AMBLIA Bloomer, who gave her name to the garment that prefigured the new freedom in women's dress, died 45 years ago.
Dress reform was merely an incident in her life, Her energies, along with those of Mrs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, her two most intimate friends, were centred on the women's rights and temperance movements, writes Leila Lee Borgida in the New York "Times." Before she died she was able to see some of the first fruits of her labours in that women were given some degree of rights over their children and property in the Eighteen Nineties, But it took the cataclysm of a World War to bring about the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments—setting up prohibition and woman suffrage. Today prohibition has been relegated to the past along with the old cumbersome bustle and hoopskirt, and her timid start of dress reform, which she herself considered merely an episode in her life's work, is the one contribution for which Amelia Bloomer is remembered.
In 1851, when women were loaded down with six stiffly starched pettit coats under skirts that literally swept the ground, and waists were corseted and boned into the pinched "hour glass," Amelia Bloomer wrote in her monthly newspaper, the "Lily":
Long skirts, small waists and whalebones can be dispensed with and we shall be allowed breathing room and Our forms shall be what nature made them."
These words coming from the town of Seneca Falls, N. Y., were to disturb contemporary social life on two hemispheres.
An article' had speared "Seneca County Courier" a curlier concerning the inconvenience. discomfort and unhealthfulness of women's clothes and advocating a arge to Turkish pantaloors, with n overskirt to the knees. Mrs Bloomer, in answering it half play-uily, half seriously, endorsed the dress.
Perhaps the Bloomer movement would have stopped there had not Elizabeth Smith Miller arrived in town on a visit to her cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wearing just such a costume. She had seen it on a grand tour of Europe and adopted it as her own; in fact, she had been wearing it in Washington during her father's term in Congress with the approval of her family. A few days after her arrival her cousin appeared in a similarly fashioned costume—a simply cut uncorseted bodice buttoned down the front, with a black satin skirt terminating slightly above the knees and full pantaloons of the same material, resembling our ski trousers of today, caught in at her ankles with a ruffle. Mrs. Bloomer "felt constrained" to follow their example, and informed her readers about it in a subsequent issue of the "Lily.
She was snowed under the letters ug how the new dress was made. Mrs. Bloomer set down no rigid rules. Good taste and health should be the guiding factors. Women had been unpaid street-sweepers long enough. Now was the time to revolt!
Because of the publicity in her columns and the controversy which she started, the new costume was given her name, although she had not invented it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.