Amelia Bloomer: biography of this journalist and feminist

In 1851, Amelia Bloomer, a journalist and editor of one of the first women's publications in the United States States, she was walking through the town of Seneca Falls, in the state of New York, dressed in curious pants. She was not going alone; Parading next to her were her wrestling partners: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Elizabeth Smith Miller (1822-1911). Of course, the attire of such respectable ladies caused stupefaction among passers-by.

Amelia Jenks Bloomer was part of the feminist movement that swept through the young American states like a new wind.. A woman with an indomitable spirit, she was a tireless journalist, from whose pen emerged some of the most fervent arguments in favor of women's rights. Let's learn more about the life of this extraordinary woman.

Brief biography of Amelia Bloomer, one of the first women to wear pants

Amelia Jenks Bloomer she has gone down in history for being the inventor of the famous bloomers pants, although in truth she was not the one who designed them, nor was she the one who wore them for the first time.

She herself showed her surprise when, days after the scandalous walk through Seneca Falls, she observed that people began to know these pants with her name.

Actually, they were an original design by one of her fellow feminists, Elizabeth Smith Miller, one of the fiercest fighters for women's rights.

Extravagant women's fashion

At the beginning of the 19th century, a movement appeared in the United States that sought to establish a new model of dress for women. The idea connected with the values ​​of a "rational dress" that adapted to the body and allowed women to carry out their daily activities with complete freedom and, above all, with minimum health guarantees.

And it is that, around 1830, eccentricity in women's attire became fashionable again. This eccentricity went through an exaggerated bulge of the skirts, under which several layers of petticoats were placed to give them a bell shape. Obviously, the woman had a very difficult time walking under all those kilos of fabric and, in addition, there was the issue of the corset. Although it is true that, throughout the 19th century, this piece became increasingly "ergonomic" (we can find photographs from the last decades of the 19th century where women playing tennis and hiking with a corset squeezing her bust), the truth is that it was still an unnatural garment, constricting the ribs, stomach and thighs. lungs.

Many were the doctors who warned about the damage that the corset exerted on the female body. Some went so far as to ensure that she moved the organs from the site and, although this issue is the result of debate even in the Currently, the reality is that a very tight corset made breathing significantly difficult, as well as healthy digestion and normal. However, it was useless for the doctors to inform the ladies about it; fashion had set in, and what was in vogue was a narrower waist, the better.

• Related article: "Gender stereotypes: this is how they reproduce inequality"

Religious movements and women's liberties

The “rational dress” movement was closely connected to the religious reality of the United States. Communities such as the Quakers claimed the equal role of men and women in creation of God, since both sexes work side by side on the farms and in the care of the family. And if the woman worked alongside the man, it was unthinkable that she would do so stuffed into such a prison.

It is not surprising, then, that many of the first activists for women's rights belonged to these religious communities. Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), one of the greatest advocates of women and women's rights, was a Quaker, and Amelia herself belonged to the Presbyterian Church. In addition to advocating for greater freedom for women, it was very common for these women to also be abolitionists and to belonged to the well-known Temperance Movement, which urged people to overcome the temptation to consume substances alcoholic.

The basis of all these movements was the faith in the creation of a much more “pure” society, that is, one more connected with God and with the real freedoms that he granted to the human being. An ideology absolutely contrary to the capitalist society that was beginning to develop in the West, where women had a strictly secondary role. Indeed; empowered by Victorian morality, the bourgeois man had acquired the active role, while the woman was relegated to the home, properly dressed as the most beautiful object in the house.

It was against this concept of "adorning woman" that these feminists were going. Her ideal was not an elegantly dressed woman who did not move, but a strong, courageous and hard-working woman, who could with her hands carve out her own future next to her partner.

• You may be interested in: "What is Political Psychology?"

Amelia Jenks becomes Amelia Bloomer

She is bright, intelligent, good-hearted, and with a poor sense of humor. This is how the one who would be her husband, the lawyer Dexter Bloomer, whom she married in 1840, describes her with affection. The marriage had been the fruit of love, and the truth is that both spouses respect and support each other. It is precisely thanks to Dexter's push (who has realized the extraordinary capacity of his wife) that Amelia begins to writing articles, initially quite committed to the Temperance Movement, of which she was a fervent (and almost radical) follower.

Amelia's fine intelligence and her literary gifts guide her pen. Actually, her education had been poor and meager; born in May 1818 in a modest city in upstate New York, she barely attended college. When she was seventeen she was sent to a home to govern the children, and she is precisely there, in the city of Waterloo, where she meets Dexter, then a young college student. laws.

Dexter is, in addition to being a future lawyer, the owner of a publication, the Seneca County Courier, whose circulation is sold successfully in Seneca Falls, a town where the newlyweds settle. The newspaper is specialized in local political news, but Amelia soon endorses the articles that she signs and begins to vindicate her own ideas.

These ideas took a definitive boost in 1848, when the first women's rights convention was convened in Seneca Falls. The main promoter of the event is Lucretia Mott, a well-known Quaker preacher who had traveled to London to her to attend an abolitionist convention and that she had been stunned when she had not been let in because of her status as women. Mott then realized that, in addition to the fight for the elimination of slavery, it was strictly necessary to claim women's rights..

The Seneca Falls convention of 1848 greatly impressed Amelia, to the point that, within a year Following her, she founds and begins to take over The Lily, the first publication intended exclusively for women. It is from the pages of The Lily that Amelia strongly supports the cause of Mott and his other companions, writing articles where she defends equality between men and women and the right of women to vote and have properties. And when she was chided for her "radicality", she replied that God had created Eve and Adam as equal, and that, therefore, there was no reason to believe that the woman should be subservient to the male.

• Related article: "The 16 types of discrimination (and their causes)"

Bloomers and the clothing revolution

It was precisely in The Lily where the first images of the bloomers appeared, those pants that the three aforementioned women wore on their walk through Seneca Falls, under the astonished glances of all. To tell the truth, more than pants they were a kind of very wide bloomers, over which a very short skirt was placed. The idea was, of course, that the woman could have the same freedom of movement as the man.

We have already commented that the idea of ​​the bloomers had been a thing of Smith Miller, but the truth is that it was popularized with the last name of our protagonist, perhaps because of the publicity he gave them since his newspaper. In fact, Amelia was the last woman to wear them (Cady Stanton and Smith Miller had done it long before), but she was, paradoxically, the one who wore them the longest. The other two of her classmates realized that the scandal caused by her walks with the bloomers they kept people away from what really mattered, which was women's suffrage and other rights inalienable. The wardrobe was, according to them, something secondary, so they soon hung the bloomers in the closet and returned to the skirt and corset.

Amelia herself ended up giving up. In the 1850s, the crinoline appeared, a hollow artifact made of wire and horsehair that allowed the skirt of the dress to be hollowed out. same way as the petticoat but, at the same time, it gave the woman's legs a greater movement, since it weighed a lot less. Amelia considered that this invention was enough to guarantee female physical freedom... and she stopped wearing bloomers.

Amelia's last years and the birth of "bloomermania"

At the end of the century, Amelia was with her husband in Iowa, where she had moved to live in peace after the bloomers scandal. However, despite having returned to the skirt, she Amelia continued her work of claiming her, always in favor of women's rights.

In 1891 she suffered a severe facial paralysis that left her speechless. She gradually recovered and, constant and tireless as she was, she continued to be immersed in her protest activities. But the end of her was close to her. Her husband tells us in her biography that he wrote about her that, on the afternoon of December 28, 1894, Amelia began to feel very bad and collapsed from her. Her agony lasted two days, and she finally passed away on the 30th of that same month.

Around the same year as Amelia's death, bloomers returned to women's fashion. The reason? They were ideal for biking. The baggy pants invented by Smith Miller and popularized by Bloomer began to be all the rage among the young women of the Belle Epoque. It was the first episode of a revolution that would no longer have a brake. Less than a century after Amelia and her companions wore the first pants, the garment was already absolutely normalized among the female audience, and now, in truth, we could not imagine life without she.