The birth of the bloomer: women’s dress reform

In 1840s America, women were weighted down by the heavy, long skirts which fashion and convention dictated they wear. The skirts dragged in the mud, restricted movement and prevented women from carrying out even basic physical tasks. Clothes began to be perceived as yet another way women were held back in society.

Enter Elizabeth Smith Miller

of New York , who was inspired by the traditional dress of the Turkish and began sporting a shorter length of skirt with a pair of loose trousers, gathered at the ankle, underneath. Miller’s outfit immediately caught attention, with some marking it as scandalous, but others saw it as freeing and began to copy the style.

Amelia Jenks Bloomer, editor of the women’s temperance journal, The Lily, was impressed by the outfit and began to wear the ‘reform dress’ herself. She wrote about it in The Lily and such was the positive response that she decided to print drawings and patterns for the bloomers, encouraging others to make their own.

As Bloomer began wearing the outfit to her talks on women’s rights and dress reform she became indelibly associated with the garment and the press began to dub it ‘Bloomer’s costume’ and the name stuck. Fellow women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone also began sporting bloomers, aligning the issue of dress reform with the call for women’s suffrage and sparking a craze for the costume amongst forward-thinking women all over America.

But as so often happens today, the furore in the press over the impropriety of bloomers, began to over-shadow the issues the reformers were trying to promote. With regret many of the leading women’s right activists returned to wearing more conventional long skirts in order to keep the emphasis on their message rather than their fashion.

Consequentially the bloomer craze of the 1850s began to fade, but the issue of dress reform persisted well into the twenty-first century. Below is a transcript of Elizabeth Smith Miller’s recollection of the introduction of bloomers taken from the Elizabeth Smith Miller collection of the New York Public Library:

‘In the spring of 1851, while spending many hours at work in the garden, I became so thoroughly disgusted with the long skirt, that the dissatisfaction–the growth of years–suddenly ripened into the decision that this shackle should no longer be endured. The resolution was at once put into practice. Turkish trousers to the ankle with a skirt reaching some four inches below the knee, were substituted for the heavy, untidy and exasperating old garment.

Soon after making this change, I went to Seneca Falls to visit my cousin Mrs. Stanton. She had so long deplored with me our common misery in the toils of this crippling fashion, that this means of escape was hailed with joy and she at once joined me in wearing the new costume. Mrs. Bloomer, a friend and neighbor of Mrs. Stanton, then adopted the dress, and as she was editing a paper in which which she advocated it, the dress was christened with her name. Mrs. Stanton and I often exchanged visits and sometimes travelled together. We endured, in various places, much gaping curiosity and the harmless jeering of street boys. In the winter of 1852 and 1853, when my father was in congress, I was also in the cosmopolitan city of Washington, where I found my peculiar costume much less conspicuous. My street dress was a dark brown corded silk, short skirt and straight trousers, a short but graceful and richly trimmed French cloak of black velvet with drooping sleeves, called a “cantatrice”–a sable tippet and a low-crowned beaver hat with a long plume.

I wore the short dress and trousers for many years, my husband, being at all times and in all places, my staunch supporter. My father, also gave the dress his full approval, and I was also blessed by the tonic of Mrs. Stanton’s inspiring words: “The question is no longer [rags], how do you look, but woman, how do you feel?”

The dress looked tolerably well in walking standing and walking, but in sitting, a more awkward, uncouth effect, could hardly be produced imagined–it was a perpetual violation of my love of the beautiful. So, by degrees, as my aesthetic senses gained claimed the ascendancy, I lost sight of the great advantages of my dress–its lightness and cleanliness on the streets, its allowing me to carry my babies up and down stairs with perfect ease and safety, and its beautiful harmony with sanitary laws–, consequently the skirt was lengthened several inches and the trousers abandoned. As months passed, I proceeded in this retrograde movement, until, after a period of some seven years, I quite “fell from grace” and found myself again in the bonds of the old swaddling clothes–a victim to my love of beauty.

In consideration of what I have previously said in regard to fashion, I feel at liberty to add that I do not wear a heavy, trailing skirt, nor have I ever worn a corset; my bonnet shades my face; my spine was preserved from the bustle, my feet from high heels; my shoulders are not turreted, nor has fashion clasped my neck with her choking collar.

All hail to the day when we shall have a reasonable and beautiful dress that shall encourage exercises on the road and in the field–that shall leave us the free use of our limbs–that shall help and not hinder, our perfect development.’