Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, suffragist, anti-fashion icon

A fascinating look at an underappreciated woman in American history whose newspaper fostered a national conversation on women’s issues. Those who recognize the name Amelia Bloomer usually do so because of bloomers, the clothing item named after her. While she was a rational dress advocate for a time—calling on women to abandon rigid corsets and heavy petticoats and opt for long trousers, shorter skirts, and sensible boots—it was “but an incident” in the larger story of her life and impact. Bloomer edited and published The Lily, the first newspaper for and by women. Founded to promote temperance, it soon broadened to include some of the most important issues to women in that day, including the right to vote, and included contributions from thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The groundbreaking paper brought the conversation from Seneca Falls right to the doorsteps of women across the expanding nation. Guided by a rigid sense of morality and a Puritan work ethic, Bloomer remained open-minded to new ideas. She refused to be swayed by social norms and wrote cutting responses to those who tried to intimidate or shame her and her friends, a group that included Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This deeply researched biography by Sara Catterall follows the many chapters of her life: her humble upbringing in upstate New York, her role in the temperance movement (and its true legacy as a wellspring of the women’s rights movement), her years at The Lily, her groundbreaking position as deputy postmaster in Seneca falls, her troubled health, and her eventual move to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where she continued to move the needle on women’s suffrage in the more flexible new governments of the West.