3 Antebellum politics and women’s writing
Clothes-talk
In 1851, when temperance advocate Amelia Jenks Bloomer adopted a shortened shirt worn over what were called, at the time, Turkish “trowsers,” she had no idea that her married name would give to the English language a new plural noun, bloomers. As originally worn by suffragettes like Bloomer herself, or Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (among a host of other, less famous women, and not always those sympathetic to the suffragettes1), it was regarded as a garment that could free a woman from the confinements of more traditional styles. In the 1850s a woman’s daily garb consisted of ten to twelve pounds of “starched flannel or muslin petticoats,” stays, and a tightly laced corset of whalebone; these underthings were covered by full-skirted dresses “that reached to the ground, sweeping up dirt and debris from country roads and unpaved city streets” (Coon, Hear Me Patiently, 9). Dragging in mud, heavy as lead and hot as Hades, these confining clothes did not promote mobility; indeed, it was generally thought that trousers, when considered merely as an item of dress, were far more comfortable and hygienic than women’s wear.2 Certainly, trousers offered mobility, as African-American abolitionist and diarist Charlotte L. Forten (later Grimké) reported on Saturday, July 15, 1854; she donned the “‘Bloomer’ costume” so as to climb “the highest cherry tree . . . Obtained some fine fruit and felt for the time ‘monarch of all I surveyed’” (Grimké, Journals, 86). And as Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, after wearing the Bloomer for the first time, “What incredible freedom I enjoyed!” (Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 201; Kesselman, “‘Freedom Suit’”).
Soon, however, many of these women adopted the Bloomer Costume not only for the mere physical freedom it bestowed, but also as a sign they sought freedom from other, more binding social and political constraints. Thus, during both the original heyday of bloomers, from 1851 through 1854, and in their later, more widespread appearance in the 1890s as an athletic and bicycle costume, these trousers were a visual reminder that the traditional shape of emancipation in the United States might be subject to radical reform. The visual impact of these pants spoke – sometimes, although not always, more loudly than words – about the fact that many a middle-class American woman was no longer content to remain off the public stage, without a legal voice, a juridical presence, or a vote in a democracy that claimed to provide equality for all (Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage).
But, if bloomers served as a reminder that the concept of freedom was being pressured from several quarters to reform in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the costume also had the power to suggest that the natural itself might be unstable and subject to interpretation because it suggested that gender, generally understood as part of the natural order, might not be rigidly fixed. Since the dominant sex–gender system of most cultures is rendered legible, in part, through the language of clothing, to tamper with clothing signifies potential changes – tantamount, perhaps, to tampering with the natural order of things. In fact, although a number of women had either worn or adapted trousers for a variety of uses – as play clothes for young girls, as underwear, as spa clothing or as working clothes, worn mostly by working-class women – for many years,3 “panting” in public still signified masculinity to the middle class. Exceptions might be made for a variety of reasons, but pants on women were generally considered lower class, risqué or shocking.4 Such firm associations between class, gender, and dress remain evident in certain lingering prejudices about dress, or in commonplaces such as “who wears the pants in this family?”5
By wearing pants in public, the Bloomerites implicitly threw the door open to questions that had often gone unasked, the simplest of these being: if women could wear pants, what else might they do, or be? Would such wearing of pants allow masculinity to be usurped, even destroyed? Weren’t trousers on women indecent, unnatural – weren’t they suggestive? The very possibility that “natural” sexual signification, like clothing itself, might be altered, or the idea that their girls might “pant” in public, gave parents pause: what did it mean? Would women become as overtly sexual as men – or prostitutes? As historian Gayle Fischer writes, “it is difficult to determine if the general public’s resistance to female trousers stemmed more from the fear that women would seize male power or from the fear that pants-clad women would be unabashedly ‘sexy’” (“‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers,’” 113). This potential for modification to which the bloomers pointed, along with the prospect of overt female eroticism and gender confusion, rattled the middle class.
Clearly, a “panting” girl was trouble. She would have to be managed. Such management is not only evident in the historical vicissitudes and ultimate fate of the New Costume, as Amelia Bloomer’s trouser-set was called, but also in the linguistic fate of a once familiar, once household word, bloomer. A highly public, publicized, and political “statement” when Amelia Bloomer first wore the design in 1851, bloomers were parodied, criticized, and finally ridiculed to death by 1854. According to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the word bloomer itself had come into being as an epithet designed to belittle the women’s movement.6 However, as the historical record shows, many women adopted both the costume and the name of Bloomer(ite) with pride and with defiance in the face of such ridicule; in fact, Amelia Bloomer held it as a point of personal pride to have given her name to the Bloomer Costume, and she wore the trousers until she retired from public speaking. But by 1854, other women in the movement had ceased to wear the garment as streetwear, and so it vanished for a time. According to Gerda Lerner, the costume “soon became a symbol of revolt against all the senseless restrictions imposed on women and was worn with grim persistence in the face of ridicule, abuse and public censure” (Grimké Sisters, 335–6). But women like the Grimké sisters did finally give it up; “Sarah gave the costume up gladly, for she had worn it only from conviction; Angelina did so with the understanding that in time a better and more attractive dress for women would be developed and accepted” (Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 336; Birney, Grimké Sisters). In the 1870s, however, bloomers reemerged as a topic of dispute in the discourse of a scientific dress-reform movement. This reform, bolstered by the claims of burgeoning fields in health science, eventuated in the far more acceptable version of the fabled emancipation drag. The new bloomers were designed as an aid to physical activity, specifically for cycling. But even this new version faded over time. No longer considered indecent, although still eroticized, trousers for women were relegated to sportswear, or shortened, or made only for children, and so became specialized, stuffed back up under skirts from whence pantaloons had once descended, returned by custom and fashion to the realm of the private underthing, those unmentionables that girls were supposed to blush over. Estelle Ansley Worrell’s comment about children’s clothing is apt here; she observes that
how a nation’s children are treated and educated reveals much about its attitudes towards its citizens . . . Evidence shows that American children’s clothing utilized new European styles and daring or even “shocking” new ideas sooner than did the fashions of adults. Apparently we dress our children in new styles that we ourselves are not always ready to accept. In recent history, young children wore bikini bathing suits before their parents did. The same was true with pantaloons at the beginning of the nineteenth century . . . Girls wore trousers or pantalets before their mothers did and made bloomers part of their regular wardrobe before their mothers did.
(Children’s Costume in America, 4)
And as Valerie Steele notes, in Paris, “Even feminine underpants were regarded as ‘demi-masculine’ apparel, and it was only gradually over the course of the century that they entered the respectable woman’s wardrobe. At mid-century, they were still mostly worn by little girls, sportswomen, and demimondaines. Dances like the can-can and the cahut exploited the ‘naughty’ image of underpants, as dancers raised their legs to display kneelength pantalons” (Paris Fashion, 164). In fact, although middle-class women did wear trousers, until the late twentieth century all female trousers had particular uses or meanings and, when women wore them, what they wore had more than likely been made for a man, or else tailor-made for a particular woman. For example, during the First World War, the women who were recruited to work in the factories, particularly munitions factories, often wore what their men had worn, trousers or boilersuits, although it was considered daring.7 In the Second World War, many women, from Rose Will Monroe, better known as Rosie the Riveter, to Norma Jeane Dougherty, later known as Marilyn Monroe, donned workmen’s jumpsuits, overalls, and blue jeans, again to help the war effort. But, although trousers for women did gain increasing acceptance as appropriate clothing, it was not until the dust raised by the social upheavals of the 1960s settled that trousers truly became part of any middle-class woman’s public wardrobe. Even so, questions about the propriety of when and how and why pants should be worn can still haunt job-seekers, professionals (especially politicians), and the fashion pages.8
Meanwhile, even if, by the 1940s, women could wear pants, the word bloomers had ceased to signify a feminist politics. It was no longer a word that made a political statement about women’s freedom. In fact, in colloquial use, the once adult, once political word bloomer signified babyhood more than anything else. Children wore bloomers, even though the pantaloons that girls had worn as early as the 1820s had never been called bloomers, and would not be called such until well after the heyday of Betty Bloomer’s bicycle costume.9 And the association between infancy and femininity that had been foisted upon “bloomers” in the wake of what has since been called the First Wave of feminist agitation in the United States was to reemerge during the 1960s, just as the Second Wave began to surge. While protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality began to turn violent, as the sexual revolution heated up and bras were about to burn, and as the parental complaint “you can’t tell a boy from a girl anymore” grew into a howl of unrest, bloomers were introduced by the world of haute couture as a pert, sex-kittenish little item for the hip young thing, particularly in England and France.10
Thus did this completely American English word lose its ability to index an intense and prolonged moment of nineteenth-century political conflict about gender in the United States (and elsewhere), as reflected in most American desk-top dictionaries of the late twentieth century, which, when they list bloomers as something other than the plural of a flowering plant or, significantly, as slang for a blunder, list the word as: n. 1. bloomers, a. loose trousers gathered at the knee, formerly worn by women as part of a gymnasium, riding, or other sports outfit. b. a woman’s undergarment of similar, but less bulky design and c. the trousers of a bloomer (costume). Only rarely does the now secondary meaning, 2. a costume for women, as advocated about 1850 by Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–94) of New York, appear (“Bloomer”). Often the dictionary will offer no explanation as to what Mrs. Bloomer was advocating, besides the costume itself.11
But, one might ask, why notice such a small matter as this single word’s definition and common use? In fact, common sense might tell the persons availing themselves of these aforementioned dictionaries that any woman advocating the wearing of pants in the mid-nineteenth century was no doubt an agitator for other, presumably more substantive political and emancipatory, projects. Historically, however, this would not be true, for, as Gayle Fischer has shown, the women of the Oneida Perfectionist Community in Oneida, New York adopted trousers for rather different reasons than the Bloomerites did, reasons that had very little to do with emancipation politics. “In contrast to mainstream critiques,” writes Fischer, “Oneida Community criticism of clothing focused on the way dress made the ‘distinction between the sexes vastly more prominent and obtrusive than nature [made] it’” (“‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers,’” 130). To these women, trousers signified both nature – after all, women, like men, had legs – and the virginity of youth – a submissive, girlish state. “The style unquestionably made Oneida women appear infantile or childlike” (132), writes Fischer, and the Oneida women were encouraged to remain girlish.
But historical accuracy and the Oneida Community aside, why should a dictionary be politically specific, if it cites historical information – names, dates, and so forth? In this chapter, I wish to propose an answer to such a question by using this entirely American neologism “bloomer” to show how common usage and the production of common sense are linked. By doing so, I will explore the ways in which common usage can help to alter the shape of what is generally recognized and understood as common sense. I do this in order to argue, in turn, that common sense drives the tenor of everyday life where feminism finds both the deepest resistance and yet, paradoxically, also a home, because it is primarily in the commonplaces of language – in the sayings and in the things we all just know – that common sense is both composed and torn asunder, both sustained and belied. I will also show that compressed within the history of this one word bloomers is the story of how our underlying common sense about such things as birth, breeding, or brawn was challenged by social, medical, and political changes that, in turn, affected our language. To be more specific, if bloomer was once a commonplace watchword that signified women’s emancipation, it did so by being caught between conflicting and changing versions of common sense: it was a term that could conjure up the common-sense belief that mobility meant practicality, and that the physical health and well-being of wives, sisters, and daughters was important enough to warrant dress reform movements in the 1850s and again in the 1870s. But it was also the watchword for common-sense assumptions about frailty and femininity that endured throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, assumptions which suggested that masculinity and patriarchal authority were under siege the minute women wore pants. By 1854, however, despite the rational common-sense arguments in favor of trousers set forth by those women who proudly called themselves Bloomers or Bloomerites, the Bloomer Costume was judged indelicate, indecent, and overly masculine by the prevailing tide of another kind of common sense, the common sense of tradition and religion, as set forth by antisuffrage, antireformists. And yet, by the 1890s a new kind of common sense about gender had begun to take hold and to prevail. By 1895, bloomers were thought, by some, to be appropriate to the growing social mobility of the soon-to-be explosive phenomenon of the “New Woman.” Certainly young women just coming into their own donned bloomers and went biking in numbers. Furthermore, if, by the 1940s, bloomers had become primarily children’s underwear, by the 1960s and 1970s, bloomers reappeared as hip fashion, adapted by designers such as Yves St. Laurent and Mary Quant, and as such signified a “new” sexual era.
Such changes in the signification of one word, I will argue, can serve as an index to the shifts in commonly held cultural attitudes not only toward dress or hygiene but also to sociopolitical changes in the domain of sexuality. My point here is that if the word bloomer was once part of the everyday political language in the 1850s, and tied, then, to what the Bloomerites saw as a rational logic of practical common sense about women’s clothing and thus also women’s place in the world, prevailing modes of common sense would also turn the Bloomer Costume into bloomers as we now know them: a quaint, picturesque sartorial feature of the past linked to childhood, underwear, and fashion fads, with perhaps a sketchy relationship – and certainly an underreported one, if the dictionary is any indication – to political events. And yet, along the historical and linguistic way, an American common sense about femininity was also radically altered.
A picture may very well be, as the common saying goes, worth a thousand words, but a word can also paint a thousand pictures. So loudly did the picture of a “panting” girl speak, in fact, that women who wished to tether the power of language to their own purposes finally gave up on trousers. But although bloomers, as a costume, had a visual impact that spoke louder than words, I think it also worth seeing what other pictures a history of the word can paint. Women in antebellum America sought to forge new meanings and so to make a new home in the world for themselves. Indeed, reformists and abolitionists sought nothing less than to remake constitutional law, and while bloomers are only indirectly linked to the fight against legalized slavery, women like Amelia Jenks Bloomer – who was also a writer, an editor, and a public speaker – did seek to change the meaning of another common word for which the United States stood and for which it would presently hurtle itself, sundered in two, into war: freedom. The larger public issues at hand for Amelia Jenks Bloomer in 1851 were temperance, abolition, and women’s rights. But the underlying question – what is literally meant by freedom? – was at stake.
To put this claim another way, if clothes are like words, words are like clothes; each speaks a cultural language; each has a gendered grammar; they are subject to interpretation, remotivation, and misunderstandings. The “Bloomer,” as both an American neologism and as an American experiment in dress reform, offers us the site of a unique historical convergence of political language and material object, from which to examine the ways in which American women tried to alter the ways of their forefathers, and thus to alter common sense. They would try to change the vocabulary of their everyday lives and the political life of the nation; they would try to make politics “mean” in a new fashion, one more suited to tell them of a future in which they, and their children, would have more mobility, more possibility. Or as Susan B. Anthony said, in a counter-centennial address in Philadelphia on July 4, 1876, “Woman’s wealth, thought and labor have cemented the stones of every monument man has reared to liberty . . . We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever” (Franklin, American Voices, American Lives, 435–40).
Panting girls
Common sense. Most Americans are proud of it. Many will appeal to it in order to further a political goal. Certainly the women who were called Bloomerites used the logic of common sense when they spoke of their costume as the rational dress. How, they asked, could one properly care for children, bound by the frivolous dictates of French – foreign – fashion? Was it not easier to lift a child, or perform other womanly tasks, unburdened by whalebone? Pragmatically speaking, why constrict the human body so cruelly that bruising, broken ribs and intestinal injury result? Some doctors agreed. But health was not the only issue. The Bloomer soon had ardent adherents who saw the garment as a means to signify changes to both their physical well-being and their mental health, if not also their social condition. As Anne C. Coon notes, factory girls in Lowell, Massachusetts organized a Bloomer Institute to help them achieve two stated objectives: “Mutual Improvement – in Literature, Science and Morals” – and “Emancipation” from the thralldom of fashion and other unnatural or unhelpful trappings (Hear Me Patiently, 12).
On July 4, 1853, for the occasion of an address entitled “Mothers of the Revolution” given in Harford, New York by the then popular temperance speaker and editor of an internationally known women’s newsletter called The Lily, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, this toast and poem was delivered by a contingent of young women who were “tastefully attired in the Bloomer Costume” (Hear Me Patiently, 62):
The Bloomer Costume – The most appropriate as well as the most convenient dress for ladies – May it soon become their universal costume.
Let sickly ladies talk and flirtAnd tell their paper passion,Amid those trailing, draggling skirtsBecause it is the fashion;But give me the gay and sprightly lassWho “pants” for health so blooming,For her I’d fill the flowing glassAnd shout, “huzza! for bloomers!”
Some two years prior to this address, in 1851, Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had designed their rational costume for women. They were goaded on by an opponent of women’s rights, who had jestingly endorsed dress reform as a means to ridicule those agitating women of Seneca Falls – women like Bloomer, Stanton, and Anthony – who had stirred up such a fuss in 1848 when they met at the first women’s liberation conference ever to be held in the United States, and where they had drafted the famous document, “The Declaration of the Rights of Women.” Bloomer and Stanton responded by adapting a costume that Stanton’s cousin, Elizabeth Smith Miller, or Libby Miller, the daughter of dress reform abolitionist Gerrit Smith, had worn in European spas: a shortened skirt worn over large, so-called “Turkish trowsers,” gathered in at the ankle with a string or button.12
Such a costume was not wholly unfamiliar to many middle-class women, who might have worn pantalets or pantaloons as children. Certainly, many had heard of or perhaps had fantasized about the harem and the seraglio, where “Oriental” women wore voluminous pantaloons and veils – thus the epithet “Turkish.” Dropping pounds of muslin, while also obviating the need to corset tightly, the new costume was hailed by some women and their male supporters as more sane and sanitary than the fashions then current. Amelia Bloomer, who took up the dress with relish and dedication, soon found her name bowdlerized into a plural noun, bloomers, and bestowed on a garment that was also referred to in the popular press as the Camilla, the Tom-Boy, Turkish trowsers, the Oriental Costume or that indecent dress. A British broadsheet in 1851 lampooned the attire thus:
Listen, females allNo matter what your trade is,Old Nick is in the girls,The Devil’s in the ladies!Married men may weep,And tumble in the ditchesSince women are resolvedTo wear the shirts and breeches.
Ladies do declareA change should have been sooner,The women, one and all,Are going to join the Bloomers.Prince Albert and the QueenHad such a jolly row, sirs;She threw off stays and putOn waistcoat, coat and trousers.
The world’s turned upside down,The ladies will be tailorsAnd serve Old England’s QueenAs soldiers and as sailorsWon’t they look funny whenThe seas are getting lumpy,Or when they ride astrideUpon an Irish donkey?(Gattey, Bloomer Girls, 75)
Some forty-two years later, on January 17, 1895, about two weeks after the 76-year-old Amelia Jenks Bloomer had died in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the New York Truth ran a “suggested epitaph” for her:
Here lies(Quite safe at last from reckless rumors)The erst well-known andWell-abused Miss Bloomer.Living too long,She saw her once bold coupRendered old-fashioned by the Woman New.
By noisy imitators vexed and piqued,her fads outfadded and her freaks out-freakedShe did not die till she had seen and heardAll her absurdities made more absurd.
In short,She found Dame Fortune but ill-humored,And passed awayIn every point out-Bloomered.
And so it might have seemed to Amelia Bloomer herself, for although she had seen the cause of colleagues Frederick Douglass, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, and Lucretia Mott change the nation through Civil War, neither her own treasured cause of temperance nor a woman’s right to vote became constitutional amendments before she died.
Yet the dismissive mockery of the aforementioned epitaph serves also to indicate that the “bloomer craze” caused more disturbance than Truth’s biting humor suggests. Not only does the epitaph nervously record the growing visibility of the New Woman, whose agitation would finally lead to women’s suffrage in 1921, but in the heyday of the Bloomer Costume more than simply a few sprightly, scandalous gay lasses, as the first poem coyly names them, panted in the public eye. Despite ridicule and censure, the Bloomer as a public, day dress for middle-class women, rather than as an immodest, private dress donned at spas, had spread quickly from Seneca Falls – where Bloomer lived and worked as an editor and speaker – to Scotland, England, Canada, and Australia – all across the fractured British Empire. It spread by word of mouth, through correspondence and through The Lily, where Bloomer offered free patterns for the costume in return for subscriptions (11). There was “Bloomerism in Picadilly,” “Bloomerism at the Crystal Palace,” and Madame Tussaud and Son’s exhibition offered the public the “Bloomer Costume: Five beautiful varieties by which the public may judge if this dress may ever become popular” (Gattey, Bloomer Girls, 67–72).
Moreover, as the rational dress craze spread, it carried with it implications that would soon erupt in other debates that, at the end of the twentieth century, are often considered more serious than either prohibition or dress reform. Advocates claimed that the costume freed the natural form of a woman’s body from the unnatural constraints of fashion. Despite Amelia Jenks Bloomer’s belief in temperance, Bloomerites were ready to “fill the flowing glass / And shout ‘huzza! for bloomers!,’” presumably with all the (masculine?) gusto of their new-found health. Aghast at such a picture, opponents cried that panting girls were unnatural, that only men were naturally suited to the suit. And so the nature of woman herself, a question that Sigmund Freud would soon spend his life attempting to answer, was up for debate. Bloomers became a referendum on nature. But what such an argument about the naturalness of trousers also suggests is that “nature” was not a transparent or immutable category, but one that indeed might have to be shaped, written, or even theorized, in order to be seen – or read – at all. What is natural – natural clothes, a natural sexuality? How should the natural be handled or determined, if it is not, well, natural? If Charles Darwin set the term “natural selection” into motion in 1859 upon the publication of The Origin of Species, the scientific, public, and legal debates that raged in the wake of Darwin’s work would set the stage for the infamous Tennessee v. John Scopes or the “Monkey Trial” of 1925, in which high school teacher John Thomas Scopes had been charged with illegally teaching evolution, a cause célèbre later dramatized in the play and film, Inherit the Wind. Two famous legal minds, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, squared off in the courtroom, Darrow for the defense, Bryan for the state of Tennessee. Such conflict about the nature of the natural reerupted in the summer of 1999, when the Kansas state school board ruled that Darwin should be stripped from public school curriculum because evolution is not a fact, but a theory. It would seem that the nature of nature remains a site of conflict. And certainly any theory about nature – whether biological, religious, or psychological – will help to shape ruling common-sense ideas about sex, race, and gender.
In July 1851, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reported that “there appears to be a decided and growing tendency on the part of our countrywomen to wear the trowsers” (288). So Harper’s kindly offered to the “practical reformers, bold as Joan d’Arc” a “sketch of Oriental Costume, as a model for our fair reformers,” which they titled the “Turkish Costume” (288; see figure 1). The next month, Harper’s ran a page entitled “Woman’s Emancipation. Being a letter addressed to Mr. Punch, with a drawing, by a strong-minded American Woman” (424; see figure 2). A cruel if acute parody of American reformist tracts, whether antislavery, temperance, or suffragist, this letter, signed by Theodosia Eudoxia Bang, M.A., MCP Phi, Delta, Kappa, KLM &c.&c. (of Boston, US), reads:
We are emancipating ourselves, among other badges of the slavery of feudalism, from the inconvenient dress of the European female. With man’s functions, we have asserted our right to his garb, and especially to that part of it which invests the lower extremities. With this great symbol, we have adopted others – the hat, the cigar, the paletot or round jacket. And it is generally calculated that the dress of the Emancipated American female is quite pretty – as becoming in all points as it is manly and independent. I inclose a drawing made by my gifted fellow-citizen Increasen Tarbox of Boston US for the Free Women’s Banner, a periodical under my conduct, aided by several gifted women of acknowledged progressive opinions.
(424)
I quote Harper’s at length because this paragraph, and the sketch, tell a tale of what was to be almost a century-long resistance to the politics of female suffrage. Independence was first and foremost a white man’s prerogative, and had been since the Founding Fathers signed the Constitution into law. Until 1921, the vote, as a sign of that independence and freedom, was a man’s civil prerogative as a citizen. Progressive opinions about changing the vote, and about female suffrage in particular, were deemed silly, ugly, and indecent – as evident in the name Increasen Tarbox, perhaps an allusion to the supposed perils of racial intermingling or to the outrageous indelicacy of women smoking cigars, wearing hats, their ankles scandalously exposed.
Figure 1 Turkish Costume: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1851.
Figure 2 Illustration from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, August 1851.
Another month later, in The Lily of September 1851, Bloomer published an engraving of herself. Neither as dainty and fantastically Orientalized as Harper’s first version nor as short and as fantastically masculinized as the second version, this Bloomer Costume is presented as serious, sober, and decidedly female, according to the gender norms of the day. Intriguingly, though, the engraving does not refuse to suggest that the Bloomer might speak of something else, for this fashion is clearly not the fashion and if, in one hand, Mrs. Bloomer holds a fan, the other rests pointedly upon an uncorseted and generous – but not too! – waist. Demure and defiant, she counters the other versions. The Bloomer would return in several forms (figure 3).
Figure 3 The “New Woman” and her bicycle from the 1890s.
It should be noted here that Bloomer herself seldom wrote or spoke about her clothes. She never gave a public lecture on dress reform, for example. She preferred to let the Bloomer costume speak for itself – and evidently, for a few years, it spoke quite loudly and contradictorily. There were Bloomer polkas, waltzes, theatrical productions; there were songs like “I want to be a Bloomer.” But there were also Staffordshire china figures made of Mrs. Bloomer, one showing her wearing a man’s collar and holding a cigar (Gattey, Bloomer Girls, 73). And there were those Lowell factory girls, who in working in the mills or in the garment industry, were among the most poorly paid laborers in the United States, a fact that Amelia Bloomer, who did speak about women and labor, never forgot. And in 1852, in Montreal, women reenacted a mild version of Lysistrata, using the Bloomer: they threatened en masse to don the new outfit if the city did not immediately take measures to clean the streets.
However, in that threat one can see the beginning of the Bloomer’s political decline: the ladies of Montreal did not, in fact, don the Bloomer en masse and by 1854, few besides Amelia Bloomer herself still wore the costume in public. The sheer dailiness of wardrobe began to blast away at the women’s resolve.13 “We put the dress on for greater freedom,” lamented Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “but what is physical freedom compared with mental bondage? . . . It is not wise . . . to use up so much energy and feeling that way” (Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 890). In March 1856, Charlotte Forten reported that she was persuaded to go to a party dressed “in full Bloomer costume, which I have since had good cause to regret” (151). As Susan B. Anthony said, the Bloomer had become something of “an intellectual slavery; one never could get rid of thinking of herself, and the important thing is to forget self. The attention of my audiences was fixed on my clothes instead of my words” (quoted in Barry, Anthony, 82).14
Anthony’s and Stanton’s sense that their words and their clothes were in competition for meaning, and that by adopting clothes – and then, finally, political positions – more in keeping with majority expectation, one could forget oneself, is a forcible reminder that appearances speak and that they do not always say what was intended, nor do they guarantee the meaning of the message. As Joan Blumberg notes, for women in the nineteenth century, appearance was linked to moral character – “becoming a better person meant paying less attention to the self . . . When girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they almost always focused on their internal character and how it was reflected in outward behavior” (Body Project, xxi). So although appearance was supposed to be a matter of indifference, and although excessive frippery was seen as a moral failing in a woman, ironically, it mattered very much what Susan B. Anthony wore – her appearance played a large part in how an audience would respond to her, and she was perhaps the most public figure of the women’s rights movement. Some of the reports she received about the Bloomer were not encouraging. Among the most virulent was the claim that the Bloomerites were “a hybrid species, half-man, half-woman, belonging to neither sex” (Gattey, Bloomer Girls, 85). Such descriptions hounded those women who felt impelled to speak in the public sphere, no matter what clothing they wore, because like it or not, appearance figured as part of the conflict.
Dress was a persistent topic of concern for women in the nineteenth century, whether or not they were of the middle class, whether or not they advocated temperance, abolition, or women’s rights. If the Bloomerites went too far in the direction of “masculinization,” the increasingly seductive dictates of fashion, often seen, as I mentioned earlier, as a foreign French import, threatened to enfeeble, degrade, and imperil womanhood – or as Sara Parton (a.k.a. author Fanny Fern) wrote in “To the Ladies: a Call to be a Wife,” a woman who thought “more of her silk dress than her children” was an abomination (307–8). Not surprisingly, the kind of rhetoric used against the enfeebling effects of fashion mirrors that launched in the early nineteenth century at the supposedly ennervating effects of “silly” novel-reading. Indeed, as historian Mary Kelley notes, when novelist Caroline Howard Gilman (a.k.a. Clarissa Packard) recounted the events surrounding her first publication, in 1810, she recalled that she had wept bitterly about it because it seemed shameful to her at the time, “as if I had been detected in man’s apparel” (Private Woman, Public Stage, 180).
But despite the fear and the warnings, the novel gained a place in the household, and as the nineteenth century progressed, more and more women turned to writing as a means to support themselves; meanwhile, more and more magazines like Godey’s Ladies Book entered the home carrying images of, and patterns for, the latest styles. Riotous fashion was winning out over sober maternity, and although Amelia Jenks Bloomer saw her invention as a “modest proposal” on behalf of sobriety in dress, other women, like Fanny Fern, could only see it as an even worse alternative to frippery – a coarsening of womanhood’s true grace and beauty. And sadly, as late as 1963, when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, part of what she sought to correct was a then still-prevalent notion that the women of the suffragette movement had been coarse and unfashionable: “These women,” she felt compelled to write, “were not man-eaters” (86). Common knowledge, however, said otherwise: in the early 1960s, the feminism of the nineteenth century, as well as the soon-to-come second feminist movement, was generally thought to be a dirty joke, perpetrated by hard-faced, humorless, embittered, unfashionable, sex-deprived or alien, i.e. lesbian, lower-class, foreign, hybrid, shrews. Never mind that both Anthony and Stanton had been of the middle class, white “ladies” of their time. And never mind that both knew full well the impact of appearance, using it, when expedient, to further their own cause. Early supporters of the rational dress, they dropped it in 1854 when it began to become a source of such persistent abuse that it was a political liability.
And then, in 1868, Stanton and Anthony undertook a rather more radical, conservative, and distressing campaign. With the Civil War over and the cause for women’s equality no further along than it was in 1848, they found themselves faced with the fact that abolitionists like Frederick Douglass had turned their attention to getting freedmen the vote. Outraged, Stanton and Anthony severed their ties with what was left of the abolitionist movement by forming the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, and later began to court southern politicians by claiming that a white woman’s racial superiority outweighed the claims of freedmen. The proposed constitutional amendment that would grant “Manhood Suffrage” was, wrote Stanton, “an open, deliberate insult to the women of the nation.” Universal male suffrage would allow men of the “lower orders, natives and foreigners, Dutch, Irish, Chinese and African” (quoted in Newman, White Women’s Rights, 64), to legislate for white women and this, she argued, was an abomination, much to the horror and dismay of many former abolitionist colleagues, like the Grimké sisters, who stayed with the Women’s Suffrage Association because it continued to support the fight for African-American emancipation and equality (Birney, Grimké Sisters, 333). Finally, by 1881, when Stanton and Anthony wrote the first volume of the still yet to be achieved History of Woman Suffrage, certain alliances were downplayed or scripted out. As historian Anne C. Coon notes, “references to Bloomer and the Lily in the History were minimal, and Bloomer’s chapter on Iowa was heavily edited” (Hear Me Patiently, 30). Their mutual association, it is true, had never been an easy one, given Bloomer’s far more tentative and sometimes conservative approach to the issues that motivated Stanton and Anthony. But the Bloomers had also moved. In 1853, they moved to Ohio, where Amelia tried to keep The Lily alive. But later, after they moved on to Council Bluffs, Iowa – at that time still a frontier town – she was forced to give it up. In Iowa, although she continued to work on behalf of women and temperance, she was removed from “the geographical, emotional and political center of the woman’s movement” (ibid.). In addition, she had always been somewhat of a difficult colleague, shy but outspoken, often irritable and well aware that she had neither the class privilege nor the education nor social position of either Anthony or Stanton (ibid., 31). In fact, some commentators at the time blamed the failure of the Bloomer on class prejudice. “Mrs. Merrifield, whose Dress as a Fine Art (1854) is one of the most enlightening books on fashion at this time, says: ‘We are content to adopt the greatest absurdities in dress when they are brought from Paris or recommended by a French name, but American fashion has no chance of success in aristocratic England’” (64).
Thus did the story of Amelia Jenks Bloomer, and the Bloomer Costume to which she had given her name, begin to shrink. As Anne C. Coon writes:
In histories of the early feminist movement, Amelia Bloomer’s contributions are often summarized in a brief reference to the garment that bears her name. While her support of dress reform did indeed focus national attention on the “Bloomerites,” and did result in a sweeping, yet fleeting, national preoccupation with a new style of dress, Amelia Bloomer has left us with much more than a “costume.” Still, the substance of her work has been eclipsed by the image of the “Bloomer” as a “shocking” and “immoral” costume in the nineteenth century and, in later years of “bloomers” as frivolous or “unmentionable” undergarments. Thus, our memory of Amelia Bloomer has regrettably been reduced to caricature.
(Hear Me Patiently, 16)
Bloomers crept back into the closet in 1854, and vanished from the streets until the 1890s. In fact, their disappearance was helped along by the way in which the suffragettes themselves used the prejudice of appearance, and responded to the pressures of everyday abuse and ridicule. Although some, like Gerrit Smith, Elizabeth Smith Miller’s activist father, remained adamant that dress reform was a necessary and integral part of any movement that would emancipate women, others – and significantly, those politically prominent, white, middle-class women who had attempted to wear the garments – found the daily grind of being associated with children, the working class, or simply sticking out like a sore (masculine) thumb amongst their peers, too dispiriting and physiologically taxing. As J. C. Flugel reports in his curious, oft-cited study, The Psychology of Clothes, issued 1930 by the Hogarth Press:
Of course there is such a thing as negative prestige. A fashion may be killed in its infancy by being adopted by persons whom it is considered undesirable to imitate. The classical instance of this was the sudden disappearance of “bloomers” in 1851 when a London brewery dressed all their barmaids in nether garments of this type. Another (and in a sense more literal) method of killing fashions was by associating them with public executions – in the persons either of the executed or the executioner. In Queen Anne’s reign there was considerable pother about women appearing in the street in their nightgowns. But this fashion speedily came to an end when a woman was executed in a garment of this description. In the terminology of the behaviourist, the habit was “deconditioned” by being thus brought into association with an event of such a painful character.
(152 n. 2)
It would seem, then, that until the latter half of the twentieth century, middle-class women who panted in public found not freedom, but rather associations that were too painful and counterproductive to endure.
Cycles
Thus does appearance speak louder than words. And yet, the word bloomer itself remained in the vocabulary, and in use – or as Charles Nelson Gattey wrote in 1967, “Mrs. Bloomer has indeed had her revenge and we should be grateful to this singular woman who gave the world so useful a plural” (Bloomer Girls, 14). Furthermore, by 1873–4, dress reform once again became an issue for widespread public debate, first in Boston and then in other cities, when Abba Louisa Goold Woolson, a teacher, popular literary essayist, and an officer of the New England Women’s Club sponsored a series of lectures about dress.
This is not to say that the issue of dress reform had died out utterly in the intervening years; but these lectures were offered so frequently, and became popular enough that Woolson collected and published them. The lecturers were four women doctors – Mary J. Safford-Blake, Caroline E. Hastings, Mercy B. Jackson, and Arvilla B. Haynes – and Woolson herself, and the lectures were designed to convince the general public that “the whole structure and the essential features of our present apparel are undeniably opposed to the plainest requirements of health, beauty and convenience” (Woolson, Dress Reform, vi). These women saw to it that an “accessible and attractive room, which is intended to serve for a bureau of information on all matters connected with dress reform,” was set up at “25 Winter Street, over Chandler’s dry-goods store, room 15.” They also provided, at the lowest cost possible, garments and patterns for garments designed on “strict hygienic principles.”
Although she seldom said so in public, Woolson herself favored pants; but in 1874, “bloomers” were still seen as far too radical a move. Overly heavy skirts, corseting, flimsy materials: these might all prove to be physically dangerous. Yet the doctors who agreed to help Woolson still had rhetorically to manage the tradition of the “American Costume” by designating it as a brave, intelligent attempt, but one which both delayed true dress reform and, in the end, had given too much credit to what Woolson termed “thoughtless women.” Because the Bloomer
sought to accomplish an immediate result by ill-considered and inadequate means . . . to the majority of thoughtless women it remained an object of indifference or of ridicule . . . Men sneered at the costume without mercy, and branded it hideous. As made and worn by many of its followers, it was certainly not beautiful: but had it been perfection itself, it would have utterly perished; for arrayed against it were the force of ignorance and of habit . . . [even] had the costume succeeded in establishing itself as our permanent and recognized dress, it would not have rendered further reform unnecessary . . . So long as the trunk of the body is girded in the middle by bands, with too little clothing above and an excess of it below, so long will the greatest evil of our present dress remain untouched.
(Dress Reform, x–xi)
The doctors had changed tactics. Rather than cite the rational politics of emancipation which had been the clarion call of the mid-century suffragettes, they chose to use moral patriotism and the science of hygiene to argue the same things their predecessors had argued: that fashion was a foreign import, thereby un-American; that women of the upper classes had a moral duty to dress with less ostentation; that American women should begin a gradual shift towards a more healthful style befitting the natural shape of a woman’s childbearing form. They had, they said, a far more scientifically sound version of common sense than that of either the radical Bloomerites or previous doctors, and they offered a series of talks which presented what they saw as up-to-date medical and historical evidence to prove that women’s fashionable clothing was physiologically dangerous and morally repugnant, a threat to the life of the (white) woman, her child, and the future of the nation.
“In presenting to you some thoughts upon the subject of dress,” says Mary J. Safford-Blake, M.D., “I do not desire you to accept my ipse dixit of right or wrong; but I hope you will probe the facts presented, and, if they appeal to your common sense and reason as truths, that you will heed them, not alone for your own good, but that your influence may go forth as a help and guide to others” (Dress Reform, 5). Mercy B. Jackson, M.D. goes further. “We are a republican nation,” she says,
at least in form, and have no distinct classes where the lines are so tightly drawn that citizens cannot pass from one to the other . . . We should therefore, as good citizens and as Christian women, do all we can to foster self-respect . . . Is not society accountable in a great measure for . . . breaches of trust in private citizens and public servants? And who but women control the customs of society, and make them either prudent, wise, and moral, or extravagant, foolish and immoral? I appeal to the moral sense of the ladies present, and I ask them if they are willing, by their example and influence, longer to countenance a mode of dress which is so little fitted to answer the reasonable demands that should be made upon it, and so destructive of health and morals?
(Dress Reform, 91–5)
In other words, according to these female physicians, their mode of rational dress reform was more scientifically and medically rational than the previous rational dress; their garments would not speak so directly of anything like “emancipation,” as the famous failure had, but rather of moral strength and scientific fact. Significantly, almost none of the physicians use the term bloomer when describing the various costumes that they urge their middle-class audiences to adopt, even when the item in question looked a lot like, well, pants. Yet a corset and hoops remained, to many, indispensable; a “lady” in 1874 was hooped and the persistence of the corset and hoop shows that the women physicians ran into at least as much resistance as their misguided mothers. It should be noted, too, that many of the physiological, hygienic and antifashion arguments would continue to be made over and over again, as in, for example, Miss Ada S. Ballin’s The Science of Dress in Theory and Practice, published in 1885. Miss Ballin thought the Bloomer had failed because it was too violent a change from tradition. She promotes the demure divided skirt.15
Still, as I have noted, most middle-class women continued to tight-lace and hoop. The general public resisted dress reform, and the idea of the Bloomer as a radical, unfeminine costume remained to haunt any type of so-called rational alteration, especially one that included pants. Very few middle-class women, even if persuaded that their health might be at risk, took heed of medical or scientific common sense because ladies were made, and middle-class women wanted to be seen as genteel, white ladies, not as something other or darker. If that meant corsets and hoops, so be it. Otherwise, what you had was not a “natural” (white) lady. Fashions that signified gender, race, and class, through the material means of laces and stays, held sway and so did the taint of past ridicule and caricature, which kept gay and panting lasses straight-laced and off the streets.
Then, fifty years or so after the initial failure of bloomers, the bicycle arrived and bloomers finally came into their own. “Women began riding bicycles and for this new sport, they wore bloomers. Soon after that bloomers became the name of a style of feminine drawers or knickers which had a great vogue in the early twentieth century, especially under sports clothes and schoolgirls’ gym tunics” (Ewing, Dress and Undress, 64). Sometimes also called knickerbockers, but more often and more generally named bloomers, the cycling costume spread with the bicycling craze.16 Like the bicycle itself, Betty Bloomer had arrived. And so had changes in the manufacture of clothing. Beginning as early as the 1830s, but culminating in Isaac Merrit Singer’s patent in February of 1854, the sewing machine greatly aided in the mass production of men’s clothing, but as the twentieth century came into view, more and more clothes were being made for women “ready-to-wear.” As Nancy L. Green remarks, “the masculinization of certain feminine styles encouraged the transfer of ready-made techniques to women’s wear (Ready-to-Wear, Ready to Work, 27). Therefore, even if “Betty Bloomer was ahead of her time in pushing pants” (27), her ubiquity and familiarity, along with changes in manufacturing, labor practices and technology, paved the way for the public’s acceptance of trousered women. This was particularly so in France. As Valerie Steele notes, “Bloomers indeed seem to have been far more commonly worn in Paris than in England or the United States . . . and this was the case despite the fact that many fashion writers strongly disliked the costume, regarding it as ugly and unfeminine. But . . . everyone wore bloomers . . . Very likely this was precisely because bloomers were presented in France as a fashionable item (rather than as a quasi-feminist statement)” (Paris Fashion, 76). Thus, by 1895, many middle-class girls in the United States had not only adopted the bike and the Bloomer, they also began to adopt the epithet the “New Woman,” and so ushered in the twentieth century. This is not to say that the New Woman was without controversy; sharp battles were still being fought over woman’s proper place, and as Marta Banta remarks:
Consider what it meant to be a feminist at the turn of the century in light of the problems of identification created by her ideological position. A woman who elected to advance a body of social and political principles was compelled to resolve the question of how to embody those abstract values pictorially . . . Somehow the feminist had to dress her ideas and her inner convictions in order to let them be expressed, however inadequately, by the surface she presented. Only then would “society’s” perception of her image translate into collective conduct that would advance her principles and protect her from hostility and ridicule.
(Imaging American Women, 78)
And it should also be noted that although bloomers had gone public, they were increasingly understood as a specialized costume. So if bloomers no longer bore the same stamp of a colonialist seraglio erotic fantasy that the original spa clothing of Turkish trowsers might have borne, they did retain the eroticism of gender transgression that had made George Sand so infamous. Furthermore, as bloomers moved farther and farther into the realm of the narrowly particularized – as they became more of what we might think of as a true “costume,” for gymnastics, for bathing, for biking or for titillation, rather than as an every-day habit donned socially in lieu of a dress or skirts – what they took with them was their history of female political resistance to patriarchal domination.
Common sense about women, however, had been changed. Although the athletic woman was undoubtedly the subject of scoffing throughout the 1890s and into the early part of the twentieth century, by the 1920s the athleticism of girls was generally considered more natural and healthy. A story published in McClure’s magazine in June 1922 illustrates such changes to a woman’s common sense about herself, as well as the ambivalence with which those changes were received. The story is a satire entitled “She Didn’t Have Any Sense” by Scammon Lockwood, and tells us that “the chief reason all the women had for saying that Allegra Bascom didn’t have any sense was because she laced. This, to a strong-minded, sensible lady who believes in suffrage and the equality of the sexes is the very last word in female folly.” But Allegra is still the heroine of this piece.
Nevertheless, slowly and surely, the Gibson Girl gave way to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age flappers with their bobbed hair. Trousers for women were no longer a complete outrage and no longer viewed with as complete a popular disdain as they had been in 1851. A new common sense about femininity was burgeoning, helped along by the bloomer girls, the New Woman, and by medical and scientific reforms regarding hygiene and gynaecology, or as Joan Blumberg notes, by 1913,
American middle-class women were developing a heightened sensibility about issues of feminine hygiene. They found the new disposable napkins extremely desirable because they promised less work, more comfort, greater mobility and a germ-free environment. The new hygiene also provided middle-class mothers with a safe script for their private conversations with their daughters. Instead of talking about the “curse of Eve” or “nerve stimulation” (which they could not see), they focused on the logistics of “sanitary protection.”
(Body Project, 40)
By the 1920s, the American middle-class woman had, after a long and bitter struggle, gained the vote. But she did not gain, nor has she gained, the equal rights amendment early suffragettes sought. Still, more and more girls, despite discouragement, took to the sports field; more changes to the common-sense understanding of femininity were introduced, through new scientific fields like psychology and gynaecology, and if some of that new common sense looks questionable by the standards of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it also shifted the sphere of woman’s influence.
At the same time, bloomers, as an item of clothing, were being thoroughly tamed, stripped, as it were, of their emancipatory meaning. Once made into a semi-acceptable costume, their brashness and their anger seemed less brazen. The vote achieved, the point of “bloomers” was less sharp. Soon, these pants would be relegated to childhood, and to the past. The word bloomer would reflect such a change because as the pants themselves were translated from the rude, the revolutionary, and the indecent to the practical, pragmatic, and finally to the childish, no longer was the word able to signify anything like a bold new (feminist) tongue.
Feminism and fashion
By the 1940s and 1950s it was not unusual for women to wear trousers or slacks as they were called for a host of particular reasons. They did not, however, don anything like the suffragette bloomers. Meanwhile, generally speaking, men still wore the pants. As noted earlier, during both the First and Second World Wars, women who worked wore boilersuits and blue jeans. Between 1915 and 1954 skirts lengthened and shortened according to the dictates of fashion and need, while the feminine profile went from the corseted hourglass to the pencil-thin flapper and back again to the hourglass, at least as that hourglass was constructed through those binding but flexible girdles and bras that had been made possible by the wartime inventions of nylon, rayon, and polyesters.
But all this time, only children were dressed in bloomers or knickers. And although actresses such as Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn or fashionable, infamous women like Coco Chanel might wear trousers in public, in general, the middle-class woman wore some variation of a dress: from the Chanel suit to the Dior “New Look,” they wore skirts, house and cocktail dresses or evening-gowns. By the late 1950s, if certain types of pants had come into vogue – such as the tapered ski-pant or stirrup pant – slacks, as the name implies, were still considered leisurewear. A working woman would seldom, if ever, wear pants to the office. Indeed, when Capri pants became fashionable in the late 1950s, some fashion magazines once again lamented the sheer ugliness of trousers on women, a lament reminiscent of the fashionable disdain for bloomers that helped to drive the garment off the streets nearly 100 years earlier.17
But by the late 1950s, continuing into the early 1970s, significant alterations were underway. These alterations of the social order began to be reflected in, and, indeed, managed by, the fashion pages. And in 1967, an old familiar word was dusted off and made its way back into use, at least briefly. As the Paris Evening News reported, “Bloomers peep boldly beneath the hemlines of short as ever smocks and shifts . . . beguiling bloomers in acid colors, aimed at the young and gay . . . miniskirts are dead, long live bloomers” (Gattey, Bloomer Girls, 177–8). Although the concept of Parisian haute couture had existed for years alongside the always increasing mass production of ready-to-wear lines, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw resistance, subversion, and nostalgia inundate fashion. Widespread demand for the unique, for the ethnic, the hand-made and the antiestablishment made a significant impact on what women wore and how they wore it. Thus the late 1960s and early 1970s was a period in which “personal” or “individualistic” styling, as it was called, went hand in hand with more traditional modes. Both saw rapid change. But it was the “London Look” that took off, and “took off” in more ways than one. After years and years of covering themselves head to toe, young women ditched the yardage for skin. This “look” was dominated by the mini-skirt, introduced in 1966, and by Mary Quant’s bell-bottoms covered by a tunic that sometimes doubled as a mini-skirt. Such comparative nudity was followed by a rage for culottes, hot-pants, micro-mini-skirts and a bashful little pair of panties called bloomers. Even Turkish trousers came back, as an “ethnic” item. Midi and maxi lengths also appeared, but from 1966 on, young, carefree and childish held sway and “the glossy magazines went overboard with the new fashion mood . . . It began to mean that you could wear anything anywhere” (Ewing, History of Twentieth-Century Fashion, 200). But by insisting on fantasy and youth, girlhood as sexy, fashion played down political revolution. Young and individualistic, these were the terms being marshaled to both describe and in effect contain the “youth revolution” or “youth explosion.” Of course, the “erotic child,” the sex-kitten, the “nymphet,” as Humbert Humbert put it,18 had enjoyed – and continues to enjoy – a long history in the United States. This kind of eroticism – especially the eroticization of little girls – is evident in popular American culture in figures like Little Eva and Shirley Temple, Lolita and Jon-Bennet Ramsey. Part of Marilyn Monroe’s appeal was her combination of childlike innocence and overt sexuality.19 The Oneida Perfectionist Community had known full well that women adopting the fashions of girlhood took on an attractive, virginal glow (Fischer, “‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers,’” 134). But the contrast between the vision of femininity that appeared on the fashion pages of the 1960s and the images of the women who took part in various social or political rebellions is nevertheless a marked one. That is, despite wild oscillations in image and fashion, in 1972, as Elizabeth Ewing notes, most middle-class “women still derived their position mainly from their relationships with men, so fashion aimed to attract men and in its development the ‘seduction principle’ was closely bound up with the hierarchic or status one” (History of Twentieth-Century Fashion, 229). The predominance of this pattern was no doubt under siege. Divorce rates spiked; Second Wave feminist activism took shape. Meanwhile, however, the fashion pages put women in pigtails and baby dolls, knee socks and bloomers. Thus, for example, although Motown might have been changing the face, race, and sound of popular music, the fact that The Supremes had a breakthrough hit single in 1964 with Baby Love is suggestive. And yet, although the predominance of the Baby Doll over and against the Bra Burner may seem to belittle the angrier aspects of the youth revolution, at the same time, a new common sense about sexuality was being forged, one in which it was no longer wholly unusual or “unnatural” for a woman to “wear the pants.” Such a new common sense about femininity has not been achieved without pain, of course, nor without struggles that look to continue on into the twenty-first century.20 It was, however, a new way of understanding one’s place in the world and a far cry from the last turn of the century, when, even after fifty-two years of agitation, women were still unable to vote as fully fledged American citizens.
The word bloomer, however, after its brief fling as mod style for the hip flower-child of the 1960s, and perhaps in part because of that fling, still refers to undergarments or children’s clothes. If mentioned at all, the Bloomer Costume is most often deemed a failure that had politically bankrupt – or at least counterproductive – colonialist effects. Cultural critic Marjorie Garber’s narrative about the ill-fated costume is a typical one:
As an innovation, unfortunately, the Bloomer Costume ranks with the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar; only a few convinced individuals, and some utopian communities, adopted the style. The Turkish connotations attracted some unfavorable attention, despite the rage for artifactsà la Turque . . . a writer to the New York Tribune pointed out the lack of freedom of Middle Eastern women compared to Americans, and suggested that the spectacle of female reformers in Turkish trousers was properly a cause for cultural irony.
(Vested Interests, 314)
Not only has Garber reduced the number of people who wore the Bloomer to “a few convinced individuals” – a description that contradicts the historical record – but she also insists, here, upon the Oriental aspect of the dress.21 However, while it is certainly true that critics of the costume at the time pointed out the Bloomer’s association with things Oriental and Turkish, it is equally true that the Bloomer Costume was neither called nor conceived of as precisely Turkish or Eastern by many who adopted Amelia Jenks Bloomer’s particular version. To these women, Bloomer had made “panting,” a male prerogative, female. The alterations made to the Turkish idea had Americanized it, had made the Bloomer as American as apple pie, and, as Gayle Fischer has persuasively demonstrated, the “complexities of cultural borrowing within fashion” (“‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers,’” 123) are profound in the case of bloomers. As she argues, “[I]f the women’s rights dress reformers chose Turkish trowsers in order to distance their costume from male dress and make it more palatable to the general public, then they failed. Although many disliked the freedom dress because of its Eastern origins, they were far outnumbered by those who simply felt that women dressed in ‘Turkish’ pantaloons looked like men” (129).
To a contemporary cultural critic, the seeming refusal, on, say, Amelia Bloomer’s part, to fully acknowledge or understand the irony of bloomers may, of course, read like another indication of the imbalances of colonialism, as Garber suggests. But again, the historical record suggests otherwise, inasmuch as the abolitionist and suffragette women in the nineteenth century knew full well that their so-called rational garment had an erotic and exoticized irony. Debates about “other” cultural practices of female oppression, from the so-called slavery of Eastern women to the practice of Chinese foot-binding, raged in the pages of The Lily and in other emancipation or abolitionist newspapers.22 What the dress reformers believed they were seeking, by adopting bloomers, was a common-sense dress, one that was based upon logical arguments regarding the natural shape of the female body, just as dress reform physicians believed they did in the 1870s.
However, history, as surely every historian must know, is seldom recounted or recalled with an accuracy that reflects archival records. Similarly, rationality and common sense often have nothing to do with one another. And clothes, as women from the Bloomerites to the bra burners knew only too well, often speak more loudly and far less rationally than the person wearing them. Clothes will tell tales – or have tales told of them – and there is no lack of idiomatic or historical evidence to prove that clothes are made to tell particular, common-sense stories (seldom rational) about politics and everyday life. For as historian Kathy Peiss notes, it was not just bloomers that spoke of politics:
Women strikers in a thread-mill (1890s), for example, linked fashion – wearing bonnets – to their sense of American identity and class consciousness, contrasting their militancy to Scottish scabs who wore shawls on their heads. Believing in the labor movement’s ideology of self-improvement, organization, worker’s dignity, these women devoted their leisure to lectures, evening school, political meetings and union dances.
(Cheap Amusements, 64)
Furthermore, at the end of the twentieth century, idiomatically, one can still be told that “clothes make the man,” and that women “dress to kill.” Indeed, although the stricter Man in the Gray Flannel Suit dress codes for men and women did give way to the pressure of love-beads, Hair, and the wilder extravagances of Glam Rock or disco, women are often counseled to wear something “appropriate” to an interview; rape cases are won or lost depending on the victim’s choice of underwear. Cross-dressing on the job, unless it is your job, can get you fired. Because, as Roland Barthes reminds us in The Fashion System, clothes signify. Like words, they are subject to both vastly different interpretations and changing mores. In 1902, when Theodore Dreiser made clothes speak in his novel Sister Carrie – as if to ratify Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, first published in 1867 – clothes spoke with both a “moral significance” to the wayward Carrie, and with the pressure of a desire not to be withstood. As Carrie wanders through the new-found glories of an urban department store, she finds fine clothes “a vast persuasion; they spoke tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves,” in a voice that a shoe fetishist might have longed to hear: “‘Ah, such little feet,’ said the leather of the soft new shoes, ‘how effectively I cover them’” (98). Despite her sense that she ought to be or to get married, rather than living as a kept woman, Carrie’s desire for nice clothes overwhelms all other considerations.
Indeed, clothes speak to us of ourselves as we exist in a dense cultural web of multiple class boundaries, ethnic or racial heritages, and sexual dimorphism, as well as changes made to those systems over time. Clothes and fashion can serve to code what is now called “sexual orientation” – as in, for example, the green suits and red ties of men seeking the company of men during the 1930s23 – and sexual availability – as in the variety of statements the wearing of a ring can make, although jewelry is technically not clothing and I could no doubt fill the pages of an entirely different chapter than this one about it. My point here is that the politics of the everyday makes clothes speak and that clothes speak to us of the dailiness of our politics, as this brief history of “panting” girls demonstrates.
If the social upheavals during the 1960s and 1970s ushered in distinct changes to the sociopolitical landscape for the average American woman, fierce arguments, both private and public, about the significance of so-called “traditional” women’s accouterments still rage – should one wear lipstick? under what circumstances? should one shave one’s legs? wear high-heels? is one oppressed if one does so? The choices made are politically inflected and received as such, whether one follows a conscious feminist politics or not. According to Kath Weston, for example, “many feminists regarded traditionally feminine dress as impractical, uncomfortable attire that objectified women and rendered them vulnerable to sexual attack. Skirts, heels, long hair, and makeup were the first to go. A woman who walked into a lesbian bar in a dress . . . was likely to have her lesbian identity questioned and unlikely to have anyone ask her to dance” (“Do Clothes Make the Woman?,” 15). Impractical, uncomfortable, oppressive: are these not the same common-sense terms by which the mid-nineteenth-century Bloomerites condemned corsets and the yardage of crinoline they were supposed to wear? And those who donned the more practical, less oppressive, more rational Bloomer costume, as we have seen, also had their femininity questioned – sometimes humorously, sometimes vilely and violently. One thus might be tempted to conclude, along with both Gayle V. Fischer and Marjorie Garber, that what “bloomers” speak about is failure. The bloomer may be merely a demonstration of another common-sense adage – that everything changes and everything stays the same. However much we know that clothes speak a multitude of conflicting meanings, we also always already know what they say.
And yet, as the history of the word bloomer sketched out in this chapter suggests, such stasis hardly reflects the historical record because, over time, common sense about femininity, repeatedly challenged by new social practices, new medical and political understandings, was and is changed. The history of the word bloomer, then, can serve as an index not only to a certain kind of failure, but also as a testament to the changes made in commonly held cultural attitudes and to the sociopolitical domain in which women live out their lives. Rather than lay blame for the failure of bloomers at the feet of Amelia Jenks Bloomer herself, or on the concept of frivolity, or at the doorstep of a misguided Western colonialism, I want to argue that what failed was not bloomers, not really, because eventually, in changing, they helped to accomplish change. What failed was, rather, the suffragettes’ reliance on the idea that rationality was equal to common sense, and that both would prove persuasive enough to produce the political changes they sought. Because common sense is not simple, or plain, or rational. It is fickle, variable and crazy. The problem with the Bloomer Costume was the problem of common sense. Logically, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, Libby Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony were being rational. Everyone knew that trousers were more convenient and comfortable than a dress. To wear a garment that increased one’s mobility was not a mere frivolity, and they designed one along the lines of women’s garments with which they were already familiar. The problem with the Bloomer was that it interfered with a common sense about that most irrational of domains, sex, and sexual desire. Until and unless common sense is altered, no amount of “panting” will change the general public’s mind.
Furthermore, in hindsight, much of what these women wrote about their hopes and ideals seems today not only movingly eloquent, but also sounds remarkably, resoundingly like current common sense. Here is Amelia Jenks Bloomer, speaking in the 1870s:
We are not content that the universities at Ithaca, Ann Arbor and Iowa City should open their doors to the equal admission of both sexes to the advantages of collegiate education, but we would have the same generous policy control all the colleges and universities in the country. The doors of Harvard, Yale, and Union, in this country, and of Oxford and Cambridge, in England, should be also open to woman and the contest will not be ended until this is accomplished. Everywhere, in every form, the just claims of woman to equal educational privileges must be ultimately acknowledged. And not only this, but we claim that she shall nowhere be debarred from any form of industry or any sphere of labor for which she has capacity, and when she accomplishes as much by her day’s work as a man does by his, that she shall be paid the same price.
(Coon, Hear Me Patiently, 183)
In effect, then, if bloomers failed, Amelia Jenks Bloomer did not, entirely, even if many are still waiting to be paid the same wage as a man. However, to create a new politics and a new political language – whether of dress or of words – is next to impossible if a common usage does not take hold. And as the activist women of antebellum America also knew, one must repeat oneself, wearily, over and over again, to be heard through the din of common sense. Therefore, if the domain of the everyday – in language or in dress – remains one of the most resistant to political agitation, it is also the place wherein the politics of change eventually comes to reside. It should not be surprising, then, to find that voice and image have long been the staging ground from which American social activism such as the feminist movement – First, Second or Third Wave – have launched campaigns. Thus it might be wise indeed to insist that the entire history of a word like bloomer be noted, that is, to insist that the infantilization of this American political neologism not be forgotten. For in the historical process of such linguistic change is visible an on-going struggle over the nature of nature. Women in the nineteenth century did make a bold bid to tether the power of language to their own purposes; they sought to forge new meanings, in clear, eloquent, and rational arguments which were nevertheless received by many as gibberish. Still, through persistence and the repetition of such so-called female blather, everyday common sense did change, and if the Bloomer became bloomers, we would be wise to at least try to remember how and why.24
1. See Fischer, “‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers’,” on the degree to which dress reform preoccupied a number of women for different and often conflicting reasons.
2. On the general preferability of male attire, see ibid., Coon, Hear Me Patiently, and Steele, Paris Fashion.
3. As Fischer remarks, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously wore trousers in her travels in Turkey (“‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers,’” 116). See also “Costumes.” For a more extensive history of trousers as underwear, see Ewing, Dress and Undress.
4. In any history of the Bloomer costume, the question of decency is always an issue. For discussions of eroticism and trousers, see: Steele, Paris Fashion and Fashion and Eroticism; Ewing, Dress and Undress; Fischer, “‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers’”; Kesselman, “‘Freedom Suit’”; Craik, Faces of Fashion; Gaines and Herzog, Fabrications; and Byrde, Nineteenth-Century Fashion.
5. See also Peiss, Cheap Amusements; Garber, Vested Interests; Barnes and Eicher, Dress and Gender; and Lurie, Language of Clothes.
6. See Coon, Hear Me Patiently, 12–14; see also Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, 890, and Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 335.
7. See Ewing, History of Twentieth-Century Fashion, 81–2, and Green, Ready-to-Wear, Ready to Work, 26–7.
8. Such questions are reflected in incidents such as the blue jean scandal in Italy, in 1998, when the courts ruled that a woman who wore blue jeans could not legally be raped.
9. See also Martin, The Way We Wore.
10. See Ewing, History of Twentieth-Century Fashion. See also Baines, Fashion Revivals and Gattey, Bloomer Girls.
11. Other dictionaries consulted were The American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary, and The Dictionary of American Slang.
12. The story of the Bloomer’s genesis has been recounted both by the participants themselves, and by various histories of the movement. See Coon’s “Introduction,” Hear Me Patiently, Kesselman, “‘Freedom Suit,’” Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, and Lerner, Grimké Sisters.
13. As Fischer, “‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers’” notes, even the women of the Oneida Community gave up wearing it outside the confines of their own community walls.
14. Barry is quoting a letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony, February 19, 1854, Library of Congress.
15. As quoted in Martin (The Way We Wore, 100–1), Miss Ada S. Ballin thought the Bloomer died because it was “too violent” a change.
16. See also Gattey, Bloomer Girls, Steele, Paris Fashion and Ewing, History of Twentieth-Century Fashion.
17. See Ewing and Garber, Vested Interests.
18. Borrowing from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
19. See also Dyer, Heavenly Bodies.
20. As Coon notes, the so-called “bra burners” also suffered the same kind of ridicule as Bloomerites. The press seized upon dress as the issue and thus dismissed the other, more radical and political claims of feminism (Hear Me Patiently, 35 n. 4).
21. See also Lurie, Language of Clothes, who insists that bloomers did not enjoy any widespread attention until the 1890s.
22. As I have written elsewhere (Conceived by Liberty, 54), abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child often referenced other cultural practices to which they took exception when attempting to talk about the condition of women. Chinese foot-binding was a favorite example; so was the seraglio. That they were unware of the irony they invited by wearing something like Turkish trowsers, or by being uninterested in the suffering of their “sisters,” despite the evident and often virulent racism that ran through the women’s movement, is unlikely, particularly given the following poem that Gayle V. Fischer quotes, noting how it “compares the ‘inhuman’ ‘Turkish’ harem with the ‘inhuman’ Western practice of wearing physically restrictive clothing: ‘Talk of Turkish women / In their harem-coop,– / Are we less inhuman, / Hampering with a hoop?” (“‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers,’” 123).
23. See Garber, Vested Interests, and Chauncey, Gay New York.
24. I wish to dedicate this chapter to Professor Louise Newman and all my feminist colleagues.