Amelia Bloomer

Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894) was an American newspaper editor and women's rights campaigner whose name ended up on a garment she did not design. From her paper The Lily, published in Seneca Falls, New York, she promoted the short-skirt-and-trousers outfit of 1851 so persistently that the press called it the Bloomer Costume, and the loose gathered trousers became "bloomers."

An editor in Seneca Falls

Born Amelia Jenks on May 27, 1818, in Homer, New York, she had only a few years of district schooling and worked briefly as a teacher and a governess. In 1840 she married Dexter Bloomer, a law student who ran the Seneca Falls County Courier and encouraged her to write for it.

She attended the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first women's rights convention, and the next year started The Lily. It began as a temperance paper for a local ladies' temperance society. When the society lost interest, Bloomer took over the editing and publishing herself, and after 1850 hers was the only name on the masthead. She is usually described as the first woman to own, operate and edit a newspaper for women. Circulation passed 4,000.

1851: the costume arrives on a visit

The outfit was not her idea. In 1851 Elizabeth Smith Miller, a temperance activist, began wearing loose trousers gathered at the ankle under a short dress or skirt and a vest, a cut borrowed from the trousers worn by women in the Middle East and Central Asia. Miller showed it to her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who adopted it at once and wore it to visit Bloomer. Bloomer started wearing it too, and wrote it up in The Lily.

The New York Tribune picked up the story. More women tried the look, and the papers named it after the editor who kept writing about it. Her case, made in print, was that a woman's dress should serve her health, comfort and usefulness first, with ornament a distant second.

What the trousers replaced

For lingerie history the point is what sat underneath. Respectable dress of the period meant a corset and layers of heavy petticoats under a floor-length skirt. A knee-length skirt over full trousers did away with most of that weight. Those ankle-gathered trousers are the ancestor of the loose drawers and knickers that later carried the bloomer name, and a distant relative of the modern full brief.

Ridicule, and a quiet retreat

Women in the costume were mocked in the press and harassed in the street. Bloomer kept wearing it for most of the decade, then went back to longer skirts by 1859. She gave several reasons. After the family moved west she wanted to fit into her new community. The newly arrived crinoline, a hooped cage, had removed the heavy underskirts she objected to. And she felt other causes deserved her energy.

The crinoline remark deserves a second look. A dress reformer accepted a new piece of underwear engineering as a partial fix for the problem her trousers had tried to solve. It is a reminder that change under the skirt often came through new structures as much as through protest. The corseted silhouette itself held on until the 1910s and 1920s, when Coco Chanel and her loose jersey clothes made it look dated.

Iowa and the vote

In 1854, moving to Council Bluffs, Iowa, she sold The Lily to Mary Birdsall of Richmond, Indiana. She spoke for women's suffrage in Omaha on July 4, 1855, led suffrage campaigns in Nebraska and Iowa, and served as president of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association from 1871 to 1873. She died in Council Bluffs on December 30, 1894.

Her reputation has not stayed fixed. The American Library Association named a feminist reading list after her in 2002, then renamed it in 2020, citing her refusal to speak against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Her house in Seneca Falls has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980.

Last updated October 7, 2026