Elizabeth Smith Miller
Elizabeth Smith Miller was a notable dress reformer and the originator of the Bloomer costume, which aimed to provide women with a more practical alternative to traditional women's clothing. Born in Hampton, New York, in a socially engaged family, she was influenced by prominent reformers of her time, including her father, Gerrit Smith, a philanthropist and abolitionist. Miller's education involved both private tutorship and attendance at the Friends' School in Philadelphia, reflecting her family's progressive values.
In 1843, she married Charles Dudley Miller, and together they had four children. Miller's advocacy for women's rights was significant, and she was an active member of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Although she gained attention for her design of the Bloomer outfit—characterized by a knee-length skirt and Turkish trousers—she faced substantial societal pushback and eventually returned to conventional dress. Despite the controversy surrounding her clothing choices, Miller's contributions to women's rights and social reform were multifaceted, including writing on rational cooking and engaging in broader philosophical discussions on women's roles in society. She passed away at the age of eighty-eight in Geneva, New York.
Subject Terms
Elizabeth Smith Miller
- Elizabeth Miller
- Born: September 20, 1822
- Died: May 22, 1911
Dress reformer, originator of the so-called Bloomer costume, was born at Hampton, New York, the eldest child of Gerrit Smith, philanthropist and reformer, and his second wife, Ann Carroll (Fitzhugh) Smith. Gerrit Smith’s wealth stemmed from his father’s real estate investments. Elizabeth’s brother Green was born in 1842; a sister and another brother had died in infancy.
“Libby” or “Lizzie” Smith’s father supplied a heterogeneous cultural milieu at his Peterboro, New York, estate, receiving New York aristocrats, reformers, Indians, slaves, and his wife’s relatives from the South. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a cousin of Gerrit Smith, often visited. Elizabeth Smith was tutored by her father and her governess; she then studied arithmetic, French, and philoso-, y in 1835-36 at Hiram Kellogg’s “manual labor school” in nearby Clinton and enrolled in 1839 at the Friends’ School in Philadelphia. Her father broke with the Presbyterian church because of his opposition to slavery, but she received a Presbyterian upbringing.
Elizabeth Smith married Charles Dudley Miller, a lawyer with a socially influential family background, in New York, on October 18, 1843; before the marriage, she warned him that she would not attend proslavery churches. Moving first from Cazenovia, New York to Peterboro, the Millers settled finally in 1869 at Lochland, in Geneva, New York. They had four children; Gerrit Smith, born in 1845; Charles Dudley, in 1847; William Fitzhugh, in 1850; and Ann Fitzhugh, in 1856.
Miller was a reformer of many dimensions, particularly the intellectual. But her greatest reputation came from her promotion of the Bloomer costume. (A similiar outfit had previously been worn and had been praised by the reform writer Amelia Bloomer.) Hampered by her trailing skirts, Miller designed a dress with a skirt four inches below the knee and Turkish trousers gathered at the ankle. Stanton adopted it; Amelia Bloomer publicized it in her paper, The Lily (thus providing a label); and Miller wore it in elaborated form (with cloak and beaver hat) in 1852-54, when she visited Washington during her father’s congressional term. Many women attracted to the costume shrank before public disapproval, and, even for its deviser, the Bloomer dress was somewhat uncomfortable and “uncouth.” She persisted for seven years until she “quite ‘fell from grace’ “ and reverted to tradition, although her father had urged her to continue wearing the costume.
The notoriety of the garment obscured Miller’s wider range of concerns: she was active in women’s rights causes and a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association; she translated French texts for the organization’s journal The Revolution; and she believed, with her husband, in rationalism, in the benefits of social science for governing society, and in the value of the contributions of the French positivist Auguste Comte and other advocates of the scientific method in social life.
Miller joined the American Association for the Advancement of Women in the 1870s, lectured, and published In the Kitchen (1874; revised 1903). Writing about the science of rational cooking and the training of cooks, she joined her domestic impulses to wider philosophical notions: to Comte’s idea, printed in The Revolution, that women’s role was to “mobilize her affective strength to restrain social disturbance” on the one hand, and to “modify the spontaneous reign of material force,” on the other. Miller tried out the Bloomer costume and, when it created a “social disturbance,” she relinquished it. She ended by experimenting in the kitchen.
Miller died at eighty-eight in Geneva, New York.
Miller’s letters are to be found in the Gerrit Smith Papers. New York Public Library and Syracuse University Library. See also T. S. and H. S. Blatch. eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences, vol. 1 (1922); E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (1881); Who Was Who in America, vol. 1 (1942); R. V. Harlow, Gerrit Smith (1939); P. Fatout, “Amelia Bloomer and Bloomerism,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, October 1952; W. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980); and Notable American Women (1971). An obituary appeared in Woman’s Journal, June 17, 1911.