June 11, 2019 • 26 mins
Victorian social mores may have taken the idea that women should be seen and not heard a little far, if you consider how ostentatious the garb of mid-18th century middle-class women was. Petticoats could be cumbersome, and corsets could cause a wearer physical harm. But fashion is worth it, right? Nay, some women said. Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Smith Miller advocated for more "rational dress" and -- gasp! -- wore pants. Today on the show, we ask: What's the value in pushing back against norms of dress?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Uh, clothes well designed pieces of material and functional do
hickies made to protect our fragile parts in safeguard our
moral decency? Were clothes shield your body from the many
threats of our environment and the judgmental eyes of fellow humans?
Pretty simple concept, right, Yeah? No? The history of clothing
(00:23):
and fashion is fraught with ideas about gender, status and appropriateness.
Different cultures around the world have different styles of dress
and different rules around the way they dress. That's always
been the case, based on geography, access to resources, and tradition,
among other factors. What someone wears and what someone thinks
(00:45):
about what someone wears can have layers of meaning. I'm
Eaves Jeff Coote and This is Unpopular, a podcast about
the people in history who did not let the threat
of persecution keep them from speaking truth to power. Quite frankly,
(01:09):
I've become sick of American conversations around what's right and
what's wrong when it comes to clothing. Not because I
think we shouldn't be having these conversations. They often question
our ideas about sexuality, patriarchy, gender identity, body types, cultural appropriation, sexism,
able is um, so on, and so forth. I'm just
(01:30):
tired of seeing how, after all these years of back
and forth over clothing, we still have our painties in
a bunch and are persecuting and detigrating people over something
as harmless as fabric. Bickering over clothing choices just seems
like such a waste of our precious energy. Idealistic me
(01:51):
whish is clothing weren't so politicized so that we didn't
have to worry about it affecting our ability to be accepted,
to avoid attack, or even to live. It would seem
that one's right to bodily autonomy and safe self expression
would be something we'd have settled on by now. Alas,
(02:11):
clothing choices and trends can still be the focus of
controversial discussions, ones around what people should and shouldn't wear,
based on how flattering it is, whether a woman's clothes
make her more susceptible to sexual assault, how school dress
codes are sexist and body shaming. It is at the
center of a controversy. A straight a high school student
(02:31):
says this outfit got her suspended for two weeks and
now she won't be able to graduate despite having multiple
scholarship offers. Which clothes men shouldn't wear in my world.
Of course, it don't matter enough. He could be against
could dress are you could be against the with bag
of pants they don't. I feel like there's no such
things where their leggings should be worn as pants. We
(02:55):
have brought in an esteemed pandal of father's right here
to see if they would allow their orders to wear
leggings to school. We basically have a rule in the
Idola household. If it's not worn in the monastery, it's
not Who can and can't be braw less in public
should have broad be mandatory for young women in schools.
(03:15):
That's an issue that's exploding at this all girl private
school in Montreal after one of them was told to
cover up when she wasn't wearing a bra. One study
even suggested that nonconformity and clothing can signal a person's
high status, a phenomenon to study author is called the
red Sneakers effect. It's disheartening to see how self limiting
(03:37):
we can be with something that can be so much
fun because of arbitrary standards. How have we not loosened
our collective collars on this issue yet? Of course, part
of the reason I feel this way is because I,
like many others, have had my personal battles with clothes
and culture. I regret to remember the times I was
(04:00):
worse to wear pantyhose or panty loafers to my Black
Southern Baptist church. We're being the weird dressing kid just
wasn't going to work. I get that there are accepted
conventions of dress we are expected to adhere to when
we're in certain spaces. Those are deep rooted and there's
no way we're ripping those out of the ground anytime soon.
(04:23):
And there are plenty of other people who face clothing
related challenges that are specific to their cultural group or practice.
Clothing serves a lot of purposes, not limited to just
function and adornment. So it really doesn't matter that I'm
jaded when it comes to cultural conversations about clothing. As
(04:43):
long as clothing reflects larger societal norms, expectations, and evolution,
then we have no choice but to recognize the issues
that clothing illustrates so tangibly. So we're going to go
back in American history when stuffy and cumbersome were appropriate
(05:06):
descriptors for the clothing of middle and upper class white people.
Women's clothing was highly impractical and in the case of
course sets, even dangerous to one's health, so some women
decided they would advocate for more rational dress. Two of
those women who worked for dress reform were Elizabeth Smith
Miller and A Million Bloomer. Now let me pause here
(05:32):
to emphasize the fact that dress reform mainly affected people
who had class and monetary privilege. This was the mid
eighteen hundreds, when slavery and its effects were still part
of American life, so when looking at the issue of
dress reform, we have to put it into perspective. There
were absolutely bigger fish to fry than high class women's
(05:53):
corsets being too tight in skirts being too wide. That
isn't up for debate and fact. Many of the women
involved in dress reform were also first wave feminists, and
they realized that even within their social groups, there were
other issues they found more pressing that they would rather
focus on and wearing comfortable clothing rather than ostentatious, uncomfortable
(06:15):
yet fashionable clothing. What's definitely not a fight working class folks,
impoverished people, and slaves were worried about. For many people,
worries about clothes until having clothes to wear at all,
and all of that's not to mention the long history
of people bucking dress norms on a singular skill to
(06:36):
do things like escape slavery and get jobs or better wages.
If we're being straight up, dress reform was not the
most pressing issue of the day, and it was not
the most noble movement out of all of them. On
top of that, progress in dress reform could belie other
societal problems around gender, and the body that said that
(06:59):
doesn't mean it wasn't important. It is totally possible for
more than one issue to be addressed at a time
in a country, and those issues may have varying degrees
of gravity and urgency. Dress reform was intertwined with the
movement for women's rights, and as a matter of gender iniquity,
it managed to raise awareness about the relevance of women's
(07:19):
clothing that was more practical and less restrictive socially and physically.
Elizabeth Smith Miller and Amelia Bloomer were both activists outside
of dress reform, but their willingness to adopt unaccepted clothing
at the risk of being rejected, and the hopes of
introducing more sensible dress was admirable. If a problem exists,
(07:41):
no matter how small, there's potential that it can be solved.
Amelia and Elizabeth chose to work on the issue of
dress reform for several years of their lives, and they
were often ridiculed for it. Though dress reform didn't fully
take off due to their efforts and fashion didn't meaningfully
changed until decade later, they recognized the need for progress
(08:02):
and we're kind of ahead of their time. After this break,
we'll dig into exactly what Elizabeth and Amelia were up against.
Reserved with something many upper and middle class women in
(08:24):
mid nineteenth century America were not when it came to clothing.
Contemporary custom called for dramatic floor length dresses. Women sauntered
around and literally breathtaking corsettes and heavy skirts filled out
with several petticoats so their top half looked like a
coke bottle and their bottom half looked like a lampshade.
(08:44):
The stiff petticoats could weigh up to fifteen pounds. As
someone who couldn't step foot in a stiletto and generally
finds tight clothing a hassle, if not insufferable, I couldn't
imagine being so burdened by such excess, but they ord
for the sake of modesty, decorum, and keeping up with
the sensibilities of the time. And when I say endured,
(09:07):
I'm not just talking about the discomfort these women experienced.
These dresses affected the way they interacted with their environments
and caused actual health complications. Women overheated had trouble breathing,
tripped over stairs, had their organs crushed, swept up the
garbage on city streets with their skirts, and got caught
(09:27):
in carriage wheels and factory machines, and even caught fire
due to their huge Crinolines. Krinolines were stiff skirts or
under skirts, also known as hoop skirts. It would be
slapstick comedy if it weren't actually hurting real women, but
a lot of people, including people who didn't wear the
unweldy outfits, realized just how absurd dealing with all of
(09:51):
this was. Cartoons, often made by men, mind You, poked
fun at the size of women's skirts and a double
hit to the anti garretting phenomenon and the krinoline praise.
One illustration from an eighteen fifty six issue of Punch,
for instance, shows a seedy looking guy narrowly missing his
(10:11):
opportunity to strangle a guy in the top at The
caption reads Mr Trumbull borrows a hint from his wife's
krenoline and invince what he calls his patent anti Garrett overcoat,
which places him completely out of harm with reach and
his walk phone from the city. In this way, the
constraints these outfits set on women's movement and the detriment
(10:33):
they had on women's health were symbolic of women's confinement
to ideals of vanity and domesticity. Not all women had
it out for corsets and ever growing petticoats. Some upheld
the exaggerated shapes as models of femininity and sophistication and
crucial parts of their beauty and health regimen. Regardless, a
(10:53):
vocal group of women involved in the temperance, suffrage, health reform,
and women's rights movements took up the cause of transforming
women's clothing that involved less calculated risk and more comfort.
Elizabeth Smith Miller was the daughter of abolitionists and Carol
(11:16):
Fitzhugh and Garrett Smith. They were a wealthy family, and
Elizabeth spent a lot of time in huge houses and
engaged in what she called rousing arguments at Peterborough that
made social life seemed tame and profitless elsewhere. The Smith's
home in Peterborough, New York was a station on the
underground railroad, so Elizabeth sometimes conversed with people who were
(11:37):
attempting to escape slavery. Being in this environment influence Elizabeth's
perspective and in part inspired her social advocacy, and she
donated time and money to the movements for suffrage in
women's rights. At the same time, Amelia Bloomer was taking
on social issues important to her. She wrote articles about temperance,
(11:59):
or abstaining and drinking alcohol, and joined temperance organizations. She
went to the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls
in eighteen forty eight, though she was still pretty conservative
at the time and her views didn't completely align with
the sentiments of the meeting, and in eighteen forty nine
she started the newspaper The Lily. When the newspaper started out,
(12:21):
it was focused on temperance and created for distribution among
women in the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society. Amelia thought
that writing was more appropriate for women to voice their
ideas as opposed to speeches she said about women in
temperance in the first issue. Surely she may, without throwing
aside the modest refinements which so much become her sex,
(12:44):
use her influence to lead her fellow immortals from the
destroyer's path. But soon the newspaper began including articles on
other subjects. Elizabeth Katie Stanton, a suffragist and activists who
was also Elizabeth Smith Miller's cousin, began writing pieces for
the paper on childbearing, education, and later women's rights. Stanton's
(13:07):
calls for changes to the way women were treated helped
motivate Amelia to become involved in the movement. Amelia advocated
for women in other ways, but she's best known for
her role in dress reform. After going back and forth
with the Seneca County Courier editor, who had proposed that
women wear pants because their dresses were a nuisance and
(13:27):
harmful to their health, she grew partial to the idea
of donning a new suit. Amelia began to support wearing
more functional attire, which consisted of a dress that came
just below the knee, a loose bodice or none at all,
and a pair of trousers that gathered at the ankle.
In an article in the Chicago Tribune, she recounted her
(13:48):
journey to adopting the costume. She said, about this time,
Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter of Congressman Garrett Smith, appeared on
the streets of our village dressed in short skirts and
full Turkish chowders. She came on a visit to her cousin,
Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who was then a resident of Seneca Falls.
(14:10):
Mrs Miller had been wearing the costumes some two or
three months at home and abroad. Just how she came
to adopt it, I have forgotten if I ever knew.
Amelia saw Elizabeth Katie Stanton wearing the short skirt and
satin chouders get up too, and Amelia figured she would
walk the walk and not just talk to talk. So
(14:30):
she started wearing the Bloomer suit, as it would become known,
and announced the switch to readers of The Lily. She
wasn't the first person in the world or even the US,
to wear that style of clothing. People in water cure santatoriums,
and in religious and utopian groups in the early nineteenth
century dressed similarly and up to the European and American
(14:52):
women were similar panto letts since the seventeen hundreds. Miller's
chouders resembled those that women war in the Middle East,
Central Asia, and the Oneida tribe. It's not clear exactly
how Miller came up with her design, but there's a
good chance she pulled from examples in utopian communities or sanatoriums.
(15:13):
But this time, unlike many other instances, women's dinning of
the Bloomer suit was not innocuous. It was a direct
challenge to contemporary social conventions, which dictated that wearing trousers
in public was for the eyes only. Amelia argued that
women's over the top dresses limited their access to physical
activities and ensure that women remained subordinate to men. The
(15:36):
outfit caught on, and Amelia was amazed at the fear
she had caused. As she put it, Bloomer expounded on
the benefits of the costume and subsequent issues of the Lily,
and women's rights advocates began to believe that removing those
layers of oppressive clothes was an important part of their
effort to reject the confines of a male dominated society.
(15:58):
Women began sending letter as to Amelia asking her for
patterns to make the outfit. The Lily circulation went from
five hundred a month to four thousand. There were Bloomer
balls and Bloomer festivals, and Amelia began wearing the outfit everywhere,
at lectures, at parties, at church, and in the office.
(16:19):
Amelia said in The Lily, those who think we look
queer would do well to look back a few years
at the time they wore ten or fifteen pounds of
petticoat and bustle around the body and balloons on their arms.
Then imagine which cut the queerest figure they or we.
Amelia Bloomer got a lot of the credit for wearing
(16:40):
the dress and trousers outfit, hence it being named after her,
but Amelia has acknowledged Elizabeth Smith Miller as the originator
of the style when it came to dress reform in
America in England, and she said that if it weren't
for Miller, neither she nor Stanton would be trapesing around
in the controversial garb anyway. So it wasn't because of
(17:04):
a milius lack of humility that people rallied around the
name Bloomers for the new costume. Anyway, her last name
is pretty fitting for those billowy pantaloons. So Bloomers were
hot stuff for many people, but not most people. The
women who dared to wear pants in public in lieu
of dresses that sacrificed health for social decency weren't going
(17:27):
to get away with their rebellion that easily. Many women
chose not to wear or support the outfit because they
found it ridiculous or undignified, because they weren't interested in
just reform, because their families begged them not to, or
any other reason. But women who did wear it were
subjected to lots of ridicule and criticism. Some people said
(17:49):
that bloomer wearers were only homely women trying to get
men's attention. Some critics said the bloomer suits erased any
trace of appeal or mystery in the women who wore them,
which could be destructive to the prospering of American families.
Bloomer wearers were accused of trying to become men, inspiring
fear in the hearts of people who couldn't stand the
(18:10):
thought of any disruption to gender roles. Women were harassed
and embarrassed in the streets, often afraid to go out
in bloomers due to fear of being scorned or even
mobbed for being so bold. An article in the October
sixty one issue of the newly founded New York Times
(18:30):
described the quote dubious reception to the new style in
London and may clear the fear of a slippery slope,
leading to an uprising of liberated women. For if the
fair sex emancipate themselves from the tyranny of custom and costume,
what may they not do next? One journal hits very
(18:52):
ill naturely that the new dress is best adapted for
a particular class of ladies, who, poor things have a
deal of street walking, would find the bloomer costume quite
a blessing, since its adaptation to outdoor exercise is insisted
on as one of its chief recommendations. If it be
once patronized by the class in question, I need not
(19:15):
say it will have no chance with any other. One might,
in fact, sooner abridge our liberties than curtail the female petticoats,
and alter the constitution more easily than affect a radical
change in feminine costume. So yeah, I need not go
through any more insulting comments filled with archaic thought. For
(19:36):
you to get the picture, women plus Bloomers equals bad, terrifying,
and somehow worse than stripping our freedoms. After the break,
we'll get into the downfall of the Bloomer costume. We
(20:00):
all felt that the dress was drawing attention from what
we thought of far greater importance, the question of woman's
right to better education, to a wider field of employment,
to better remuneration for her labor, and to the ballot
for the protection of her rights. In the minds of
some people, the short dress and woman's rights were inseparably
(20:20):
connected with us. The dress was but an incident, and
we were not willing to sacrifice greater questions to it.
Amelia wrote that in the Chicago Tribune article I mentioned earlier.
By eighteen fifty nine she had ditched the costume, and
Elizabeth Katie Stanton only wore the Bloomer suit for about
(20:41):
two or three years after her father and friends convinced
her to retire the ensemble. The trend didn't last for
even a decade. Bloomer's unpopularity in the derision that brought
on the women who wore them discouraged women from wearing
the outfit and ultimately led to its faith into relative obscurity,
though advocates of health reform did continue to embrace similar
(21:04):
costume throughout the eighteen fifties and sixties. So Bloomers had
fallen by the wayside, but cage cunolines were growing in popularity.
Those were lighter and more flexible, and gave women a
better range of mobility as compared to the hot and
unhygienic layered petticoats of previous years. According to the Ladies
(21:26):
newspaper of eighteen sixty three, so perfect are the wave
like fans that a lady may ascend a steep stare,
lean against the table, throw herself into an armchair passed
to her stall at the opera, and occupy a further
feet in the carriage, without inconveniencing herself or others, and
(21:48):
provoking the rude remarks of observers, thus modifying in an
important degree all those peculiarities tending to destroy the modesty
of English women. And lastly, it allows the US to
fall in graceful fold. Many women, including Bloomer herself, were
content with wearing these and cage crinolines were inexpensive, worn
(22:11):
by working class and black women. That meant that they
also came to signify women's shifting position in society, and
they challenged racial and class hierarchies. A Bloomer light costume
did come back decades later as athletic wear. Dress reform
continued after the Civil War and fashion standards eased up
(22:32):
in the early nineteen hundreds. Miller and Bloomer continued to
be active in social movements, but the fervor for Bloomers
have been relatively short lived. Clearly, Bloomerism and dress reform
(22:53):
really scared some people who saw it as a gateway
drug to more rights for women. Someone and at the
time did view dress reform as inextricably linked with the
women's rights movement. To them, choosing new dress that anticipated
a shift in women's roles, rights, and power was a
significant action. But others just saw Bloomerism as a byproduct
(23:16):
of the real work that needed to be done for women.
So dress reform took a back seat, and that's valid.
While fashion can be a great visual signifier of social progress,
cultural autonomy, and identity, that symbolism can't belie real gender
class and race issues still at play based on who
(23:36):
gets to wear the fashion, how and where they wear it,
and how they're treated when they do wear it. Even
Bloomer was conservative, as she didn't take to the liberal,
religious and abolitionist views many of her peers did. Let
me remind you again that this period of dress reform
and women's rights activism took place while women who were
(23:57):
still enslaved were not concerned about having the freedom to
ditch corsets and wear pantaloons in public, and that Native
Americans were often being forced to give up their traditional
dress in favor of European clothes. To this day, conversations
around what people wear and what it signifies about their background, ideas,
and identity are often contentious, and they can devolve into
(24:20):
cultural shaming and public mockery. And he said, why are
you wearing that? You know, really my favor? Why are
you wearing that? Take it off? And then the next
thing I realized is we're both of my scuff from hand.
Just try to remove it. There have been strides in
American fashion, like clothes created with religious practices in mind,
(24:43):
gender neutral clothing, clothes that cater to people with disabilities,
and clothes created for a wider range of body sizes
and tights. But clothing choices still invite stigma and judgment,
and people are still confined by social norms and strea.
Some people are ridiculed for what they wear when they're
(25:03):
not even trying to be subversive. So yes, Bloomerism did
not have an immediate impact in terms of it meaningfully
changing women's lives, and it operated and privileged spaces. But
a million Bloomer and Elizabeth Smith Miller both used clothing
as a vehicle to defy the constraints that were part
(25:24):
of their lived experiences, and they stepped out on the
limb and endured backlash in service of a goal that
was bigger than just them. In the end, they showed
how a few people's personal descent can galvanize many, and
that has the potential to change minds and societies around
the world. Andrew Howard is our producer. Holly Fry and
(25:54):
Christopher hasiotis our our executive producers. If you're not already subscribed,
you can make sure you never miss an episode by
subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, to I Heart
Radio app or wherever you get your Podcasts. We'll be
back next week with another episode of Unpopular m
Uh, clothes well designed pieces of material and functional do
hickies made to protect our fragile parts in safeguard our
moral decency? Were clothes shield your body from the many
threats of our environment and the judgmental eyes of fellow humans?
Pretty simple concept, right, Yeah? No? The history of clothing
(00:23):
and fashion is fraught with ideas about gender, status and appropriateness.
Different cultures around the world have different styles of dress
and different rules around the way they dress. That's always
been the case, based on geography, access to resources, and tradition,
among other factors. What someone wears and what someone thinks
(00:45):
about what someone wears can have layers of meaning. I'm
Eaves Jeff Coote and This is Unpopular, a podcast about
the people in history who did not let the threat
of persecution keep them from speaking truth to power. Quite frankly,
(01:09):
I've become sick of American conversations around what's right and
what's wrong when it comes to clothing. Not because I
think we shouldn't be having these conversations. They often question
our ideas about sexuality, patriarchy, gender identity, body types, cultural appropriation, sexism,
able is um, so on, and so forth. I'm just
(01:30):
tired of seeing how, after all these years of back
and forth over clothing, we still have our painties in
a bunch and are persecuting and detigrating people over something
as harmless as fabric. Bickering over clothing choices just seems
like such a waste of our precious energy. Idealistic me
(01:51):
whish is clothing weren't so politicized so that we didn't
have to worry about it affecting our ability to be accepted,
to avoid attack, or even to live. It would seem
that one's right to bodily autonomy and safe self expression
would be something we'd have settled on by now. Alas,
(02:11):
clothing choices and trends can still be the focus of
controversial discussions, ones around what people should and shouldn't wear,
based on how flattering it is, whether a woman's clothes
make her more susceptible to sexual assault, how school dress
codes are sexist and body shaming. It is at the
center of a controversy. A straight a high school student
(02:31):
says this outfit got her suspended for two weeks and
now she won't be able to graduate despite having multiple
scholarship offers. Which clothes men shouldn't wear in my world.
Of course, it don't matter enough. He could be against
could dress are you could be against the with bag
of pants they don't. I feel like there's no such
things where their leggings should be worn as pants. We
(02:55):
have brought in an esteemed pandal of father's right here
to see if they would allow their orders to wear
leggings to school. We basically have a rule in the
Idola household. If it's not worn in the monastery, it's
not Who can and can't be braw less in public
should have broad be mandatory for young women in schools.
(03:15):
That's an issue that's exploding at this all girl private
school in Montreal after one of them was told to
cover up when she wasn't wearing a bra. One study
even suggested that nonconformity and clothing can signal a person's
high status, a phenomenon to study author is called the
red Sneakers effect. It's disheartening to see how self limiting
(03:37):
we can be with something that can be so much
fun because of arbitrary standards. How have we not loosened
our collective collars on this issue yet? Of course, part
of the reason I feel this way is because I,
like many others, have had my personal battles with clothes
and culture. I regret to remember the times I was
(04:00):
worse to wear pantyhose or panty loafers to my Black
Southern Baptist church. We're being the weird dressing kid just
wasn't going to work. I get that there are accepted
conventions of dress we are expected to adhere to when
we're in certain spaces. Those are deep rooted and there's
no way we're ripping those out of the ground anytime soon.
(04:23):
And there are plenty of other people who face clothing
related challenges that are specific to their cultural group or practice.
Clothing serves a lot of purposes, not limited to just
function and adornment. So it really doesn't matter that I'm
jaded when it comes to cultural conversations about clothing. As
(04:43):
long as clothing reflects larger societal norms, expectations, and evolution,
then we have no choice but to recognize the issues
that clothing illustrates so tangibly. So we're going to go
back in American history when stuffy and cumbersome were appropriate
(05:06):
descriptors for the clothing of middle and upper class white people.
Women's clothing was highly impractical and in the case of
course sets, even dangerous to one's health, so some women
decided they would advocate for more rational dress. Two of
those women who worked for dress reform were Elizabeth Smith
Miller and A Million Bloomer. Now let me pause here
(05:32):
to emphasize the fact that dress reform mainly affected people
who had class and monetary privilege. This was the mid
eighteen hundreds, when slavery and its effects were still part
of American life, so when looking at the issue of
dress reform, we have to put it into perspective. There
were absolutely bigger fish to fry than high class women's
(05:53):
corsets being too tight in skirts being too wide. That
isn't up for debate and fact. Many of the women
involved in dress reform were also first wave feminists, and
they realized that even within their social groups, there were
other issues they found more pressing that they would rather
focus on and wearing comfortable clothing rather than ostentatious, uncomfortable
(06:15):
yet fashionable clothing. What's definitely not a fight working class folks,
impoverished people, and slaves were worried about. For many people,
worries about clothes until having clothes to wear at all,
and all of that's not to mention the long history
of people bucking dress norms on a singular skill to
(06:36):
do things like escape slavery and get jobs or better wages.
If we're being straight up, dress reform was not the
most pressing issue of the day, and it was not
the most noble movement out of all of them. On
top of that, progress in dress reform could belie other
societal problems around gender, and the body that said that
(06:59):
doesn't mean it wasn't important. It is totally possible for
more than one issue to be addressed at a time
in a country, and those issues may have varying degrees
of gravity and urgency. Dress reform was intertwined with the
movement for women's rights, and as a matter of gender iniquity,
it managed to raise awareness about the relevance of women's
(07:19):
clothing that was more practical and less restrictive socially and physically.
Elizabeth Smith Miller and Amelia Bloomer were both activists outside
of dress reform, but their willingness to adopt unaccepted clothing
at the risk of being rejected, and the hopes of
introducing more sensible dress was admirable. If a problem exists,
(07:41):
no matter how small, there's potential that it can be solved.
Amelia and Elizabeth chose to work on the issue of
dress reform for several years of their lives, and they
were often ridiculed for it. Though dress reform didn't fully
take off due to their efforts and fashion didn't meaningfully
changed until decade later, they recognized the need for progress
(08:02):
and we're kind of ahead of their time. After this break,
we'll dig into exactly what Elizabeth and Amelia were up against.
Reserved with something many upper and middle class women in
(08:24):
mid nineteenth century America were not when it came to clothing.
Contemporary custom called for dramatic floor length dresses. Women sauntered
around and literally breathtaking corsettes and heavy skirts filled out
with several petticoats so their top half looked like a
coke bottle and their bottom half looked like a lampshade.
(08:44):
The stiff petticoats could weigh up to fifteen pounds. As
someone who couldn't step foot in a stiletto and generally
finds tight clothing a hassle, if not insufferable, I couldn't
imagine being so burdened by such excess, but they ord
for the sake of modesty, decorum, and keeping up with
the sensibilities of the time. And when I say endured,
(09:07):
I'm not just talking about the discomfort these women experienced.
These dresses affected the way they interacted with their environments
and caused actual health complications. Women overheated had trouble breathing,
tripped over stairs, had their organs crushed, swept up the
garbage on city streets with their skirts, and got caught
(09:27):
in carriage wheels and factory machines, and even caught fire
due to their huge Crinolines. Krinolines were stiff skirts or
under skirts, also known as hoop skirts. It would be
slapstick comedy if it weren't actually hurting real women, but
a lot of people, including people who didn't wear the
unweldy outfits, realized just how absurd dealing with all of
(09:51):
this was. Cartoons, often made by men, mind You, poked
fun at the size of women's skirts and a double
hit to the anti garretting phenomenon and the krinoline praise.
One illustration from an eighteen fifty six issue of Punch,
for instance, shows a seedy looking guy narrowly missing his
(10:11):
opportunity to strangle a guy in the top at The
caption reads Mr Trumbull borrows a hint from his wife's
krenoline and invince what he calls his patent anti Garrett overcoat,
which places him completely out of harm with reach and
his walk phone from the city. In this way, the
constraints these outfits set on women's movement and the detriment
(10:33):
they had on women's health were symbolic of women's confinement
to ideals of vanity and domesticity. Not all women had
it out for corsets and ever growing petticoats. Some upheld
the exaggerated shapes as models of femininity and sophistication and
crucial parts of their beauty and health regimen. Regardless, a
(10:53):
vocal group of women involved in the temperance, suffrage, health reform,
and women's rights movements took up the cause of transforming
women's clothing that involved less calculated risk and more comfort.
Elizabeth Smith Miller was the daughter of abolitionists and Carol
(11:16):
Fitzhugh and Garrett Smith. They were a wealthy family, and
Elizabeth spent a lot of time in huge houses and
engaged in what she called rousing arguments at Peterborough that
made social life seemed tame and profitless elsewhere. The Smith's
home in Peterborough, New York was a station on the
underground railroad, so Elizabeth sometimes conversed with people who were
(11:37):
attempting to escape slavery. Being in this environment influence Elizabeth's
perspective and in part inspired her social advocacy, and she
donated time and money to the movements for suffrage in
women's rights. At the same time, Amelia Bloomer was taking
on social issues important to her. She wrote articles about temperance,
(11:59):
or abstaining and drinking alcohol, and joined temperance organizations. She
went to the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls
in eighteen forty eight, though she was still pretty conservative
at the time and her views didn't completely align with
the sentiments of the meeting, and in eighteen forty nine
she started the newspaper The Lily. When the newspaper started out,
(12:21):
it was focused on temperance and created for distribution among
women in the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society. Amelia thought
that writing was more appropriate for women to voice their
ideas as opposed to speeches she said about women in
temperance in the first issue. Surely she may, without throwing
aside the modest refinements which so much become her sex,
(12:44):
use her influence to lead her fellow immortals from the
destroyer's path. But soon the newspaper began including articles on
other subjects. Elizabeth Katie Stanton, a suffragist and activists who
was also Elizabeth Smith Miller's cousin, began writing pieces for
the paper on childbearing, education, and later women's rights. Stanton's
(13:07):
calls for changes to the way women were treated helped
motivate Amelia to become involved in the movement. Amelia advocated
for women in other ways, but she's best known for
her role in dress reform. After going back and forth
with the Seneca County Courier editor, who had proposed that
women wear pants because their dresses were a nuisance and
(13:27):
harmful to their health, she grew partial to the idea
of donning a new suit. Amelia began to support wearing
more functional attire, which consisted of a dress that came
just below the knee, a loose bodice or none at all,
and a pair of trousers that gathered at the ankle.
In an article in the Chicago Tribune, she recounted her
(13:48):
journey to adopting the costume. She said, about this time,
Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter of Congressman Garrett Smith, appeared on
the streets of our village dressed in short skirts and
full Turkish chowders. She came on a visit to her cousin,
Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who was then a resident of Seneca Falls.
(14:10):
Mrs Miller had been wearing the costumes some two or
three months at home and abroad. Just how she came
to adopt it, I have forgotten if I ever knew.
Amelia saw Elizabeth Katie Stanton wearing the short skirt and
satin chouders get up too, and Amelia figured she would
walk the walk and not just talk to talk. So
(14:30):
she started wearing the Bloomer suit, as it would become known,
and announced the switch to readers of The Lily. She
wasn't the first person in the world or even the US,
to wear that style of clothing. People in water cure santatoriums,
and in religious and utopian groups in the early nineteenth
century dressed similarly and up to the European and American
(14:52):
women were similar panto letts since the seventeen hundreds. Miller's
chouders resembled those that women war in the Middle East,
Central Asia, and the Oneida tribe. It's not clear exactly
how Miller came up with her design, but there's a
good chance she pulled from examples in utopian communities or sanatoriums.
(15:13):
But this time, unlike many other instances, women's dinning of
the Bloomer suit was not innocuous. It was a direct
challenge to contemporary social conventions, which dictated that wearing trousers
in public was for the eyes only. Amelia argued that
women's over the top dresses limited their access to physical
activities and ensure that women remained subordinate to men. The
(15:36):
outfit caught on, and Amelia was amazed at the fear
she had caused. As she put it, Bloomer expounded on
the benefits of the costume and subsequent issues of the Lily,
and women's rights advocates began to believe that removing those
layers of oppressive clothes was an important part of their
effort to reject the confines of a male dominated society.
(15:58):
Women began sending letter as to Amelia asking her for
patterns to make the outfit. The Lily circulation went from
five hundred a month to four thousand. There were Bloomer
balls and Bloomer festivals, and Amelia began wearing the outfit everywhere,
at lectures, at parties, at church, and in the office.
(16:19):
Amelia said in The Lily, those who think we look
queer would do well to look back a few years
at the time they wore ten or fifteen pounds of
petticoat and bustle around the body and balloons on their arms.
Then imagine which cut the queerest figure they or we.
Amelia Bloomer got a lot of the credit for wearing
(16:40):
the dress and trousers outfit, hence it being named after her,
but Amelia has acknowledged Elizabeth Smith Miller as the originator
of the style when it came to dress reform in
America in England, and she said that if it weren't
for Miller, neither she nor Stanton would be trapesing around
in the controversial garb anyway. So it wasn't because of
(17:04):
a milius lack of humility that people rallied around the
name Bloomers for the new costume. Anyway, her last name
is pretty fitting for those billowy pantaloons. So Bloomers were
hot stuff for many people, but not most people. The
women who dared to wear pants in public in lieu
of dresses that sacrificed health for social decency weren't going
(17:27):
to get away with their rebellion that easily. Many women
chose not to wear or support the outfit because they
found it ridiculous or undignified, because they weren't interested in
just reform, because their families begged them not to, or
any other reason. But women who did wear it were
subjected to lots of ridicule and criticism. Some people said
(17:49):
that bloomer wearers were only homely women trying to get
men's attention. Some critics said the bloomer suits erased any
trace of appeal or mystery in the women who wore them,
which could be destructive to the prospering of American families.
Bloomer wearers were accused of trying to become men, inspiring
fear in the hearts of people who couldn't stand the
(18:10):
thought of any disruption to gender roles. Women were harassed
and embarrassed in the streets, often afraid to go out
in bloomers due to fear of being scorned or even
mobbed for being so bold. An article in the October
sixty one issue of the newly founded New York Times
(18:30):
described the quote dubious reception to the new style in
London and may clear the fear of a slippery slope,
leading to an uprising of liberated women. For if the
fair sex emancipate themselves from the tyranny of custom and costume,
what may they not do next? One journal hits very
(18:52):
ill naturely that the new dress is best adapted for
a particular class of ladies, who, poor things have a
deal of street walking, would find the bloomer costume quite
a blessing, since its adaptation to outdoor exercise is insisted
on as one of its chief recommendations. If it be
once patronized by the class in question, I need not
(19:15):
say it will have no chance with any other. One might,
in fact, sooner abridge our liberties than curtail the female petticoats,
and alter the constitution more easily than affect a radical
change in feminine costume. So yeah, I need not go
through any more insulting comments filled with archaic thought. For
(19:36):
you to get the picture, women plus Bloomers equals bad, terrifying,
and somehow worse than stripping our freedoms. After the break,
we'll get into the downfall of the Bloomer costume. We
(20:00):
all felt that the dress was drawing attention from what
we thought of far greater importance, the question of woman's
right to better education, to a wider field of employment,
to better remuneration for her labor, and to the ballot
for the protection of her rights. In the minds of
some people, the short dress and woman's rights were inseparably
(20:20):
connected with us. The dress was but an incident, and
we were not willing to sacrifice greater questions to it.
Amelia wrote that in the Chicago Tribune article I mentioned earlier.
By eighteen fifty nine she had ditched the costume, and
Elizabeth Katie Stanton only wore the Bloomer suit for about
(20:41):
two or three years after her father and friends convinced
her to retire the ensemble. The trend didn't last for
even a decade. Bloomer's unpopularity in the derision that brought
on the women who wore them discouraged women from wearing
the outfit and ultimately led to its faith into relative obscurity,
though advocates of health reform did continue to embrace similar
(21:04):
costume throughout the eighteen fifties and sixties. So Bloomers had
fallen by the wayside, but cage cunolines were growing in popularity.
Those were lighter and more flexible, and gave women a
better range of mobility as compared to the hot and
unhygienic layered petticoats of previous years. According to the Ladies
(21:26):
newspaper of eighteen sixty three, so perfect are the wave
like fans that a lady may ascend a steep stare,
lean against the table, throw herself into an armchair passed
to her stall at the opera, and occupy a further
feet in the carriage, without inconveniencing herself or others, and
(21:48):
provoking the rude remarks of observers, thus modifying in an
important degree all those peculiarities tending to destroy the modesty
of English women. And lastly, it allows the US to
fall in graceful fold. Many women, including Bloomer herself, were
content with wearing these and cage crinolines were inexpensive, worn
(22:11):
by working class and black women. That meant that they
also came to signify women's shifting position in society, and
they challenged racial and class hierarchies. A Bloomer light costume
did come back decades later as athletic wear. Dress reform
continued after the Civil War and fashion standards eased up
(22:32):
in the early nineteen hundreds. Miller and Bloomer continued to
be active in social movements, but the fervor for Bloomers
have been relatively short lived. Clearly, Bloomerism and dress reform
(22:53):
really scared some people who saw it as a gateway
drug to more rights for women. Someone and at the
time did view dress reform as inextricably linked with the
women's rights movement. To them, choosing new dress that anticipated
a shift in women's roles, rights, and power was a
significant action. But others just saw Bloomerism as a byproduct
(23:16):
of the real work that needed to be done for women.
So dress reform took a back seat, and that's valid.
While fashion can be a great visual signifier of social progress,
cultural autonomy, and identity, that symbolism can't belie real gender
class and race issues still at play based on who
(23:36):
gets to wear the fashion, how and where they wear it,
and how they're treated when they do wear it. Even
Bloomer was conservative, as she didn't take to the liberal,
religious and abolitionist views many of her peers did. Let
me remind you again that this period of dress reform
and women's rights activism took place while women who were
(23:57):
still enslaved were not concerned about having the freedom to
ditch corsets and wear pantaloons in public, and that Native
Americans were often being forced to give up their traditional
dress in favor of European clothes. To this day, conversations
around what people wear and what it signifies about their background, ideas,
and identity are often contentious, and they can devolve into
(24:20):
cultural shaming and public mockery. And he said, why are
you wearing that? You know, really my favor? Why are
you wearing that? Take it off? And then the next
thing I realized is we're both of my scuff from hand.
Just try to remove it. There have been strides in
American fashion, like clothes created with religious practices in mind,
(24:43):
gender neutral clothing, clothes that cater to people with disabilities,
and clothes created for a wider range of body sizes
and tights. But clothing choices still invite stigma and judgment,
and people are still confined by social norms and strea.
Some people are ridiculed for what they wear when they're
(25:03):
not even trying to be subversive. So yes, Bloomerism did
not have an immediate impact in terms of it meaningfully
changing women's lives, and it operated and privileged spaces. But
a million Bloomer and Elizabeth Smith Miller both used clothing
as a vehicle to defy the constraints that were part
(25:24):
of their lived experiences, and they stepped out on the
limb and endured backlash in service of a goal that
was bigger than just them. In the end, they showed
how a few people's personal descent can galvanize many, and
that has the potential to change minds and societies around
the world. Andrew Howard is our producer. Holly Fry and
(25:54):
Christopher hasiotis our our executive producers. If you're not already subscribed,
you can make sure you never miss an episode by
subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, to I Heart
Radio app or wherever you get your Podcasts. We'll be
back next week with another episode of Unpopular m
Unpopular News
Host
Yves Jeffcoat
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