On Bloomers

By Sara Catterall, author of Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon

 

Amelia Bloomer saw this coming.

This spring there’s a fashion trend for “bloomers,” the long baggy trousers named for Amelia Bloomer, who went viral for promoting them in 1851. Some current versions are longer and loose; some are little frilly shorts, like an unevolved Pokemon version. 

A recent article in The New York Times called them “unflattering” and quoted a Brooklyn curator as saying that nineteenth century women “somehow started associating freedom of clothing with freedom of choice.”

Early this year, my biography of Amelia Bloomer was published, the first since the one her husband pulled together the year after she died in 1894. After six years of research and study, I can fairly claim to be the international expert on her now. 

And I have to say, where Bloomer is concerned, journalists have been mindlessly repeating each other since 1851. “Bloomers” was a mocking term coined by newspapers that year, which glued this garment to a lifelong editor, writer, and movement leader devoted to temperance and women’s rights. The last thing she wanted was for them to become her legacy. In an interview near the end of her life, she said, “I worked hard for temperance and woman suffrage and hope that I shall not always be remembered just because I wore short skirts and trousers.”

But no number of interviews, letters to the editor, or even the book of her writings that her husband released after her death, could prevent that. And I understand. The trope that feminists are unattractive in every way is alive and well. Despite all these generations of their hard work, it’s still a reflexive attack on any woman who speaks in public.

Bloomer wore and promoted the short dress and trousers for about six years, starting in the spring of 1851. When she first began wearing this ensemble, most called it “the Turkish costume.” It was based on the dress of Ottoman Muslim Turkish women: a chemise and layered coats over long gathered trousers. Radical and artistic Europeans had been wearing versions of it since the early 18th century for political and health reasons. 

Bloomer first read about it in The Water Cure Journal. This was not a fashion publication, or a women’s rights publication. Its focus was alternative medicine. Conventional medical treatments at that time were brutal, and commonly included dosage with a compound of mercury to the point of lasting neurological and organ damage. Approaches that emphasized diet and exercise, loose clothing, and cold water therapies attracted Bloomer because she was chronically ill with severe headaches and digestive problems all her adult life. She gave up restrictive clothing well before she and many other women in Seneca Falls put on the knee length dress and trousers, with sacque coats or cloaks for outerwear instead of shawls, and gaiters over their ankles and insteps. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin, Elizabeth Smith Miller, was the first to wear the long trousers on a visit to Seneca Falls. Stanton was the first to copy her. Bloomer was close behind them. “The new dress” became a common sight in their village, and when Bloomer promoted it in her temperance and women’s rights paper, The Lily, it rapidly spread. Newspaper editors initially called it “beautifully becoming,” and said, “In point of beauty, not costume is equal to that of the Turkish. Its convenience is superior to all others.” 

Some requested pictures. Bloomer had her daguerreotype taken in it several times, and engravings were made. She published some in The Lily, with editorials by herself and Stanton and others that were reprinted with the illustrations across the country, and beyond. Women began to wear it in Ohio and Wyoming and California, some of them at home for work, some for an everyday public dress. 

There was certainly much overlap between this dress subculture and the developing women’s rights movement. But in the 1850s, “women’s rights” did not just refer to suffrage. That was the most radical stance, still unthinkable for many. More people focused on the right of women to own and control property and income, to access the professions, and any work that paid enough to support dependents, to access education above the eighth grade. 

Those who wore this alternative dress might only be interested in their own comfort and convenience. They might be temperance and water cure adherents who did not have much interest in politics. They might draw the line at woman suffrage, or they might be absolute women’s rights supporters across the board. 

When the short dress and trousers expanded widely in 1851, with international fame and infamy for Bloomer herself, the backlash was intense. Stanton would say that it put Seneca Falls on the map. Those who wore it were called unsexed, un-Christian, indecent, and mannish. Songs and dances were written, satirical cartoons published. Bloomer was horrified in private, and stood fast in public, asserting her and anyone’s right to “dress as you choose.”

But to this day, journalists are still repeating and recycling the ideas passed down from that antebellum newspaper scandal.

In one of her many letters to editors in her old age, attempting to correct the record and her legacy, Bloomer wrote that journalists who repeated misinformation about her and centered her life story on the trousers, “may not intend to be incorrect and to pervert the truth, but they do it nevertheless; and the wrong done is the same as though willfully done…I would that future writers would seek to learn the truth concerning me and my public career, or let my memory rest in peace.” 

Buy the book, here.