The true story of Amelia Bloomer
An interview with the biographer of Amelia Bloomer, the 19th century "journalist, suffragist and anti-fashion icon"
Perhaps you’ve heard of “bloomers” the scandalous pants for ladies of olden times, but did you know the true story of their namesake, Amelia Bloomer? She was an “anti-fashion” icon, a temperance reformer, a lifelong woman’s rights activist. She was notably the first woman to write and edit a newspaper in America. Her paper, The Lily, published from 1849 to 1853 and was a leader in conversation on women’s issues. She also famously introduced Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—one of the most legendary and influential female friendships in history.
I spoke with Sara Catterall, the author of a new biography called Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon about one of the 19th century’s great heroines many of us have never heard of.
Note: our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
So Amelia Bloomer is best known the outfit that bears her name. What I love about your book is that is shows her to be so much more than that. She was a temperance reformer, a newspaper editor, publisher, and suffragist. Who was Amelia, the person?
She was a very small town person who was raised in little farm towns around Central New York, the first generation after it had been settled. She was raised by a very strict Presbyterian mother who valued education for her daughters. And she got into temperance [the movement to prohibit alcohol] because the church promoted it.
She had very strong principles, but she was also very open minded. She really believed in that traditional Christian idea of “it's not your job to judge people, that's God's job.” Although she sometimes did anyway and sometimes lost her temper.
Her husband would say that people thought she was humorless, but neither he nor I thought that that was really true. She had a really good, dry sense of humor.
When she believed something very strongly, she would persist with it and tended not to back down. She was very good at conflict. For the most part, she tended to engage with arguments head on, even when it was with her friends. She had a talent for doing that, but also not burning bridges.
How did you discover Amelia and decide to write a book about her? It’s so needed—I think it’s the only biography of her.
Yes, it's the only one since the one that her husband wrote right after she died, which tells you how devoted he was.
The last book I worked on was Ottoman Dress and Design in the West, which was a book about influence from Ottoman culture into European dress culture. She was one of the illustrations in it because the reform dress that she chose was Turkish women's dress--that's how they described it at the time. There was a picture in it of Amelia Bloomer in the outfit, and it was cut out of a German paper. And I was thinking, Who is this person? Why was this such a big deal? Then I actually started to read her writing--and she was funny! She was also saying a lot of things that unfortunately are still relevant.
I think that's one of the most striking things about studying these women from this period is how relevant everything still is, which is a tangent for another day.
They made all the arguments back then, and we're still having to make them now.
So let’s talk about the outfit.
It's the Turkish dress. It’s a dress that you would wear ordinarily, that goes to a little below your knees, although some people wore it a little above. And then it's a pair of Turkish trousers underneath, which go all the way up to your waist and don't have a split crotch the way drawers did back then. They generally match the dress, being made in the same fabric. There were some women who almost immediately started wearing men's straight legged trousers. There were a lot of variations on it. It's very modest.
It looked so much more comfortable than traditional 19th century dress. While Amelia is famous for popularizing the outfit, but she didn’t invent it.
It came from Elizabeth Garrett Smith, who got it from somewhere else, who got it from somewhere else. It’s unclear exactly where Amelia might have gotten from—possibly from health spas, where it was a standard exercise dress. She also lived about 10 miles from the Oneida community, which was a radical religious community just north of her. It's still a historical site now, and women in that community dressed in that outfit
Amelia put [the outfit] on the map with her newspaper. She had a lot of reach with The Lily and she had pictures done. Plus Elizabeth Cady Stanton and another woman wrote columns about it that got reprinted in big newspapers.
One of my all-time favorite details from the women’s rights movement is Amelia Bloomers “club house” for women at the Seneca Falls post office. Can you talk about that?
Her husband Dexter was made postmaster Seneca Falls because he had supported the [winning] presidential candidate, and she talked him into making her his deputy because they needed two people to handle that level of work they had. And as part of her job, she got a little office off the lobby of the post office. Then women started to come in and talk to her about articles in The Lily, and she just realized that there was an opportunity.
She got some curtains, some nice chairs and tables and covered them in newspapers, journals and books. She made it into a reading room and a discussion room for the women of the town, where they could go in, close the door and just talk to each other about the affairs of the day. That was a very new thing, and it was one of the keystones of the Seneca Falls radical women's community.
I can only imagine the conversations that were happening there! So let's talk about The Lily.
It was the first paper that was published and edited by a woman for women in the United States. It started out as a temperance paper, but temperance was at that time was a women's rights issue. It was considered to be a domestic violence issue, and also an issue of fighting back against large industries that exploited the poor. It sort of it had sort of the same feel as the opioid epidemic.
Temperance is where she started, but what led it into women's rights was the domestic violence aspect. It led to the need for women to be economically independent. And for that, of course, they would need education and access to the professions and so forth. And none of these changes were going to happen unless they had some political power. And you don't have any political power if you can't vote. So that's when they just started to focus on voting, because once they could do that, then they would be able to get everything else.
She also promoted education for women and exercise. She herself was very into alternative health, because her own health was very bad. So she was very interested in hydropathy and loose clothing and diet and diet and exercise and that sort of thing.
So as a contemporary person today, what really jumped out at you from those old issues of The Lily?
I think a lot of it was these arguments about stuff that we still haven't resolved. Like, what happens to all the domestic work if women are working outside of the home? We’ve never really resolved that we just sort of let women keep doing both, which is a nightmare. There was a discussion at one point of actually having cooperatives to cook and deal with housework. There were also arguments about whether women have the same intelligence as men, the same capabilities as men.
I was also very startled at how sarcastic they were. It's not the image you have really of [19th century] women.
They were so snarky and sarcastic and funny. I'm glad you found that too.
Yeah, that was one of the things that made me keep reading, for sure, I expected this to be much more serious and boring than it was. I love that.
Amelia was the one to introduce Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She was friends with them both for decades. What was your sense of Amelia’s relationship with them?
She admired them enormously. I mean, she had their portraits in her front entryway of her home where you'd ordinarily have, you know, relatives or somebody else that you enormously admired. She did keep up a sort of cordial correspondence with them and helped out Susan B. Anthony quite a lot with the history of the women's movement [The Complete History of Woman’s Suffrage].
She also said that she thought they were the best speakers in the movement, and possibly that she'd heard anywhere. She definitely did not agree with them on everything. She didn't necessarily agree with their federal approach to getting women's suffrage. She had a falling out with them and Frederick Douglass over the women's Temperance Society in Rochester. But Amelia held her own. She might not have been as famous, no, but she believed that her own, her principles, were still worthwhile and worth arguing.
You have a great line in the introduction about the important lessons to take away from her life story: “how activists carry on when nothing is getting better, is in many ways more useful than the story of a final triumph.” Amelia advocated passionately for her causes for decades and didn’t see “a final triumph.” What sustained Amelia?
I think it was partly her religious faith that was combined with her political beliefs. She had a very rock solid belief in what was right, and she believed that eventually it would all turn out. It was just a question of continuing the work as you went along.
She wrote a column in The Lily titled “Be Not Discouraged” and she basically said “we have these losses, and they may make you want to stop trying and let your opposition win and let them suffer the consequences.” But then she said, “you have to ask yourself, is that right?” And her response to that was always “you have to keep working for what you consider to be right.”
It's about the work. It's not about the results. And if you're if you're impatient for results, you will burn out.
If Amelia were alive today, how do you think she would be engaging with the world? I think there's a lot she would be very passionate about.
Assuming that her health was better, which it probably would be, since we have treatments for some of the things she was suffering from, I think she would probably still be writing and organizing. She was a very good organizer and mentor of younger people.
She'd be horrified by women's clothing. She was horrified by fashionable women in her day, for showing their shoulders. She was a very modest person. But she would at the same time probably say, “Well, this is a different time, and it's not for me to judge.”
I also think she would probably say that we have been through a lot of this before.
What do you think is valuable for readers to learn or take away from Amelia’s story?
The thing that I consider the best takeaway is her willingness to do things even though she had an eighth grade education—and not a good one. She had no professional experience, she had no connections, she had no real money but she had very strong beliefs about what the world should be and how she could make it a better place.
She would just try things. She would just get out there and do it. And if she didn't know how to do something, she and her friends would ask experts who did and they would go ahead with it. They would look for examples of how to do something, and then do it as well as they possibly could and learn through doing it. I think a lot of the time, people don't get involved or don't start a new enterprise because they're afraid that they're not good enough, that they don't have the expertise, that they don't have the professional experience. Her example says that you don't need to—you can study up on your own and make a good contribution to the world.
