The Bloomer Girls: America's Dress Reform Movement of the 1850s
By Nancy Wolfe

Masthead of The Sibyl, a magazine of the Women's Dress Reform movement.

I became interested in the story of "The Bloomer Girls" when my husband, Scott, mentioned an article he'd run across in the Galena Daily Gazette from just after the Civil War. I don't remember the exact details, but they were something like this: A lady dressed in the "Bloomer Costume" was traveling up the Mississippi by steamboat when it docked in East Dubuque to take on supplies. Not wanting to waste a beautiful day, she decided to climb the bluff and pick wildflowers. She was spotted by a local constable who felt it was his duty to arrest her for "disturbing the peace". Fortunately she was released and allowed to re-board the steamboat.

Many of us are familiar with the term "Bloomer Girls" or at least the word "bloomer". But where did the term come from, and why? To answer that, we have to go back over 150 years to Seneca Falls, New York, the home of Amelia Jenks Bloomer.

On a spring day in 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller (daughter of abolitionist Gerrit Smith) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia Bloomer strode through Seneca Falls in short skirts and "Turkish trousers", and unleashed a firestorm of controversy. The popular press delighted in the sight of three middle class white women wearing pantaloons, and the New York Times, the Boston Carpet Bag, and the Chicago Tribune all reported on the incident.

Several names were suggested for the outfits. Women's rights advocates preferred "freedom dress," but the press preferred "bloomers." Bloomer didn't design the outfit, nor was she the first to wear it, but it was her name that became forever linked with the garment. It may be because of her high profile as a newspaper editor.

The costume they wore was actually created by Elizabeth Smith Miller, who gave conflicting reasons through the years as to her reason for doing so. One explanation was that she became so frustrated at trying to garden in the long skirts. More likely it was from hearing about similar outfits being worn at health spas, or at the utopian community near her father's home—–the Oneida Perfectionists.

Even though the outfits were being privately worn at health spas and religious and utopian communities for several years, it was the ladies of Seneca Falls that were the first to wear them publicly.

Wearing her new short skirt, Miller "hastened to Seneca Falls to visit [her] cousin, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton." Stanton quickly copied the costume. Miller and Stanton showed their outfits to Bloomer and persuaded her to join them in their new style of dress. However, it took Stanton over six months to persuade Susan B. Anthony to adopt the costume.

This caricature entitled "Woman's Emancipation," appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in August of 1851. It was accompanied by text which made fun not only of bloomers, but of some of the other reforms in which women were involved. It appeared a month after Harper's featured "Turkish costume" on its pages.

She eventually gave in because "I can see no business avocation in which a woman, in her present dress, can possibly earn equal wages with a man." Anthony hoped to be an example to working women in the United States by wearing a costume that was more functional than beautiful.

Harper's New Monthly Magazine featured the "Turkish" costume and considered the possibility that short dresses and pantaloons could be the next fashion rage. Godey's Lady's Book refused to comment on the outfit. Many magazines published satirical cartoons. In 1852, the New York Times reported "these ladies assert their claim to rights, which we of bifurcated raiment are charged with usurping. This claim conflicts with, and if secured, will tend to diminish the rights of masculine mankind...he must be blind who does not perceive...a storm that shall eventually rob manhood of all its grand prerogatives."

Male opponents launched a counter-attack. Women were subjected to jeering laughter, physical attacks and satirical poems:

Now then, my dear, We'll smoke and cheer and drink our lager beer; We'll have our latch-keys, stay out late at night; And boldly we'll assert our female rights; While conquered men, our erewhile tyrant foes, Shall stay at home and wear out cast-off clothes, Nurse babies, scold the servants, get our dinners; "Tis all that they are fit for, wretched sinners!

For the sensitive Susan B. Anthony, wearing freedom dress was especially difficult. All of the women experienced harsh treatment, but because Anthony had a higher profile, she was subjected to the most ridicule.

Surprisingly, in the midst of all the mostly negative press coverage, a group of artists rendered flattering portrayals of Amelia Bloomer in the costume, and sheet music was produced romanticizing the "Bloomer Girls."

Caption reads: "Man in his natural position, and woman where she ought to be" From "Yankee Notions" magazine, Aug. 1851.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton took public comments with a grain of salt. For her, the effect on her family was the hardest for her to take. Her son refused to let her visit him at school wearing pantaloons and short dress and her husband barely won his second term to the New York Senate because of slogans such as "Twenty tailors take the stitches, Mrs. Stanton wears the breeches."

Feminists came to realize that their style of dress was drawing attention from the issues they considered important—–employment, education and suffrage. Once having started, however, they kept to the style of dress for seven years. Stanton said: "Had I counted the cost of the short dress, I would never have put it on; now, however, I'll never take it off, for now it involves a principle of freedom." "Never" for her came in 1853 when Stanton was the first woman's rights leader to return to long dresses.

Both Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had long given up reform dress by the time they attended the woman's suffrage convention in Galena in 1869.

After 1879, few dress reformers continued to wear short skirts and pantaloons. The National Dress Reform Association had disbanded in the mid-1860s. By the 1890s, "bloomers" had become a permanent part of the bicycling costume. During World War I, women who served the military as truck drivers, and those who took civilian jobs formerly held only by men, took up trousers. And pants for women were here to stay.

Note: I was inspired to write this article after reading the book "Pantaloons and Power: A Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States," by Gayle V. Fischer. Anyone interested in more details of the dress reform movement, would enjoy this book.