My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning

~ Eaton's Fall and Winter Catalogue, 1920 - 1921

“Gee” the Water’s Fine

Postcard ca. 1910 with woman in bloomer-style bathing suit on photochrom print postcard.

A group of Maori women’s dress reformers [1906]

Bloomers on the Wunderkammer

“Bloomer Club” Cigar Box Cover

An 1890’s satiric lid for a cigar box, featuring women in the just-barely-acceptable new styles of skirtless knickerbockers (Bloomers) at a swanky social club. Of course, late-Victorian gender mores were still very rigid in many aspects of society, especially in formal settings, so this was an absurd satirical proposition.

The acceptable settings for bloomers (at least for the more progressively-minded - many people still felt scandalized by them in general) were not restricted to when one was bicycling. Sports such as basketball were also becoming more acceptable for women, and nonrestrictive clothing was a “must” in those arenas, as well.

The original bloomers were an article of women’s clothing invented by Elizabeth Smith Miller of Peterboro, New York an early pioneer of the vulcanized rubber girdle, but popularized by Amelia Bloomer in the early 1850s (hence the name, a shortening of “Bloomer suit”). They were long baggy pants narrowing to a cuff at the ankles (worn below a skirt), intended to preserve Victorian decency while being less of a hindrance to women’s activities than the long full skirts of the period (see Victorian dress reform). They were worn by a few women in the 1850s, but were widely ridiculed in the press, and failed to become commonly accepted (see 1850s in fashion). Bloomer was an insult made up by the newspapers of the time. British explorer Richard Francis Burton, travelling across the United States in 1860 noted that he saw only one woman (whom he called a “hermaphrodite”) wearing bloomers.[1] The costume was called the “American Dress” or “Reform Costume” by the women’s activists that wore it. Most of the women who wore the costume were deeply involved in dress reform, abolition, temperance and the women’s rights movement. Although practical, the “bloomers” were also an attempt to reform fashion since the majority of “bloomers” were also in upper to middle class and also in the public eye.