Temperance advocate and feminist Amelia Bloomer’s bloomers reformed women’s fashion

GIVEN her passion for sobriety, Amelia Bloomer would be disappointed she is remembered for an unflattering women’s fashion.

An illustration of Amelia Bloomer, dressed in bloomers, delivering a lecture on the latest fashion statement at the Royalty Theatre in London in the mid 1800s.

HAD six Maryland drunks not met in a Baltimore tavern to swear off the booze in 1840, temperance advocate Amelia Bloomer would likely have remained anonymous. Instead, the mid-1841 visit to Seneca Falls in upstate New York by J.F. Pollard and W.E. Wright, advocates for Baltimore’s “six reformed drunkards”, encouraged Bloomer’s vocation.

“Intemperance is the great foe to (women’s) peace and happiness,” Bloomer wrote in January 1849.

“It is that above all that has made her home desolate and beggared her offspring … Surely, she has the right to wield her pen for its suppression.”

Given her passion for sobriety, Bloomer, born 200 years ago tomorrow, would likely be disappointed that she is best remembered for an unflattering addition to women’s fashion.

Pollard and Wright collected 23,340 total abstinence pledge signatures on their 1841 tour, when Mary Bull, then a seven-year-old in Seneca Falls, recalled public enthusiasm for lectures on the
ill-effects of alcohol.

“Reformed drunkards were … heroes of society, and I remember the jealousy and envy I felt toward a girl at school who was quite a heroine, as her father addressed crowds every night in his character of a reformed inebriate,” Bull wrote.

“I recall my mother’s face when I expressed the wish ‘that papa was a reformed drunkard.’ ”

Born Amelia Jenks on May 27, 1818, in Homer, western New York State, Bloomer’s father Ananias had been a prosperous clothmaker who fell on hard times. Her mother Lucy came from a Puritan family and joined the Presbyterian church, giving her five children a strict religious upbringing.

Amelia Bloomer, pioneering women's liberationist and suffragette wears her fashion statement “bloomers”.

In 1837 Bloomer became governess to three daughters of Oren Chamberlain, a wealthy farmer in nearby Waterloo. Chamberlain’s nephew Dexter Bloomer, a lawyer and journalist, was a regular visitor and soon became enamoured with Amelia.

At first she found his manners uncouth and disapproved of his use of alcohol. However she eventually recognised Dexter’s intellect and kind heart, and the couple married in 1840. At their wedding the minister did not ask Bloomer to promise to obey her husband. She also decided not to serve wine at her wedding, arguing she had known young men who “started on their downward paths by taking their first drinks at weddings or parties”.

Her refusal to keep wine or liquor at home created marital tension, but after Bloomer urged him to attend meetings of Baltimore’s “drunkards”, or Washingtonians, by early 1842 Dexter signed the temperance pledge. He had initially resisted, arguing he was no drunkard and did not want his name on a roll with reformed drunks. But Bloomer recalled the day Dexter signed the pledge as the happiest of her life.

Dexter began publishing a temperance newspaper, The Water Bucket, in February 1842, and Bloomer used various pseudonyms to submit articles which included a lecture to women who cooked with wine or brandy. “What examples these ladies are setting before their families. Have they a husband, a brother or a son, and have they no fear the example they are setting them may be the means of their filling a drunkard’s grave? Have they a daughter? Their example teaches her to respect moderate-drinking young men, and receive their addresses, and should she unite her fate with such a one, almost certain ruin awaits her.”

Bloomer’s proposal for a women’s temperance newspaper at a Ladies Temperance Society meeting in mid-1848 was eagerly adopted. To be called The Lily, Bloomer and Anne Mattison edited the first edition, a role that then fell to Bloomer for 15 years, with support from Dexter.

The publication coincided with the First Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Seneca Falls’ Wesleyan Chapel in July 1848 by slavery abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, angered after they were barred from the floor of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Their convention’s 12 resolutions included women’s right to vote, to begin US women’s suffrage efforts.

Stanton cultivated a friendship with Bloomer and contributed articles on women’s rights to The Lily. In January 1852, Bloomer changed the paper’s mission from a temperance journal to “devoted to the interests of woman”.

The Lily also supported dress reform for women, then constricted by tight corsets, trailing skirts and layers of petticoats. Stanton indirectly began Bloomer’s adoption of a more relaxed fashion when she introduced her cousin Elizabeth Miller Smith, who visited Seneca Falls in February 1851.

She was wearing “Turkish dress”, or a shorter skirt with full trousers gathered with a ribbon at the ankle, a style recommended by health periodical the Water-Cure Journal.

Bloomer told her readers in March that she had adopted the dress and later printed a description and details on how to make it. By June, popular newspapers had dubbed the outfit the “Bloomer dress”.

Bloomer died in 1894, and in 1895 Dexter published The Life And Writings Of Amelia Bloomer.