This is the memory palace, I'm Nate Demail.

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 telling a field or building a barn.

But he knew enough about the body to know this.

Women's clothes.

This clothes of the 1830s made no sense.

He knew enough to know that tying a woman's torso and 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 petty coats 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 worked to do.

And so his youngest daughter, Mary, would wear what she wanted, pants and shirts and boots,

boy clothes, or she would call them clothes.

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

It was a time of spirits and of spirited women.

The new religions were founded, Mormonism, Adventism, Shakerism, and Ism after Ism after

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