summary:

"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.

Record details

ISBN: 1493036092
ISBN: 9781493036097
Physical Description: 312 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Publisher: Guilford, Connecticut : Lyons Press, 2020.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Intro -- Introduction: "I Will Always Be Somebody" -- Chapter One: Getting to Washington -- Chapter Two: Commission Seeker -- Chapter Three: Volunteer Surgeon -- Chapter Four: Field Surgeon -- Chapter Five: In the Field, In the City -- Chapter Six: Union Spy -- Chapter Seven: Surgeon in Charge -- Chapter Eight: The Medal of Honor -- Chapter Nine: Women's Rights during Radical Reconstruction -- Chapter Ten: Outcast and Erased -- Chapter Eleven: The Old "New Woman" -- Epilogue: The Medal of Honor Restored -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Sources and Recommended Readings -- Sources