Amelia Bloomer Promotes Reform Dress and the 'Bloomer' Costume
Poet involved
What happened
American suffragist and temperance campaigner Amelia Bloomer, based in Seneca Falls, New York, championed a radical reform dress that replaced the corset and heavy skirts of conventional feminine fashion with loose Turkish trousers gathered at the ankles, topped by a short skirt. The costume was promoted in her newspaper The Lily and quickly became known as 'bloomers.' The fashion reform sparked intense public ridicule across the United States and Britain but established a permanent link between dress reform and women's rights activism.
Literary impact
The Bloomer controversy generated an outpouring of satirical verse and serious feminist poetry, putting women's bodily autonomy at the centre of public literary culture. Poets in reform and suffragist newspapers used the bloomer controversy to argue that women's poetic voices were as constrained as their bodies. Walt Whitman's expansive, unbound celebration of the human body in Leaves of Grass (1855) was partly in dialogue with this moment of radical critique of women's dress.
Source: Wikipedia
