Bloomers, also called the bloomer, the Turkish dress, the American dress, or simply reform dress, are divided women's garments for the lower body. They were developed in the 19th century as a healthful and comfortable alternative to the heavy, constricting dresses worn by American women. They take their name from their best-known advocate, the women's rights activist Amelia Bloomer.
The name "bloomers" was derogatory and was not used by the women who wore them, who referred to their clothes as the "Reform Costume" or the "American Dress."[1]:128–129
Fashion bloomers (skirted)
1851 caricature of fashion bloomers
Bloomers were an innovation of readers of the Water-Cure Journal, a popular health periodical that in October 1849 began urging women to develop a style of dress that was not so harmful to their health as the existing fashion. It also represented an unrestricted movement, unlike previous women's fashions of the time, that allowed for greater freedom—both metaphorical and physical—within the public sphere.[2] The fashionable dress of that time consisted of a skirt that dragged several inches on the floor, worn over layers of starched petticoats stiffened with straw or horsehair sewn into the hems. In addition to the heavy skirts, prevailing fashion called for a "long waist" effect, achieved with a whale-bone-fitted corset.[3]
Women responded with a variety of costumes, many inspired by the pantaloons of Turkey, and all including some form of pants. By the summer of 1850, various versions of a short skirt and trousers, or "Turkish dress", were being worn by readers of the Water-Cure Journal as well as women patients at the nation's health resorts. After wearing the style in private, some began wearing it in public. In the winter and spring of 1851, newspapers across the country carried startled sightings of the dresses.[4]
The wearing of bloomers—a woman wearing pants, a men's garment—was a question of power. The symbolism of bloomers was enormous. Men felt threatened by them, and sometimes disparaged women wearing them as "Amazons" or "male impersonators".[5]:128–129
Bloomer craze of 1851
In a reversal of gender roles, a "bloomer" asks her fiancé's shocked father for consent to marry his son: satirical cartoon from 1852
In February 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller of Peterboro, New York, wore the "Turkish dress"[6] to the Seneca Falls, New York, home of Amelia Bloomer and her temperance journal, The Lily. The next month, Bloomer announced to her readers that she had adopted the dress and, in response to many inquiries, printed a description of her dress and instructions on how to make it. Her circulation rose from 500 to 3,000.[5]:138 By June, many newspapers had dubbed it the "Bloomer dress".[7]
During the summer of 1851, the nation was seized by a "bloomer craze". Health reformer Mary Gove Nichols drafted a Declaration of Independence from the Despotism of Parisian Fashion and gathered signatures to it at lectures on woman's dress.[8] Managers of the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, gave a banquet for any of their female workers who adopted the safer dress before July 4.[9] In Toledo, Ohio, 60 women turned out in Turkish costume at one of the city's grandest social events.[10] Bloomer balls and bloomer picnics were held; dress reform societies and bloomer institutes were formed.[11] A grand festival in favor of the costume was held at New York City's Broadway Tabernacle in September.[12] In August, a woman who had spent six months sailing from Philadelphia around the Horn to California with the reform dress packed in her trunk disembarked to find that the dress had preceded her and was being displayed in the window of a San Francisco dress shop.[13]
Bloomers in London
Interest in the bloomers was also sparked in England when Hannah Tracy Cutler and other women delegates wore the new dress to an international peace convention in London.[14] Many newspaper reports were dedicated to the controversy the outfit caused. One prominent figure who began to lecture about the bloomers in London and beyond was Caroline Dexter.[15] When she and her husband later emigrated to Australia, she continued to advocate for dress reform. Although few women are known to have worn the bloomers in Australia, Dexter's continued support led to controversy in The Sydney Morning Herald.[16]
Women's rights
Bloomer Costume (Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1864)
The Bloomer became a symbol of women's rights in the early 1850s. The same women—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony—who adopted the new form of dress also advocated women's right to vote. These women preferred to call their new style the "freedom dress", a two-piece outfit similar to the shalwar kameez of Central and South Asia.[18][19] Crowds gathered to not only hear these women's radical words, but also to see their "scandalous" mode of dress. After three years, however, fearing that the new dress was drawing attention away from the suffragist cause, many of these women returned to corsets, long skirts, and more conventional forms of dress. In similar suit, the Dress Reform Association which was formed in 1856 called the outfit the "American costume" and focused on its health benefits rather than its political symbolism. Following the American Civil War, interest in the Bloomer costume waned almost completely until its resurgence in the 1890s.[20]
In the 1850s, the "bloomer" was a physical and metaphorical representation of feminist reform. This garment originated in late 1849 for the purpose of developing a style of dress for women that was less harmful to their health. Because it was less restricting than the previous attire, the bloomer provided more physical freedom for women. Being a completely new and distinctively different form of dress, the bloomer garment also provided women with a metaphorical freedom, in the sense that it gave women not only more diverse dress options, but also the opportunity and power to choose their type of garment.
Some individuals at the time even argued that the Bloomer dress should be adopted for moral reasons. A reporter noted that a group of "very intelligent appearing, lady-like women" met in Milford, Massachusetts in July 1852. The purpose of this meeting was to consider the propriety of adopting bloomers. The women unanimously passed a resolution approving the costume, declaring existing fashion to be consistent with "moral evils" and arguing that the bloomer would facilitate women's efforts to engage in good works."[21]
And now I'm dressed like a little girl, in a dress both loose and short, Oh with what freedom I can sing, and walk all 'round about! And when I get a little strength, some work I think I can do, 'Twill give me health and comfort, and make me useful too.
Feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many others, essentially claimed that women who took on the "feminist dress" look without being fully knowledgeable of all the accompanying issues were imposters. They were concerned that individuals could demonstrate reform without actually being an expert in the issues. In the Sibyl poem, the feeling and element of reform was demonstrated through simplicity and the subtle appreciation of this small step in women's fashion in parallel to a small step for women in general. During the 1850s, feminist reformers were fighting numerous battles to bring about change and further equality to women everywhere. Feminists believed that it was more important to focus on the issues, and that giving in to fashionable trends was exactly what they were battling against. However, the simple change in popular dress symbolically furthered women's liberation.
Opposition to Bloomer dress
Bloomer's promotion of the style as a freedom dress rather than as a health dress did nothing to recommend it to the orthodox clergy and other critics of the woman's rights movement, who denounced the wearing of pants by women as a usurpation of male authority.[23] Associating it with the woman's rights movement, the New York Sunday Mercury published a woodcarving representing the woman's rights convention held in Akron, Ohio, in May 1851. It depicted every woman in coat, breeches, and high boots, sitting cross-legged and smoking cigars, when in truth not a bloomer was present.[24] Some young women were denied church membership for wearing the dress.[25] Public meetings were called to put down the fad, and the very same newspapers that had previously praised the dress began ridiculing and condemning "Bloomerism". In August 1851, Harper's Monthly reprinted a cartoon and article from a London newspaper ridiculing the American dress, one month after it had printed a sketch of the "Oriental Costume" and pronounced it tasteful, elegant, and graceful.
Bloomers in the West
Lucy Stone, one of America's most famous orators in the woman's rights movement during the 1850s, helped popularize the dress by wearing it as she addressed immense audiences in over twenty states, the District of Columbia, and Ontario between 1851 and 1855. She had begun wearing the dress as a health measure while recuperating from typhoid fever during the winter of 1850–51, and she wore it exclusively for three years.[26] In 1856 a National Dress Reform Association organized[27] and one of its officers, Dr. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, who had worn the dress since 1849, established a journal, The Sibyl, as the society's organ. From July 1856 through June 1864, that paper carried news of dress reform to subscribers from New England to California and published the names of nearly a thousand women who sent in their names as wearers of the reform dress.[28] A letter-writer from Iowa said it was especially suited for life on the prairie and reported that many women from various parts of the state wore it all the time. Readers from Illinois, Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota, and Oregon attested to its popularity among Western women.[29] In 1860, an English traveler reported meeting a bloomer wearer in Laramie, Wyoming, and a traveler to Pike's Peak reported that "the bloomer costume is considerably in vogue and appears peculiarly adapted to overland travel".[30]
Civil War nurses and the bloomer
When Dorothea Dix was appointed superintendent of army nurses in June 1861, she issued a statement banning the bloomer from army hospitals and requiring women to abandon it before entering nursing service. But as Western communities organized battalions of soldiers, they also formed corps of volunteer nurses to accompany them, and many of these nurses adopted the reform dress for field service. All members of one such corps, organized by Dr. Fedelia Harris Reid of Berlin, Wisconsin, and called the "Wisconsin Florence Nightengale Union", wore the bloomer not only in the field, but also while caring for patients at a military hospital in St. Louis. Four bloomer wearers were among the nurses who accompanied Minnesota's First Regiment.[31] Dr. Mary E. Walker, who earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for her medical services during the Civil War, wore the reform dress while working in a military hospital in Washington, D.C., as well as for field work. As she accompanied troops in the South, she wrote to the Sibyl that New Orleans women of wealth and standing had worn it to Haiti and Cuba.[32] The dress was still being worn by members of the utopian Oneida Community in 1867[33] but gradually it was abandoned by all but a very few stalwart wearers willing to defy society's mores.
Bloomers and bicycles
In 1893, the Woman's Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition revived interest in the bloomer as an aid in improving women's health through physical exercise. Their session on women's dress opened with Lucy Stone reminiscing about the bloomer movement of the 1850s; her extolling the bloomer as the "cleanest, neatest, most comfortable and most sensible garment" she had ever worn; and young women modeling different versions of the dress.[34] The following year Annie "Londonderry" Cohen Kopchovsky donned the bloomer during her famous bicycle trip around the world, and an updated version of the bloomer soon became the standard "bicycle dress" for women during the bicycle craze of the 1890s.[35]
In 1909, fashion designer Paul Poiret attempted to popularize harem pants worn below a long flaring tunic, but this attempted revival of fashion bloomers under another name did not catch on.
Athletic bloomers (unskirted)
19th and 20th centuries
During the late 19th century, athletic bloomers (also known as "rationals" or "knickerbockers") were skirtless baggy knee-length trousers, fastened to the leg a little below the knees; at that time, they were worn by women only in a few narrow contexts of athletic activity, such as bicycle-riding, gymnastics, and sports other than tennis (see 1890s in fashion). Bloomers were usually worn with stockings and after 1910 often with a sailor middy blouse.
Bloomers became shorter by the late 1920s. In the 1930s, when it became respectable for women to wear pants and shorts in a wider range of circumstances, styles imitating men's shorts were favored, and bloomers tended to become less common. However, baggy knee-length gym shorts fastened at or above the knees continued to be worn by girls in school physical education classes through to the 1950s in some areas. Some schools in New York City and Sydney still wore them as part of their uniforms into the 1980s. In Japan their use persisted into the early 2000s.[36]
Known as buruma (ブルマ), also burumā (ブルマー), bloomers were introduced in Japan as women's clothing for physical education in 1903.[37] After the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, in response to the styles worn by the foreign women athletes, a newer style of bloomers, pittari, which fit the body closer, similar to volleyball uniforms, became commonplace. Around the mid-1990s, however, schools and individuals began to choose sports shorts instead, citing modesty concerns.[38] Some people are interested in bloomers in clothing fetish context.[39]
Gallery of athletic bloomers
An example of late 19th-century athletic bloomers: the Smith College class of 1902 basketball team
1890s caricature of athletic bloomers
Gymnasts in Stockholm, Sweden. Early 20th century.
Undergarments
Women's baggy underpants fastened to just below or above the knee are also known as "bloomers" (or as "knickers" or "directoire knickers"). They were most popular from the 1910s to the 1930s but continued to be worn by older women for several decades thereafter. More recently, the term bloomers has often been used interchangeably with the pantalettes worn by women and girls in the early 19th century and the open-leg knee-length drawers of the mid 19th and early 20th centuries.
Lingerie is a category of primarily women's clothing including undergarments, sleepwear, and lightweight robes. The choice of the word is often motivated by an intention to imply that the garments are alluring, fashionable, or both. In a 2015 US survey, 75% of women reported having worn "sexy lingerie" in their lifetime.
A skirt is the lower part of a dress or a separate outer garment that covers a person from the waist downwards. Originally made for both genders, it is currently made mainly for females.
A skort is a pair of shorts with an overlapping fabric panel made to resemble a skirt covering the front, or a skirt with a pair of integral shorts hidden underneath. Skort is a portmanteau of skirt and shorts.
Fashion in the 1890s in Western countries is characterized by long elegant lines, tall collars, and the rise of sportswear. It was an era of great dress reforms led by the invention of the drop-frame safety bicycle, which allowed women the opportunity to ride bicycles more comfortably, and therefore, created the need for appropriate clothing.
Victorian dress reform was an objective of the Victorian dress reform movement of the middle and late Victorian era, led by various reformers who proposed, designed, and wore clothing considered more practical and comfortable than the fashions of the time.
Culottes are an item of clothing worn on the lower half of the body. The term can refer to either split skirts, historical men's breeches, or women's underpants; this is an example of fashion-industry words taken from designs across history, languages and cultures, then being used to describe different garments, often creating confusion among historians and readers. The French word culotte is panties, pants, knickers, trousers, shorts, or (historically) breeches; derived from the French word culot, meaning the lower half of a thing, the lower garment in this case.
Hotpants or hot pants are extremely short shorts. The term was first used by Women's Wear Daily in 1970 to describe shorts made in luxury fabrics such as velvet and satin for fashionable wear, rather than their more practical equivalents that had been worn for sports or leisure since the 1930s. Hotpants are worn above the knees around the thigh area. The term has since become a generic term for any pair of extremely short shorts. While hotpants were briefly a very popular element of mainstream fashion in the early 1970s, by the mid-1970s they had become associated with the sex industry, which contributed to their fall from fashion. However, hotpants continued to be popular as clubwear well into the 2010s and are often worn within the entertainment industry, particularly as part of cheerleader costumes or for dancers. Performers such as Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue have famously worn hotpants as part of their public performances and presentation.
Ottoman clothing or Ottoman fashion is the style and design of clothing worn during the Ottoman Empire.
1850s fashion in Western and Western-influenced clothing is characterized by an increase in the width of women's skirts supported by crinolines or hoops, the mass production of sewing machines, and the beginnings of dress reform. Masculine styles began to originate more in London, while female fashions originated almost exclusively in Paris.
The history of bras is closely tied to the social status of women, the evolution of fashion, and shifting views of the female body over time.
Trousers are a staple of historical and modern fashion. Throughout history, the role of trousers is a constant change for women. The first appearance of trousers in recorded history is among nomadic steppe-people in Western Europe. Steppe people were a group of nomads of various different ethnic groups that lived in the Eurasian grasslands. Archaeological evidence suggests that men and women alike wore trousers in that cultural context. However, for much of modern history, the use of trousers has been restricted to men. This norm was enforced in many regions due to social customs and laws. There are, however, many historical cases of women wearing trousers in defiance of these norms such as the 1850s women rights movement, comfort, freedom of movement, fashion, disguise, attempts to evade the gender pay gap, and attempts to establish an empowered public identity for women. Especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, the customs and laws restricting this manner of dress have relaxed dramatically, reflecting a growing acceptance and normalisation of the practice.
Trousers, slacks, or pants are an item of clothing worn from the waist to anywhere between the knees and the ankles, covering both legs separately. In the United Kingdom, the word pants generally means underwear and not trousers. Shorts are similar to trousers, but with legs that come down only to around the area of the knee, higher or lower depending on the style of the garment. To distinguish them from shorts, trousers may be called "long trousers" in certain contexts such as school uniform, where tailored shorts may be called "short trousers" in the UK.
Underwear, underclothing, or undergarments are items of clothing worn beneath outer clothes, usually in direct contact with the skin, although they may comprise more than a single layer. They serve to keep outer clothing from being soiled or damaged by bodily excretions, to lessen the friction of outerwear against the skin, to shape the body, and to provide concealment or support for parts of it. In cold weather, long underwear is sometimes worn to provide additional warmth. Special types of undergarments have religious significance. Some items of clothing are designed as undergarments, while others, such as T-shirts and certain types of shorts, are appropriate both as underwear and outerwear. If made of suitable material or textile, some underwear can serve as nightwear or swimwear, and some undergarments are intended for sexual attraction or visual appeal.
Amelia Jenks Bloomer was an American newspaper editor, women's rights and temperance advocate. Even though she did not create the women's clothing reform style known as bloomers, her name became associated with it because of her early and strong advocacy. In her work with The Lily, she became the first woman to own, operate and edit a newspaper for women.
The Lily was the first U.S. newspaper edited by and for women. It was published from 1849 to 1853 by Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–1894) before she sold the newspaper to Mary Birdsall in 1854. While the newspaper initially focused on temperance, it soon broadened its focus to include the many issues of women's rights activists in the 1850s. It grew in its distribution as a result of its discussion of bloomers, a comfortable fashion popularized by Bloomer in the paper.
Anna Jenness Miller was a pioneering clothing designer and an advocate for dress reform, as well as an author and lecturer. Her main goals were to be an "advocate of correct principles of physical development and dress for women." She also wanted to educate mass groups of men and women about the importance of hygiene and health to prevent the spread of diseases. As a lecturer, she spoke about human rights, arguing for equality.
Harriet Newell Austin was an American hydrotherapist, author, and dress-reform advocate. She was the designer of the "American costume," a style of dress meant to promote women's health.
Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was an American hydrotherapist, an advocate for women's dress reform, and the founder and editor of The Sibyl, a periodical devoted to that attire reform topic. Elected to the Middletown, New York, Board of Education in 1880, she was one of the first women to hold elected office in the United States.
The Women's Suffrage Movement in the Western world influenced changes in female fashions of the early 1900s: causing the introduction of masculine silhouettes and the popular Flapper style. Furthermore, the embodiment of The New Woman was introduced, which empowered women to seek independency and equal rights for women. As a result, several changes and improvements were seen in women's economic and political standing, such as the right to vote.
National Dress Reform Association (NDRA) was an American association in support of the Victorian dress reform, founded in 1856 and dissolved in 1865.
References
↑ Dann, Norman K. (2016). Ballots, Bloomers and Marmalade. The Life of Elizabeth Smith Miller. Hamilton, New York: Log Cabin Books. ISBN9780997325102.
↑ Greig, Catherine Smith & Cynthia (2003). Women in pants: manly maidens, cowgirls, and other renegades. New York: H.N. Abrams. p.28. ISBN978-0810945715.
↑ Water-Cure Journal, reprinted in Lily, March 1851.
↑ Elizabeth Cady Stanton's husband wrote to her, asking, "How does Lib Miller look in her new Turkish dress?" Henry B. Stanton to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Stanton Papers, Library of Congress, Film 1:68.
↑ To assertions that she was the innovator of the dress, Bloomer replied: "The first we heard of it, it was worn as an exercise dress at the Water-Cures; the first article we saw advocating it was an editorial in the Seneca County Courier, [Jan. 1851], which article we transferred to our columns; the first person we saw wearing such a dress was Mrs. Charles D. Miller of Peterboro, daughter of Gerrit Smith, who has worn it for the last five or six months", Lily, June 1851, p. 45.
↑ Urwin, Tiffany (2000). "Dexter, Dextra, Dextrum: The Bloomer Costume on the British Stage in 1851". Nineteenth Century Theatre. 28 (2): 91–113. doi:10.1177/174837270002800201. S2CID193319585.
↑ Stevenson, Ana (2017). "'Bloomers' and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950". Cultural & Social History. 14 (5): 621–646. doi:10.1080/14780038.2017.1375706. S2CID165544065.
↑ Fischer, Gayle V. (2001). Pantaloons and Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. pp.79–80.
↑ Greig, Catherine Smith & Cynthia (2003). Women in pants: manly maidens, cowgirls, and other renegades. New York: H. N. Abrams. p.28. ISBN978-0810945715.
↑ Kriebl, Karen. "From Bloomers to Flappers: The American Women's Dress Reform Movement, 1840–1920." Electronic Thesis or Dissertation. Ohio State University, 1998. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. 18 Apr 2014.
↑ Fischer, Gayle V. (Spring 1997). "Pantalets and Turkish Trowsers: Designing Freedom in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States". Feminist Studies. Vol.23, no.1. pp.110–40. doi:10.2307/3178301. JSTOR3178301.
↑ Noun, Louise, "Amelia Bloomer, A Biography, Part I, The Lily of Seneca Falls", Annals of Iowa, 7 (winter 1985), pp. 598–99; Tinling, p. 24.
↑ Cunningham, Patricia A. (2003). Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Libris länk. ISBN0873387422.
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