Mary Edwards Walker (1932-1919) was a dress-reform advocate and women's rights activist who served as a physician for the Union army during the Civil War. She challenged the social and cultural mores of the Victorian-era middle class to their limits and in the process "out-raged the sensibilities even of those who believed themselves tolerant and progressive," as Elizabeth D. Leonard points out in her book Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. Yet Walker refused to back off from her lifelong insistence that women deserved nothing less than full equality with men.

Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26, 1832, in Oswego, New York. She was the youngest daughter of Alvah Walker, a farmer, teacher, and self-taught physician, and Vesta Whitcomb Walker, who was also a teacher. Influenced by reform movements advocating abolition and sexual equality that swept through their part of the state during the 1820s and...