Bloomers
were invented in 1850 by Elizabeth Miller, a cousin of the renowned
feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The dress styles for women at the
time were extremely uncomfortable and debilitating and made it difficult
to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Dresses dragged the floor
and collected the dirt and muck of the streets, tight corsets left
women deformed with serious health problems, hoops, padding and
petticoats made the whole outfit weigh in at 15 pounds. Miller,
tired of the constrictive and uncomfortable dresses, designed an
outfit consisting of loose pants worn under a slightly shorter skirt.
She and Elizabeth wore the attire to visit Amelia
Bloomer at her home in Seneca Falls, NY one day in 1851. Bloomer
had recently started the first woman-owned feminist newspaper,
The Lily. As a rational dress advocate she saw this as a way
not only to improve the health of women, but also to improve the
status of women by de-sexing fashions and making women’s fashions
more similar to men’s. She wrote articles in The Lily
promoting the fashion, including patterns so that women could sew
their own. She always appeared in public wearing the outfit, which
generated a great deal of publicity and helped her newspaper sales.
Hence, the outfit was named “bloomers.”
Unfortunately, the male dominated press insulted
and ridiculed bloomers. Editorial cartoons mocked Amelia Bloomer and
her followers and depicted them as masculine and crazy. All this is
reminiscent of the current media’s depiction of feminists in
our own culture. When women (or any marginalized group) try to change
the status quo, the media is quick to respond with a backlash so powerful
as to stigmatize outspoken individuals. Needless to say, bloomers
were so heavily insulted in the media that they were rarely worn by
women in public and only gained acceptance as an outfit for bicycle
riding. Of course, we don’t know if women wore bloomers in the
privacy of their own homes. Rational dress reformers finally gave
up on the idea of bloomers and instead focused on changing dress styles
in small increments by keeping the same styles but decreasing the
amount of fabric.
Bloomer’s Lily advocated other women’s
issues as well, such as temperance and the right to vote, and she
regularly published speeches by Stanton and other suffragettes. Bloomer
published The Lily until 1854 when she moved west with her
husband to Iowa. There she became president of the Iowa Woman Suffrage
Society and published the essay, “Woman's Right to the Ballot.”
“Woman,” she wrote, “is entitled to the same means
of enforcing those rights as man; and that therefore she should be
heard in the formation of Constitutions, in the making of the laws,
and in the selection of those by whom the laws are administered.”
