Bloomers (clothing)

Bloomers are divided women's garments for the lower body.

Also called the "Turkish dress", "American dress", or simply "reform dress", bloomers were an innovation of readers of the Water-Cure Journal, a popular health periodical that in October 1849 began urging women to develop a style of dress that was not so harmful to their health as the current fashion. It also represented an unrestricted movement, unprecedented by previous women's fashions, that allowed for greater freedom—both metaphorical and physical—within the public sphere. The fashionable dress of that time consisted of a skirt that dragged several inches on the floor, worn over layers of starched petticoats stiffened with straw or horsehair sewn into the hems. In addition to the heavy skirts, prevailing fashion called for a "long waist" effect, achieved with a whale-bone-fitted corset that pushed the wearer's internal organs out of their normal place. The result was a feminine population which, as one medical professor warned his students, was of no use as cadavers from which to study human anatomy.

Women responded with a variety of costumes, many inspired by the pantaloons of Turkey, and all including some form of pants. By the summer of 1850, various versions of a short skirt and trousers, or "Turkish dress", were being worn by readers of the Water-Cure Journal as well as women patients at the nation's health resorts. After wearing the style in private, some began wearing it in public. In the winter and spring of 1851, newspapers across the country carried startled sightings of the dresses.

In February 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller of Peterboro, New York wore the "Turkish dress" to Seneca Falls, New York, home of Amelia Bloomer and her temperance journal, The Lily. The next month Bloomer announced to her readers that she had adopted the dress and, in response to many inquiries, printed a description of her dress and instructions on how to make it. By June many newspapers had dubbed it the "Bloomer dress".

During the summer of 1851, the nation was seized by a "bloomer craze". Health reformer Mary Gove Nichols drafted a Declaration of Independence from the Despotism of Parisian Fashion and gathered signatures to it at lectures on woman's dress. Managers of the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, gave a banquet for any of their female workers who adopted the safer dress before July 4. In Toledo, Ohio, sixty women turned out in Turkish costume at one of the city's grandest social events. Bloomer balls and bloomer picnics were held; dress reform societies and bloomer institutes were formed. A grand festival in favor of the costume was held at New York City's Broadway Tabernacle in September. In August, a woman who had spent six months sailing from Philadelphia around the Horn to California with the reform dress packed in her trunk disembarked to find that the dress had preceded her and was being displayed in the window of a San Francisco dress shop. Interest was sparked in England when Hannah Tracy Cutler and other women delegates wore the new dress to an international peace convention in London.

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Wikipedia