Bloomer did not invent the costume that became inextricably associated with her name; indeed, she laughed out loud the first time she saw it on her fellow suffragist Elizabeth Smith Miller, Stanton’s cousin. Bloomer was many things: a writer, editor, lecturer, temperance activist, and even deputy postmaster. But a fashion rebel she was not. Her greatest fear was that she would be remembered for the short years she spent wearing “the short dress” and not for her tireless social activism. Sara Catterall’s carefully researched but exceptionally readable book, Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon, rights that wrong, while also leaving the reader with the nagging suspicion that her flirtation with trousers really was the most interesting thing about Bloomer. She was admirably broadminded yet also pious and, in many ways, deeply conventional—a “quiet village wife” whose unlikely radicalization was born of a desire to do good and be useful rather than burn it all down (16). Unlike many of her fellow suffragists, Bloomer had little formal education and did not come from wealth. Her main qualifications for joining the burgeoning women’s rights movement were a supportive husband who worked in the newspaper industry; proximity to Seneca Falls at a time when it was becoming a hub of trade and progressive politics; and a steadfast commitment to temperance.
Like abolition, labor rights, or dress reform, temperance was a feminist issue in the nineteenth century. Alcohol abuse was “the opioid epidemic of the day,” writes Catterall. “Between 1800 and 1830, Americans drank more alcohol per capita than they ever had before or ever would again” (15). And women and children paid the price, having little social, financial, or legal protection from abusive or insolvent men. But the cause was no sexier then than it is now: unlike slavery, which was irrefutably evil and largely confined to the South, moderate drinking was a minor vice in which one’s friends and neighbors were likely to indulge.
Fortunately, women had more time for moral crusading than ever before. “As factory-made cloth became more commonly available after 1821, the labor saved for rural women was substantial, and it gave them more time for church organizations and reading” (2). But the editorials and petitions of nonvoters ultimately carried little weight. Bloomer seems to have come around to the idea of suffrage as a way further her temperance goals, rather than an end in itself.