"Twenty years ago, scarcely a man could be found who could hear the words 'women's rights' without immediately becoming angry."

Arrested for wearing trousers, imprisoned by Confederate forces, the first and (still) only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor, only to be struck from the rolls and denied her pension: Dr. Mary E. Walker's biography, like her writing, was marked by an absolute denial of cowardice and a sense of personal obligation to name injustice wherever she saw it.

Walker attended one of few medical schools willing to train women, Syracuse Medical College. She was also able to observe from an early age the operation of political principle in action, as her parents, committed abolitionists, opened their home in Oswego, New York as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Generally inclined to place ethics over diplomacy, Walker was unafraid to fight on multiple fronts at once: Walker refused to wear corsets or skirts that hampered her movements, despite the abuse she received from the public, press, and police. Surviving photographs attest to the author's success as a snappy dresser, from her early experiments with short dresses over trousers to her later years in full masculine formalwear, but her firmest arguments for dress reform — which occupy a significant chapter of HIT — were based on practicality, humanity, and comfort, with aesthetic improvements a happy byproduct of physical freedom. Often identified as a cross-dresser and insulted (later, praised) for it, she refused to cede ownership of her garments to men, conceptually or otherwise: "I don't wear men's clothes," she famously said; "I wear my own clothes."

Among the other subjects discussed in HIT are: Love and Marriage, Temperance, Women's Franchise, Divorce, Labor, and Religion. Often praised for her strength as a polemicist more than for her subtlety as a rhetorician, Walker is in fact much more than a sloganeer. Using her medical authority to bear witness to the prevalence of sexual abuse, she argues that barring women from political life relies on a parallel dismissal of women's personhood and denies that either abuse may be abolished while the other continues. Many of her arguments bolster or rely on the premises of intersecting rights movements; notably, her discussion of marriage based on equality and mutual esteem references Damon and Pythias as the highest example of joined souls, a model for the ideal relation of heterosexual couples: "True marriage of an exalted type must have had just such a joining as these men had, and then the word Divorce can never be found in the lexicon of their hearts."

Read more: Sharon M. Harris, Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919.