Sara Catterall. Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon. Belt Publishing, 2025. 304 pp. Paperback $26.00.
A biography of Amelia Bloomer is long overdue. While her friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are still revered as the mothers of the women’s rights movement, Bloomer is perhaps best remembered as the pantsuited punchline to a Punch cartoon captioned “Bloomerism—An American Custom,” depicting two mannish women smoking cigars as they parade through the streets in knee-length full skirts worn over voluminous trousers. It’s a wildly inaccurate record of bloomers, and equally unfair to Bloomer herself—and it’s just one of the many myths about her that have been perpetuated, whether through malice or carelessness.
Bloomer did not invent the costume that became inextricably associated with her name; indeed, she laughed out loud the first time she saw it on her fellow suffragist Elizabeth Smith Miller, Stanton’s cousin. Bloomer was many things: a writer, editor, lecturer, temperance activist, and even deputy postmaster. But a fashion rebel she was not. Her greatest fear was that she would be remembered for the short years she spent wearing “the short dress” and not for her tireless social activism. Sara Catterall’s carefully researched but exceptionally readable book, Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon, rights that wrong, while also leaving the reader with the nagging suspicion that her flirtation with trousers really was the most interesting thing about Bloomer. She was admirably broadminded yet also pious and, in many ways, deeply conventional—a “quiet village wife” whose unlikely radicalization was born of a desire to do good and be useful rather than burn it all down (16). Unlike many of her fellow suffragists, Bloomer had little formal education and did not come from wealth. Her main qualifications for joining the burgeoning women’s rights movement were a supportive husband who worked in the newspaper industry; proximity to Seneca Falls at a time when it was becoming a hub of trade and progressive politics; and a steadfast commitment to temperance.
Like abolition, labor rights, or dress reform, temperance was a feminist issue in the nineteenth century. Alcohol abuse was “the opioid epidemic of the day,” writes Catterall. “Between 1800 and 1830, Americans drank more alcohol per capita than they ever had before or ever would again” (15). And women and children paid the price, having little social, financial, or legal protection from abusive or insolvent men. But the cause was no sexier then than it is now: unlike slavery, which was irrefutably evil and largely confined to the South, moderate drinking was a minor vice in which one’s friends and neighbors were likely to indulge.
Fortunately, women had more time for moral crusading than ever before. “As factory-made cloth became more commonly available after 1821, the labor saved for rural women was substantial, and it gave them more time for church organizations and reading” (2). But the editorials and petitions of nonvoters ultimately carried little weight. Bloomer seems to have come around to the idea of suffrage as a way to further her temperance goals, rather than an end in itself.
As editor and chief author of the first newspaper for and by women—The Lily, a name she found insipid—Bloomer left behind considerable writings that give a window into her life and times. She shared many of the prejudices of her era: a dim view of Italians and Irishmen, an interest in phrenology, and romantic notions about Native Americans. Like many a modern feminist, she was interested in alternative medicines, thanks to her own chronic poor health (probably due to malaria, which was only exacerbated by harmful treatments for it) and the death of her sister in childbirth.
The Lily, a journal “devoted to temperance and literature.” (Public Domain.)
Bloomer’s rigid morality can come across as scolding in the pages of The Lily, which advertised itself as “A Monthly Journal, Devoted to Temperance and Literature.” But at the same time, Catterall points out, she “endorsed property destruction and arson, and framed women’s disfranchisement as ‘tyranny’ and ‘taxation without representation’” (38). She even advocated separation for wives of drunkards, though she stopped short of divorce “to avoid violating the teachings of Jesus” (95). In 1850, she dropped the pretense that the newspaper was written by a “committee of ladies” and signed her own name to it, though she accepted both signed and anonymous contributions.
When, in 1851, Bloomer wrote an editorial in praise of the new “freedom dress” that women, herself included, were wearing around Seneca Falls, circulation soared. (Only one subscriber cancelled.) Far from being masculine in origin or appearance, the costume was based on Turkish women’s loose trousers and tunics, garments already familiar as exercise wear at spas and sanatoriums. Bloomer was inundated with requests for patterns from around the country, and the trousers—which newspapers had struggled to describe as “Greek, Turkish, Chinese, or Hindoo” —got a new name: bloomers. “She had gone viral,” Catterall quips (74).
Dress reform had long been debated and practiced in enlightened Seneca Falls, and Bloomer, her husband, and many others in the community found the new costume modest, practical and attractive. “The strength of the greater public reaction would take them by surprise” (69). Bloomer, in turn, was prudishly shocked when she traveled to New York to give a temperance lecture in her bloomer costume and met the poets Alice and Phoebe Cary, wearing fashionable off-the-shoulder evening gowns. “It was their appearance that displeased me, rather than their conversation or their manner,” she confessed. “I was not used to seeing women in company half-dressed” (111).
The outfit of a “woman’s emancipation,” as depicted in Punch, 1851. (Public Domain.)
In 1853, the Bloomers moved west to Ohio, where there were more opportunities for an ambitious lawyer-journalist, but fewer open minds than in Seneca Falls. Bloomer continued to publish The Lily; however, she caused a minor scandal when she hired a female typesetter. When the couple moved on to Iowa a year later, Bloomer gave up the paper’s editorship, though she continued to write for it until it ceased publication, abruptly and without explanation, in 1859.
Iowa was at the edge of the frontier, and Bloomer made a necessary retreat from public life. “The country is sparsely settled, and the facilities for travelling tedious,” she complained (178). On the hardscrabble frontier, there was little market for temperance, her pet cause; although there was a local temperance society, it did not allow women as members. Bloomer gave up “the short dress” around this time. She explained this as a comfort choice: the prairie winds often blew her short skirts up over her head, and the new crinoline petticoat made long skirts less cumbersome. The crinoline itself was controversial, however, being seen as frivolous, expensive, and prone to tipping; in 1861, an Ohio bishop “forbade anyone with hoops on to partake of the sacrament” (191). In truth, Bloomer already felt isolated and purposeless, and suspected “my influence would be greater in the dress ordinarily worn by women” (179).
Bloomer followed the Civil War from afar, busying herself with the Soldier’s Aid Society and her newly adopted children (the Bloomers were childless, probably because of Amelia’s frail health). The question of the short dress was revived for army nurses, as neither hoops nor long skirts were practical in the field. Bloomer “became fascinated by stories of women who joined the army in disguise” (194). But she disapproved of Dr. Mary Walker, the pioneering army surgeon who courted controversy by wearing masculine dress. Like many who initially embraced the “freedom dress,” Bloomer had come to the conclusion that sartorial experiments were unhelpful distractions from more important issues. “In the minds of the people the short dress and woman’s rights were inseparably connected,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1889. “With us the dress was but an incident, and we were not willing to sacrifice greater questions to it.”1
While some of her fellow suffragists attacked the status quo with fiery urgency, Bloomer played the long game. Over her long lifetime, which began in 1818 and ended in 1894, she saw slow but steady improvements in women’s rights and took satisfaction from her own small part in them. “The secret to Bloomer’s success, such as it was, lay in her openmindedness, combined with her steadfast integrity and respect for the rights of others,” Catterall writes. “After a lifetime of practice in small, close-knit communities, she had learned how to hold her ground; counterattack as needed with confidence, logic, and humor; and greet the person the next day in front of everyone at the post office” (81). Long before it was fashionable, Bloomer pioneered what would later be dubbed “respectability politics,” confident that righteousness, not radicalism would win the day.
Even her grieving husband eulogized Bloomer as “over-earnest” and “perhaps . . . deficient in the quality of humor” due to “dwelling so much upon what she regarded as the wrongs of her sex.” But he pointed out that “the same charge, that of taking things too seriously, has recently been made . . . against the women of the present day who are battling for what they conceive to be the sacred rights of women” (243). The “feminist killjoy” stereotype is as timely—and misleading—now as it was then; just ask Greta Thunberg or that other pantsuited icon, Hillary Clinton.
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