The Wild Women who wore Bloomers

By Jacqui Nelson

When women started wearing bloomers (loose trousers gathered at the ankle and worn under a below-the-knee-length skirt) in the 1850s, it was considered a scandalous mode of dress. What bloomers replaced seems beyond scandalous by today’s standards.

1850s fashion bloomers with corset

If women wanted to be deemed fashionable in the 1850s, they wore…

1) a skirt that dragged several inches on the ground
2) layers of starched petticoats stiffened with straw or horsehair sewn into the hems
3) a whale-bone corset that pushed one’s internal organs out of place

As one medical professor warned his students, the result was “a feminine population which was of no use as cadavers for studying human anatomy.”

But bloomers (also known as the Reform Dress) resulted in warnings as well. Public meetings were called to stop the change. Some women were denied church membership for wearing bloomers.

So now it's time to meet Amelia Bloomer and Lucy Stone, two Wild Women reformers and fashionistas who helped shape a new fashion…instead of having it shape them.

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Amelia Jenks Bloomer

( born 1818 in Homer, New York )

1851 drawing of Amelia

At age 17, Amelia became a schoolteacher. When she was 22, she married Dexter Bloomer and started writing for his newspaper, The Seneca Falls County Courier.

Eight years later in 1848, she attended the Seneca Falls Convention (the first women's rights convention) and was inspired to start her own newspaper, The Lily (the first American newspaper published by and for women).

In 1851, Amelia introduced suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to each other.

That same year, temperance activist Libby Miller started wearing bloomers. Libby’s cousin showed them to Amelia who began wearing them as well. Amelia promoted her bloomers in her newspaper as a change in dress standards that allowed less restriction in women’s regular activities. Her articles were picked up by The New York Tribune, and this new fashion was dubbed the Bloomer Costume or just bloomers.

In 1854, Amelia sold her newspaper and moved with her husband to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where she wrote periodicals and led suffrage campaigns. From 1871 until 1873, she served as president of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association.

Lucy Stone
( born 1818 in West Brookfield, Massachusetts )

1853 drawing of Lucy

At age 16, Lucy (like Amelia) became a schoolteacher. When she was 25, she traveled by train, steamship, and stagecoach to attend Ohio’s Oberlin College (America’s first college to admit both women and African Americans).

In 1847 (after becoming the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree) she began a career as a women's rights lecturer—during a time when women were discouraged from public speaking.

In 1850 while traveling for her work, Lucy contracted typhoid fever and nearly died. During the winter of 1850–51, she began wearing bloomers as a health measure to help her recuperate.

For the next four years, while speaking for women's rights and against slavery, Lucy helped popularize bloomers by wearing them exclusively as she addressed huge audiences in over twenty states and in Canada as well.

Called the “heart and soul” of the women's rights movement, Lucy not only influenced Susan B. Anthony to take up the suffrage cause, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that Lucy was “the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question”…all while wearing bloomers 🙂

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I love fashion that's comfortable...and doesn't push my internal organs out of place. There's nothing like writing in your pajamas! ❤️

What's your favorite work or relaxation clothing? 

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