History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century/4/Amelia Jenks Bloomer
MRS. AMELIA JENKS BLOOMER
AMELIA JENKS BLOOMER was born in Cortland County, New York, May 27, 1818. Her education was obtained in the common schools and at the age of seventeen she began to teach at Clyde. Mrs. Bloomer was one of the pioneers in the movement to secure increased rights and privileges for women and was associated with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth C. Stanton and Abby Kelley in the inauguration of the Woman Suffrage movement. In 1849 Mrs. Bloomer established a paper which was the special advocate of temperance and woman suffrage. She was an accomplished writer and an able public speaker and for many years lectured upon the two reforms. In 1861 a friend, Elizabeth Smith Miller, a daughter of Gerrit Smith, invented a new style of costume consisting of a skirt reaching a little below the knees with wide Turkish trousers gathered at the ankle. Elizabeth C. Stanton was the second woman to appear in the new style of dress, and Mrs. Bloomer was the third. Mrs. Bloomer began to advocate the dress reform in her paper and the public obtained the impression that she was the originator of the new costume and it became known as the “Bloomer dress.” The notoriety of the “Bloomer Costume” brought to her paper thousands of new subscribers and greatly enlarged her constituency to whom she urged the reforms in which she was deeply interested and she soon acquired national fame. In 1855 Mr. and Mrs. Bloomer removed to Iowa, settling at Council Bluffs, where Mrs. Bloomer continued to advocate woman suffrage and prohibition as a lecturer. In October, 1871, she was chosen president of the Iowa Woman's Suffrage Association at its second annual session. Mrs. Bloomer died at Council Bluffs on the 30th of December, 1894.