Threads of

Change

BLOOMERS: AN ALTERNATIVE TO DRESS REFORM

Cloth bloomers hanging from a cabinet door.

Linen split-bottom bloomers with two separate legs gathered at the waistband with a pearl button closing (1).

A historical illustration of a woman wearing bloomers, a dress, and hat tied under her chin. She is outside with two people in the background.

An illustration published by Kellogg, 1851, of a woman wearing bloomers underneath a shortened dress (2).

Before the popularity of dress reform, there was another type of reform that some women advocated for, bloomers. Bloomers were a type of undergarment that would have been worn under a dress in the conventional style of the day but with a shorter hemline as an alternative to the long skirts that posed health and safety concerns for women (3). They were first worn by women’s rights advocates such as Amelia Bloomer, from which they got their name, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone in the 1850s (4). This concept of women wearing a type of trouser garnered immense amounts of public scrutiny since it was viewed as a gender specific piece of clothing in America and the Western world (5). However, there was a precedent for women wearing trousers similar to the bloomers style in the Middle East, which women’s rights advocates attempted to capitalize on by orienting their trousers with the style of Turkish trousers (6). However this did not help their case since in Western society many saw bloomers as an attack on men and masculinity because of its previous association as men’s clothing and its origin with women’s rights advocates (7). Additionally, the women who supported the style cared more about the health, comfort, and mobility that it allowed instead of how fashionable it was, so it was regarded as ugly and unfashionable by the general public (8). This resulted in many woman disregarding the style so as to not detract from their goals for increased rights (9). However, they were more accepted in the early 1900s for physical activities such as exercise or the newly popular bicycling (10). Although these bloomers show the ways in which women were actively advocating for clothing changes that reflected their desire for social changes in the 1800s, they also demonstrate the challenges faced in gaining acceptance for their increased participation in society.

1 Bloomers, Fayetteville, AR, University of Arkansas Museum Collections.
2 Patricia A Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art, (Ashland: Kent State University Press, 2015), 4.
3 Ibid, 31.
4 Ibid, 33.
5 Ibid, 32-33.
6 Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, “Refashioning the New Woman: Women’s Dress, the Oriental Style, and the Construction of American Feminist Imagery in the 1910s,” Journal of Women’s History 27, no. 2 (2015): 17.
7 Ibid, 18.
8 Ibid.
9 Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 33.
10 Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, “Refashioning the New Woman,” 19.