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Amelia Jenks Bloomer was the first woman to found, publish, be the Editor-in-Chief and primary writer for a newspaper written for women. Her newspaper was called The Lily and began publication in Seneca Falls on January 1st, 1849, on the heels of the first Women’s Rights Convention in the previous year, July 1848, which she attended. Jenks Bloomer was a suffragist, temperance advocate and abolitionist, encouraged by her husband Dexter Chamberlain Bloomer, co-owner of the Seneca Falls Courier (for which Jenks Bloomer also wrote) and Postmaster of Seneca Falls (Jenks Bloomer was Assistant Postmaster
Today, Jenks Bloomer is known to many as advocating a shorter dress that did not pick up dirt and mud (was not a mop!) worn with trousers, thus, was more hygienic and gave women more freedom of movement. She also advocated against corsets, which were made of whale bone or steel and crushed women’s inner organs, contributing to the leading cause of death for women in the 19th C, that of death in child birth and, also, the death of the infant. Jenks Bloomer became a leader in the Suffragist, Abolitionist, Temperance and the Dress Reform movements, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who first wrote about this mode of dress in The Lily ) and Susan B. Anthony, who Jenks Bloomer introduced to each other, and who, all three, wore what came to be called “Bloomers.”
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