Victory for the Vote. Doris Weatherford
be trivialized nor forced to compete with those of blacks. Earlier than Susan B. Anthony and others who became famous, Sojourner Truth stood tall.
A Currier & Ives print of the Bloomer style, circa 1851. (Library of Congress)
Not all progress is political. Social change can be of at least equal significance, and one of the greatest issues of the 1850s became feminine apparel. Early in 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller appeared on the streets of Seneca Falls wearing “Turkish trousers.” An affluent and fashionable young mother, she came to visit her father’s cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The full, almost skirt-like pants that Miller wore were based on a fashion introduced by English Fanny Kemble, whose stage portrayals of Shakespeare’s Juliet in the 1830s had made her one of America’s first entertainment celebrities.
Both Kemble’s professional and personal life led her to feminism. She had given up her career for a South Carolina planter and soon found that the marriage was a disaster. The law was on his side in every disagreement, including their frequent fights over her sympathy for slaves. When she finally left him, it meant leaving her children, too; she did not see them for more than 20 years. She returned to the stage, and in the midst of what was likely personal turmoil, introduced the shockingly different apparel known as “pantalettes.”
While Kemble was a trendsetter, primarily for reasons of style rather than practicality or health, there were others who advocated dress reform for more serious reasons. A thoughtful listener at the Worcester convention might have been moved to consider these ideas when a letter was read from French agriculturist Helene Marie Weber. After apologizing that “circumstances place it out of my power to visit America” for the October convention, she wrote:
The newspapers both of England and America have done me great injustice. While they have described my apparel with the minute accuracy of professional tailors, they have…charged me with undervaluing the female sex and identifying myself with the other…. I have never wished…to be anything but a woman…. I adopted male attire as a matter of convenience in my business…. I have never had cause to regret my adoption of male attire, and never expect to return to a female toilette….
There is no moral or political principle involved in this question…. [If] the superiority of male dress for all purposes of business and recreation is conceded, it is absurd to argue that we should not avail ourselves of its advantages….
Women who prefer the gown should, of course, consult their own pleasure by continuing to wear it; while those whose preference is a male dress, ought not to be blamed for adopting it. I close…by recording my prediction, that in ten years male attire will be generally worn by women of most civilized countries.
Paulina Wright Davis received Weber’s letter via Mildred Spofford, an American living in France, who assured the Worcester audience that the French feminist was “lady-like, modest, and unassuming.” Her deviance in dress was understandable, Spofford urged, for Weber was “a practical agriculturist” who personally conducted “the entire business of her farm.” Although just 25 years old, Weber also was “in the front rank of essayists in France,” and had “a perfect command of the English language.” She not only practiced her feminism in her apparel, but also wrote feminist theory: “She has labored zealously on behalf of her sex, as her numerous tracts on subjects of reform bear testimony,” Spofford concluded. “No writer of the present age has done more.”
One of the Worcester attendees who must have nodded his head in agreement with Weber’s words was Gerrit Smith, Stanton’s cousin and the father of Elizabeth Smith Miller. He had inherited a fortune through a family partnership with New York millionaire John Jacob Astor, and the Smith home in western New York near Seneca Falls was a haven for both runaway slaves and the era’s most prominent liberals. Stanton later remembered his estate as a place where “one would meet the first families in the State, with Indians, Africans, slaveowners, religionists of all sects…each class welcomed and honored.”
Gerrit Smith (Library of Congress)
No one was a stronger advocate of dress reform than Gerrit Smith. Long after women had given up the fight, he argued for making this area a “battleground.” To the end of his life, he believed that women would find greater political success if their appearance were not so strikingly different from that of men. He received isolated support for this reform, often from other men. As early as 1787, Philadelphia’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, a founder of the nation’s first medical school, had written, “I…ascribe the invention of ridiculous and expensive fashions in female dress entirely to the gentlemen, in order to divert the ladies from improving their minds…to secure more arbitrary and unlimited authority over them.” Many others, especially physicians, echoed the same thought, particularly after the Gilded Age brought even more confining corsets and bustles.
Because Gerrit Smith could not model ideal feminine clothing himself, it was no surprise that his daughter did. Cousin Elizabeth liked the idea, too, and soon Seneca Falls was seeing a second revolution, more visual than the first. “I wore the dress for two years,” Stanton recalled, “and found it a great blessing.”
What a sense of liberty I felt, in running up and down stairs with my hands free to carry whatsoever I would, to trip through the rain or snow with no skirts to hold…ready at any moment to climb a hill-top to see the sun go down, or the moon rise, with no ruffles or trails to be…soiled. What an emancipation from little petty vexations.
Her friend Amelia Bloomer already was on record: she had defended Fanny Kemble’s “pantalettes” in one of the first issues of Bloomer’s temperance paper, The Lily. Seeing the practicality of Miller’s costume up close, Bloomer also adopted the style. When she wrote about it in The Lily, her name forever would be attached to the garment. To her chagrin, it was soon clear that many women were more interested in clothing than in temperance, and when she included sewing patterns, subscriptions soared. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was quick to pick up this second hot story from Seneca Falls, and soon people around the globe were debating the merits of the “Bloomer Costume.”
Although she had not intended to create this “furor,” Bloomer wore the style for “some six or eight years.” That she stuck with it longer than Stanton is probably due to the fact that the Bloomers moved from Seneca Falls to Iowa in 1853. Practicality always has priority over fashion in frontier situations, and it therefore was not surprising that among those Stanton listed as long-term bloomer wearers were “many farmers’ wives.”
Other women’s rights leaders who experimented with the costume included Lucy Stone, the Grimké sisters, and Susan B. Anthony. For the latter women, the change was an especially daring one from the modest Quaker dress of their youth, but for all women, wearing the new style meant inviting controversy and worse. Preachers, in Gerrit Smith’s words, ran “to the Bible, not to learn the truth, but to make the Bible the minister to folly” in preaching against the garment. Using scripture such as “male and female He created them,” clergymen argued that it was sinful for a woman to dress like a man. Any outing in the new clothes became a trial. “People would stare,” Stanton said. “Some men and women make rude remarks; boys follow in crowds, or shout from behind fences.”
In the end, she and others decided to surrender their freedom of movement at least in part because the experiment was literally threatening to the men in their lives: when strangers jeered at the women, “the gentleman in attendance felt it his duty to resent the insult by showing fight.” Elizabeth Smith Miller’s husband especially suffered while trying to support his father-in-law’s visionary ideas. “No man,” Stanton said in praise of Charles Dudley Miller, “went through the ordeal with [such] coolness and dogged determination.” The cousins called on him to escort them in sophisticated places as well as on country outings, and when Washington and New York City were just as hostile to the style as rural bumpkins, the women decided the battle was not worth it. Helene Maria Weber’s prediction was wrong. Male attire was not “generally worn” within the century, let alone within the decade that she forecast.