In 1851, a brand new phrase entered the style lexicon: the “Bloomer.” It referred to not undergarments however to what had been identified beforehand by such names because the “reform costume” and the “Turkish costume”: primarily, a brief costume paired with pantaloons, instead of the constricting girls’s clothes of the day. It will turn into related to girls’s rights activists, particularly with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and the girl who by accident bestowed her title upon the garment, Amelia Bloomer.
Though the costume reform motion first attracted widespread public consideration in 1851, it was not a brand new phenomenon. As early as 1826, Robert Owen had tried to introduce the “New Concord” costume to his utopian group in New Concord, Indiana. Resident Sarah Pears, who was decidedly underwhelmed, wrote to her aunt on April 8, 1826, “The feminine costume is a pair of under-trowsers tied around the ankles over which is an exceedingly full slip reaching to the knees, although some have been so extravagant as to make them quite longer, and likewise to have the sleeves lengthy. I have no idea whether or not I can describe the boys’s attire however I’ll attempt. The pantaloons are extraordinarily full, additionally tied around the ankle; the highest garment additionally very full, sure around the waist with a really broad belt, which provides it the looks of being multi function.”
Pears grumbled, “A fats particular person dressed on this elegant costume I’ve heard very appropriately in comparison with a feather mattress tied within the center.” One one who did carry off the New Concord costume nicely was the tall, slender Frances “Fanny” Wright, a Scottish-born reformer who was concerned with the group for some time.
The New Concord group quickly broke up. The Oneida group, nonetheless, adopted a model of reform costume in 1848, and advocates of the water-cure motion started to advertise the reason for costume reform as nicely. In 1849, actress Fanny Kemble was criticized by the press when she supposedly appeared in Lenox, Massachusetts, in what had been referred to as “man’s garments.” Not so, mentioned Amelia Bloomer in her periodical The Lily: Kemble was carrying “a free flowing costume falling a little bit beneath the knees, and free pantalettes of drawers confined to the ankle by a band or twine. This exhibits how very delicate gents are in regard to any infringement on what they’re happy to contemplate their ‘rights.’ They want don’t have any fears nonetheless on the topic, for we very a lot doubt whether or not even Mrs. Kemble may very well be prepared to don their ugly costume. We want they may very well be content material with the proper of dressing as they please, and never dictate to us what we will or shall not put on.”
It was in Seneca Falls, nonetheless, that the costume reform motion actually took off. In 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller, the daughter of rich abolitionist Gerrit Smith, visited her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton at her dwelling in Seneca Falls—the identical small metropolis the place Stanton had famously held a conference to debate girls’s rights three years earlier than. Stanton recalled: “Mrs. Miller came around me in Seneca Falls, dressed considerably within the Turkish model–quick skirt, full trousers of nice black broadcloth; a Spanish cloak, of the identical materials, reaching to the knee; beaver hat and feathers and darkish furs; altogether a most changing into costume and exceedingly handy for strolling in all types of climate. To see my cousin, with a lamp in a single hand and a child within the different, stroll upstairs with ease and charm, whereas, with flowing robes, I pulled myself up with problem, lamp and child out of the query, readily satisfied me that there was sore want of reform in girl’s costume, and I promptly donned an analogous apparel. What unimaginable freedom I loved for 2 years! Like a captive let out from his ball and chain, I used to be all the time prepared for a brisk stroll by way of sleet and snow and rain, to climb a mountain, bounce over a fence, work within the backyard, and, in reality, for any obligatory locomotion.”
Amelia Bloomer, a neighbor of Stanton, promptly adopted the brand new costume and started to advocate for it within the pages of The Lily, and shortly the press was calling the garment the “Bloomer.” The Water-Treatment Journal printed a sketch of Amelia in her eponymous garment in October 1851.
In the meantime, Stanton discovered that her household didn’t share her enthusiasm for her new clothes. On April 11, 1851, she fearful in a letter to her husband that she won’t be welcome at her father’s dwelling, “for Cousin Gerrit says that papa is so distressed about my costume.” Younger Daniel Stanton begged his mom to not go to him at college “in a brief costume,” to which Stanton responded on October 14, “You need me to be like different individuals. You don’t prefer to have me laughed at. You should study to not take care of what silly individuals say.” Almost definitely the lad was not comforted by this sage recommendation.
All by way of 1851, the press stored an eye fixed out for girls in Bloomer apparel, recording sightings in metropolis streets and city squares. The Syracuse Commonplace praised the costume as “female, sleek, handy, tidy, and in concord with the legal guidelines of well being,” and the Wisconsin Telegraph proclaimed, “The style on the entire is suitable, and has some present of widespread sense to again it.” The Brooklyn Night Star reported that some manufacturing unit ladies in Lowell, Massachusetts had adopted it. Against this, the reactionary New York Herald grumbled, “The try of some lunatic and crotchety outdated maids and widows, induced by the socialist philosophers to persevere of their folly, has resulted within the placing on of breeches—referred to as the Turkish costume—by these females who’re foolish sufficient to be led into such an absurd observe.” Satirical pictures abounded.
On the Lady’s Rights Conference at Syracuse, New York, in September 1852, numerous attendees appeared within the Bloomer, most notably Lucy Stone, who had began carrying the costume at dwelling in 1850 and had gone public with it after a few yr. Stanton, who had younger kids to take care of, didn’t go to the conference, however her new good friend Susan B. Anthony was there—the primary time Anthony, energetic within the temperance motion, appeared at such a gathering. Stanton had not but transformed Anthony to Bloomers, however by December 1852, Anthony, writing to Lucy Stone from Stanton’s home, reported, “Nicely, finally I’m briefly skirt and trousers!” Each Stone and Anthony lower their hair as nicely.
However the Bloomer remained the garb of a determined minority. Not even all girls’s rights activists adopted it. Lucretia Mott, one of many older girls within the motion on the time, continued in her regular apparel, as did Ernestine L. Rose and Lucy Stone’s shut good friend and future sister-in-law, Antoinette Brown (later Blackwell). Sarah Gilson, who interviewed Antoinette Brown Blackwell years later, wrote that Brown discovered lengthy skirts a nuisance, however eschewed the brand new costume as a result of she “believed it a mistaken emphasis to trigger a lot dialogue about mere garments.”
Certainly, the press turned more and more hostile to the garment, and people who wore it had been subjected to road harassment and stares. Whether or not it was the pantaloons, the disapproval of the influential (and woman-edited) Godey’s Girl’s Guide, the concern of being conspicuous, the affiliation of the Bloomer with the unpopular girls’s rights motion, or the truth that many merely discovered reform costume unflattering, most ladies continued of their lengthy skirts.
One after the other, girls’s rights activists gave in to public strain. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had donned the Bloomer with such enthusiasm, was one of many first to desert the garment. As she recalled ruefully, “However, whereas the few realized its benefits, the various laughed it to scorn, and heaped such ridicule on its wearers that they quickly discovered that the bodily freedom loved didn’t compensate for the persistent persecution and petty annoyances suffered at each flip. To be rudely gazed at in private and non-private, to be the aware topics of criticism, and to be adopted by crowds of boys within the streets, had been all, to the final diploma, exasperating.”
Having purged her wardrobe of “each quick skirt,” Stanton campaigned for her mates to do the identical. “[L]ay apart the shorts,” she urged Lucy Stone in early 1854. “We put the costume on for larger freedom, however what’s bodily freedom in contrast with psychological bondage? By all means have the brand new costume made lengthy.” Each Stanton and Lucy Stone started to work on Susan B. Anthony, who in March 1854 grimly reported, “I’ve let down a few of my attire and am dragging round with lengthy skirts.” She later recalled of the Bloomer, “I discovered it a bodily consolation however a psychological crucifixion. . . . The eye of my viewers was mounted upon my garments as a substitute of my phrases.” Years later, Antoinette Brown Blackwell recalled, “On one event some years later when among the youthful girls had been attempting to reintroduce the quick costume and had been advocating it at a public assembly, Miss Anthony turned to me with a queer look and whispered, ‘They could do it, however I shan’t. I’ve suffered sufficient.’”
Elizabeth Smith Miller, whose father and husband had heartily permitted of the Bloomer, continued to put on it for some years, despite the fact that she discovered that sitting in such apparel “produced a clumsy, uncouth impact.” Giving option to her “love of the gorgeous,” she lastly deserted the Bloomer, although she prevented corsets and trend extremes. Amelia Bloomer, who claimed that she had by no means encountered “open opposition” whereas carrying her titular garment, step by step laid it apart when the invention of the ring skirt relieved girls of the necessity to put on “heavy underskirts.”
However regardless of its abandonment by its best-known advocates, the Bloomer nonetheless had its adherents. Some girls within the water-cure motion continued to put on it, and well being advocates went as far as to discovered the Nationwide Costume Reform Affiliation. Others discovered the Bloomer helpful on the overland path. Variations of it had been worn in gymnastics lessons or as swimwear. Dr. Mary Walker, who had adopted the garment as a trainer within the early 1850s, wore it for years till lastly shifting within the 1870s to clothes that was little totally different from menswear; in her final years, she even added a prime hat to her ensemble. “I don’t faux to be a dude,” she instructed The Boston Globe in 1898, “and I don’t care very a lot about following the most recent types.”
Sources:
Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Lady’s Rights.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell, typescript of memoirs recounted to Sarah Gilson (Papers of Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell, 1842-1921, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute).
Amelia Bloomer, “Mrs. Kemble and her New Costume,” The Lily, December 1849.
D. C. Bloomer, Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer.
Brooklyn Every day Eagle, June 2, 1851.
Brooklyn Night Star, June 2, 1851.
Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons and Energy: A Nineteenth-Century Costume Reform in the US.
Ann D. Gordon, ed., Within the Faculty of Anti-Slavery: The Chosen Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. I.
Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony.
Kenneth L. Holmes, ed., Coated Wagon Ladies: Diaries & Letters From the Western Trails, 1854-1860.
Amy Kesselman, “The ‘Freedom Go well with’: Feminism and Costume Reform in the US, 1848-1875, in Gender and Society, December 1991.
Sara Latta, I Might Not Do In any other case: The Outstanding Lifetime of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.
New York Tribune, June 27, 1851
Thomas Clinton Pears, Jr., ed., New Concord, An Journey in Happiness: Papers of Thomas and Sarah Pears.
Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences.
“Symposium on Ladies’s Costume” in B. O. Flower, ed., The Enviornment, vol. VI, 1892.
