It Happened Here -- The "Lily"

Amelia Jenks, like a surprising number of her sisters and brothers in the social reform movements that swept through America in the first 60 years of the 19th century had been born and raised in central New York.  This area had been host to so many pentecostal type religious reform movements and fiery  traveling religious speakers that it became known as the "burned over" district. While these preachers' central message had been that individuals could save their souls by accepting Jesus Christ, implicit in that message was the notion that individuals through their personal actions and choices could improve their lives, reform their society, and create in a small measure, a heaven on earth. It was this notion that inspired the girl from Homer, New York, and so many of her contemporary central New Yorkers.

In 1830 Amelia married Dexter Bloomer, a lawyer, and they moved to Seneca Falls,  New York where he edited a newspaper the Seneca Falls County Courier. Though Amelia had only two years of formal education she was soon regularly contributing to his paper. Active in her church, she became involved in the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society in 1848. Americans had been heavy drinkers since the earliest colonial times, with homemade low alcohol beers providing a safe alternative to often fetid and disease laden water available to early settlers, but the post-revolutionary war era saw the rise in popularity of much higher alcohol content—distilled beverages, bourbons and rye whiskeys. Widespread inebriation had become a social problem, having the greatest impact on women and their families. She would write,

“Intemperance is the great foe of her (women's) peace and happiness. It is that above

all that has made her House desolate and beggared her offspring....Surely she has the

right to wield her pen for its suppression.”

The Lily, a newspaper for 'home distribution' was started by members of the Ladies Temperance Society in1849 but by 1850 Amelia Jenks Bloomer would be its sole editor. One of its early contributors would be Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writing under the pen name “Sunflower”. Before long the Lily would be addressing not only temperance issues but issues about child bearing and education, women's rights and fashion, becoming a forerunner of modern publications for women—Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Oprah and many more. Beginning with a circulation of 500, by its final year of publication in 1853 it was being distributed to 6000 people.

The same year Amelia joined the temperance society, she attended, as an observer, the First Women's Rights Convention, in Seneca Falls. Women's Rights became an increasing focus of the Lily. In 1851 she introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton facilitating a partnership that would span decades and be the driving force in the Women's Movement in the 19^th century.

Also in 1851 Elizabeth Smith Miller visited her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton. There she met Amelia Bloomer. Mrs Miller was a women's rights activist and the daughter of Gerritt Smith, a leading abolitionist from Peterborough New York, near Rochester. She was also an advocate of women's clothing reform. The fashions and mores of women's dress in the mid-19th century dictated that women wear floor length, billowing dresses with up to fifteen pounds of petticoats underneath and tightly corseted waists, often strengthened with stays of whalebone.  Hot and fatiguing, such costumes, the women agreed, were  a considerable health and safety hazard.  Trips and falls were a constant threat especially for women attempting to negotiate stairways with children or arm loads of laundry. Such dresses dragged in the street, bringing all sorts of filth home with them and around hot stoves and open hearths they could be a menace.  The women believed the tight corsets. besides being extremely uncomfortable might be leading to a variety of health problem.

At their meeting, Elizabeth Smith Miller wore a costume inspired by middle eastern women's costumes, with a loose blouse, a short skirt and underneath, a pair of light loose pants,

fastened at the ankles.  Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia made their own versions of this outfit and Amelia began to enthusiastically promote dress reform in the Lily,  even supplying patterns to interested readers.  The New York Tribune picked up her articles and soon her clothes were the center of a storm of controversy with clergymen and male social commentators weighing in against “the Bloomer Costume” and the most controversial part of the outfit, the baggy pantaloons or “Bloomers.” Ridiculed by male opinion leaders, and condemned for undercutting the patriarchy of the family, or even being sinful the fashion was abandoned by most member of the women's rights movement who saw it as a distraction from their main cause of Women's Rights. Amelia persisted until 1859 when she too abandoned the fashion announcing the advent of crinoline petticoats and other changes made current fashions less objectionable. 

In 1853 Amelia moved with her husband to Mount Vernon Ohio, where she continued to publish her paper. The following year she sold the Lily when the couple moved again to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where there were no facilities to have the paper printed, but she remained a contributing editor .
Amelia Bloomer continued to be involved in Women's and other social causes throughout the rest of her life.

Marker of the Week -- Winners and Losers

Rte. 32,  Greenville

It is easy to forget that the American Revolution was actually America's first Civil War  with an estimated 1/3 of all Americans supporting the Crown; or that this nation that earned a reputation for accepting all sorts of political refugees was extremely reluctant to accept back the loyalists who had supported the mother country against the revolutionaries.
The displacement of people was extensive and widespread with every town seeing properties "abandoned" and realizing the necessity of having courts set up to dispose of "abandoned" properties.  Prejudices persisted. Thus on this sign, Benjamin Spees is held up as something of a pioneer, for occupying the home of a (nameless) Tory.