Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck
Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was an influential dress reformer, feminist, and editor born in Warwick, New York. As the third daughter of Benjamin and Rebecca Sayer, she grew up in a comfortable environment that nurtured her independence and critical thinking. After adopting the Bloomer costume in 1849, her advocacy for women's rights intensified, particularly when she faced discrimination for her attire. Throughout her life, Hasbrouck championed various causes, including hydropathy, women's education, and suffrage, while editing the feminist publication, The Sibyl. In her writings, she criticized societal norms related to women's fashion, promoting health and natural living over superficial appearances. Hasbrouck's activism extended to local politics, where she served on the Middletown Board of Education and co-founded a newspaper supporting equal rights. She lived until the age of eighty-two, leaving a legacy of social reform that resonated through her community and beyond.
Subject Terms
Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck
- Lydia Hasbrouck
- Born: December 20, 1827
- Died: August 24, 1910
Dress reformer, editor, and radical individualist, was born in Warwick, New York, the fifth of the eight children and third daughter of Benjamin Sayer and Rebecca (Forshee) Sayer. Her mother came from Bergen County, New Jersey, and her father was a well-to-do farmer, a sixth-generation descendant of Thomas Sayre, who helped to found Southampton, New York. Lydia’s childhood was materially comfortable and, apart from learning domestic responsibilities, filled with horseback riding and reading; in this milieu she developed wit and independence of spirit. When she felt the local school lacking, she transferred to Miss Galatian’s Select School, the Elmira High School, and Central College.
In 1849 she began to wear the Bloomer costume—the recently developed knee-length skirt and pantaloons; her motives of comfort became principled when Seward Seminary denied her admission because of her dress. “This treatment anchored me into the ranks of women’s rights advocates,” she said later. After speaking as a feminist, for dress reform, and for temperance, she became interested in hydropathy, the treatment of disease by the internal and external use of water, usually cold water. In the 1850s she studied briefly at the Hygeia-Therapeutic College in New York, then practiced hydropathy in Washington, D.C. Simultaneously, she lectured on women’s clothes.
In 1856 she moved to Middletown, New York, where she edited the Sibyl, a feminist “Review of the Tastes, Errors and Fashions of Society,” established for her by John Whitbeck Hasbrouck. Hasbrouck himself edited and published the Middletown Whig Press. On July 27, 1856, Lydia Sayer, dressed in her white Bloomers, joined him in a marriage that produced a daughter, Daisy, who lived until she was two, and two boys, Sayer and Burt.
For eight years Hasbrouck devoted herself primarily to the Sibyl, a biweekly until 1861 and then a monthly. She urged medical training for women, more female education, woman suffrage, and dress reform. Women throughout the country expressed themselves in her columns. Hasbrouck herself stressed health and natural physicality; “If only a woman would study the laws governing her physical being,” she wrote in the Sibyl when she began as editor, “instead of the fashion laws to adorn her outward seeming, we would hear less of the catalogue of fearful consequences resulting from civilization.” “Senseless ninny faces and forms” had been “deformed ... by a redundancy of paints, puffs, bows, flounces and laces,” she said. And, radically, she wanted all single and married women to have “freedom in every relation with man”; both should choose freely “their own occupations in life, mingling their works and counsels in every department of life.” Consonant with her search for genuine fiber in social and personal life, the Sibyl’s editor suggested good diets, bathing, and fresh air, and argued against the use of tobacco.
Hasbrouck continued to be a reform activist, refusing to pay local taxes as a protest against the denial of her right to vote (and prompting a tax collector to steal a Bloomer outfit from her house, and advertise it for sale). She presided over the National Dress Reform Association in 1863-64. After the Sibyl’s demise for financial reasons in 1864—a failure to which her determined emphasis on dress reform during the Civil War may have contributed—she helped her husband with editorial work on his paper. She was elected to the Middletown Board of Education in 1880; started a newspaper, the Liberal Sentinel, with her husband in 1881 to champion equal rights; and engaged in local property development. She died at eighty-two in Middletown in a period of social activism many of whose aspects she had prefigured. She was buried in Warwick.
Biographical sources include D. Akers, Sally Sunflower and the Bloomer: The Story of Lydia Sayer (1956); E. M. Ruttenber and L. H. Clark, History of Orange County, N.Y. (1881); W. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980). See also Notable American Women (1971) and the Dictionary of American Biography (1932). An obituary appeared in The New York Herald, August 26, 1910.