Amelia Bloomer

American suffragist

• Born: May 27, 1818
• Birthplace: Homer, New York
• Died: December 30, 1894
• Place of death: Council Bluffs, Iowa

Best known for lending her name to a notorious costume designed for women and an article of women’s underwear, Bloomer was also the publisher of the first American women’s newspaper, The Lily. However, her greatest contribution to women’s rights may have been to bring together Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who worked together for women’s rights for nearly fifty years.

Early Life

Amelia Bloomer was born Amelia Jenks, the youngest daughter of the six children born to Ananias Jenks, clothier, and Lucy Webb of Rhode Island. Both her parents came from New England Puritan stock. Her mother was a devout member of the Presbyterian Church. Amelia’s earliest recollections were of the family’s pleasant Homer, New York, home, to which “Indians” occasionally came to trade.

Amelia attended the local school and at the age of seventeen was hired as a teacher in Clyde in New York’s Wayne County. She taught there for only one term, however, and then went to live with her older married sister, Elvira, in Waterloo. At the age of nineteen, she was employed as a governess to the three children of Oren Chamberlain. During three years at that post, she met a young Quaker law student and former teacher, Dexter C. Bloomer. On April 15, 1840, they were married by the Reverend Samuel H. Gridley, the Presbyterian clergyman of the village. Amelia often noted that the word “obey” had been deleted from her marriage vows. At the time of the marriage, Bloomer was a partner of Isaac Fuller in a Seneca Falls printing business.

Life’s Work

Amelia and her husband settled in Seneca Falls. As editor of the only Whig newspaper in the county, Dexter Bloomer was active in the 1840 presidential campaign that pitted General William Henry Harrison and Martin Van Buren against each other. His political activism gradually influenced Amelia to develop an interest in politics as well as activity in the temperance movement. Under her husband’s urging, Amelia wrote regular columns in his newspaper and other publications, using a series of pseudonyms rather than her own name. Both Amelia and her husband joined the Episcopal Church, in which Amelia was not hesitant about speaking out against certain biblical passages that she believed were strained and unnatural about women.

Although Amelia attended the Seneca Falls Convention that was sponsored by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and several other women of the village in 1848, she signed neither the resolutions nor the declaration of independence of the women’s rights convention. Up until that point, her interests centered on the temperance movement; when the Daughters of Temperance formed in 1848, she became an officer in the new organization.

In 1849, Amelia launched The Lily , a newspaper that she intended to be about temperance. The Women’s Rights Historical Park credits Amelia Bloomer as the editor and publisher of the first American women’s newspaper. One of Bloomer’s earliest supporters was Susan B. Anthony, a Rochester school teacher, and an early contributor of articles was Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In the spring of 1850, an important antislavery meeting was held in Seneca Falls whose speakers included the abolitionist newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison and the English orator George Thompson. Also active in that movement was Susan B. Anthony, who attended the antislavery meeting as the guest of Amelia, who introduced her to Stanton. That fortuitous meeting started a lifelong friendship between Anthony and Stanton that led to their working together for women’s rights for nearly half a century. Married and the mother of a growing family, Stanton was the writer; Anthony, who was single by choice, was the traveler and orator. Both gave credit to Bloomer for their life’s work.

Over time, Bloomer became increasingly interested in the fight for women’s rights and used The Lily to support women’s property rights, along with the temperance movement, and gradually increased her support of the woman suffrage movement. She also traveled to several states to speak on those two issues. However, the incident that was to bring Bloomer lasting fame occurred early in 1851. No one is sure exactly who invented the “Bloomer costume,” but the design has been attributed by some historians to Elizabeth Smith Miller, who wore the costume while visiting the Stantons. The outfit consisted of a skirt that came either a little above or below the knees, over full “Turkish” trousers cuffed at the ankle. Both Stanton and Bloomer abandoned their tight corsets and heavy petticoats and adopted the new, loose and comfortable dress. Bloomer was pictured wearing it in The Lily, and she and the outfit were featured in The New York Times and other publications in America and England as she traveled to the World Temperance Convention in New York City and to meetings in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other cities. Afterward, her name became synonymous with the distinctive costume.

In 1853, the Bloomers moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where Dexter bought the weekly family newspaper Western Home Visitor, of which Amelia became assistant editor. The paper was devoted to morality, temperance, reform and women’s rights. In addition to editing her husband’s newspaper, Amelia continued to write, speak publicly, and edit The Lily. Putting into practice what she believed, she hired a woman typesetter. When the male typesetter refused to work in the same place with the women, the Bloomers gave them an ultimatum. After the men walked out, Amelia hired more female typesetters—all of whom were teetotalers.

In July, 1854, Dexter sold his interest in his newspaper. When he decided to settle in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where no printing facilities existed, Amelia sold The Lily to Mary A. Birdsall of Richmond, Indiana, where it lasted only a few years longer. While the Bloomers waited in St. Joseph, Missouri, for a steamboat to take them up the Missouri River, Amelia was spotted wearing the “Bloomer costume” and was carried off to make a speech, which was well reported in the local paper. Shortly after arriving in Council Bluffs, however, she abandoned the comfortable costume for the fashionable new whaleboned hoop skirt. In the East, the Bloomer costume had become discredited. Amusement turned to ridicule and then to viperous attacks in legislatures and newspapers, associating wearers with socialists and revolutionaries, and calling them “unsexed women,” “semi-men,” and “hermaphrodites.” Women activists decided their cause was more important than their comfort, and went back to traditional dress.

Meanwhile, Dexter Bloomer opened a law office specializing in farm issues. The childless couple then adopted two children, a brother and sister. There was no Episcopal Church in Council Bluffs, so Amelia spoke at the Methodist and Congregational churches on women’s rights and was asked by a member of the Nebraska Territory legislature to speak to that body, which she did in January, 1856. She received loud applause and favorable reporting in Omaha newspapers. Afterward, she often traveled to Omaha and other cities to speak, urging Nebraska women to take advantage of their legal right in that territory to own property. At the same time, she also remained active in the temperance movement and joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). When Anthony, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and other activists visited Council Bluffs, they were guests in the Bloomer home. In 1870, she was a charter member and the first president of the Council Bluffs woman suffrage society, and was named first vice president of the newly formed Iowa Woman’s State Suffrage Society in 1871. In 1887, she was asked by Stanton and Anthony to write the chapter on Iowa suffrage activity for their history of woman suffrage.

In 1890, the Bloomers celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. In addition to the more than one hundred guests who attended the celebration, letters and telegrams came from prominent people all over the country. Four years later, when Amelia Bloomer died at the age of seventy-six after a brief illness, messages again came to her family from all over. On her tombstone is the inscription, “A pioneer in woman’s enfranchisement.”

Significance

Besides her own active work for more than fifty years in temperance, women’s rights, and church work, and the epitaph on her tombstone, Amelia Bloomer is memorialized on a plaque explaining the three-statue sculpture that stands on East Bayard Street overlooking Van Cleef Lake in Seneca Falls. Two of the women are dressed in the Bloomer costumes, and the plaque explains

In May 1851, there was a chance encounter on the streets of Seneca Falls which forever altered the struggle for women’s rights. Amelia Jenks Bloomer introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The friendship that was forged between Stanton and Anthony gave direction and momentum to the seventy-two year struggle for women’s suffrage which culminated on August 26, 1920 in the passage of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Neither woman lived to see this happen.

Bloomer herself also did not live long enough to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. However, her work was far more significant than giving her name to a liberating but short-lived costume for nineteenth century women, and to the style of women’s underwear and gym shorts that still bears her name.

Bibliography

Beale, Irene A. Genesee Valley Women 1743-1985. Geneseo, N.Y.: Chestnut Hill Press, 1985. The table of contents names Elizabeth Miller, dress reformer, but information about Bloomer is contained in the short selection.

Bloomer, Amelia Jenks. Hear Me Patiently: The Reform Speeches of Amelia Jenks Bloomer. Edited by Anne C. Coon. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Collection of Bloomer’s speeches, exploring women’s lives and issues from 1850 to 1880. Coon portrays Bloomer as a shy women who was thrust into public life by her commitment to reform and endorsement of a new style of dress.

Bloomer, D. C. Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer. 1895. New York: Shocken Books, 1975. Written by Amelia’s husband, this extensive biography is the source from which many of the selections in women’s history books are taken.

Whitton, Mary Ormsbee. These Were the Women: The Story of Women Who Helped Make American Culture, 1776-1860. New York: Hastings House, 1954. Contains three pages with a great deal of information about Bloomer that is based on Dexter Bloomer’s biography.