The first time I remember learning about Amelia Bloomer was from Shana Corey’s children’s book You forgot your skirt, Amelia Bloomer! This bright and colorful book opens with the line, “Amelia Bloomer was not a proper lady.” This single line resonated with me, a tom boy who was certainly not a proper lady. In fact, I tried to be anything but. As a girl who refused to wear dresses and skirts, the time period before girls were allowed to wear pants terrified me. I cherished my own time period where I had the freedom to put on a pair of overalls or pants instead of being forced to wear heavy pretty dresses drinking tea in the garden. You forgot your skirt, Amelia Bloomer gave insight into the history of pants in American fashion, starting with Amelia Bloomer who revolutionized women’s fashion, popularizing and supporting bloomers in her own newspaper publication.
“Thank you!” was the first thing I thought. This woman, Amelia Bloomer, fought criticism, ridicule and the social culture and gender roles of the time, so that she could wear more comfortable clothing, even if it wasn’t ‘ladylike.’ She played a major role in allowing me to wear jeans and pants today. What she did was not just important for me, but for all women and the break down of gender roles in Western society.
Like me, most people know Amelia Bloomer because of her work in popularizing the fashion style named after her, the bloomers, long baggy pants narrowing to a cuff at the ankles, but she was dedicated to women’s rights throughout her life and worked for woman’s suffrage, the temperance movement, higher education for woman, marriage reform, and other woman’s rights. As a colleague of activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer has an important place as a women’s rights activist in the mid 19th century.
Born in Homer, New York in 1818, Amelia Bloomer was a writer, publisher and editor. Her husband, Dexter Bloomer owned The Seneca Falls Courier, and in the early 1840s, she became a regular contributor to his newspaper, writing about the importance of women’s rights. Her involvement in the women’s movement grew as she continued to write, and in 1849 she attended the Seneca Falls Convention, the most famous women’s rights convention of the time that focused on women’s suffrage.
After the conference, she started her own newspaper, The Lily. The first newspaper in the United States to be owned and operated by a woman, The Lily, focused on women’s issues from suffrage to temperance, education, and fashion. The Lily was very popular, reaching a subscription of over 4,000. Her newspaper was often criticized, however, for giving women the prerogative to speak, when really they should remain silent. Bloomer continued to let her voice be heard by publishing her paper and giving speeches until she died in 1894.
Amelia was able to achieve great things because of her passion and drive, but also because of her husband who supported her and her causes the whole time and was the first person to encourage her to write. She may be remembered as the inventor of the bloomers, but Amelia did so much more than that and deserves a place in our blog as we are "Writing Women Back into History." As a young 7-year-old girl who just wanted to wear my jeans and play baseball, I had a deep appreciation for Amelia Bloomer and her courage to stand up against social gender roles and criticism and promote a revolutionary fashion to liberate women, but now ten years later I understand the larger implications of her work in the women’s movement and dedication to achieving progress.
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