In the mid-1800s, garment styles were specific to one’s age, gender, and social status; and were fastened with only buttons, hooks and ribbons. At about four years of age, boys and girls began wearing clothes distinctive of their gender – boys in knee-length trousers called breeches with high socks and a white shirt, and girls in dresses with age-specific lengths, moving lower as they matured. Women wore floor-length dresses.

Underneath a woman’s outer dress were several layers of undergarments topped by a corset - hooked in the front, laced in the back, and stiffened with “boning” made of strips of whalebone or metal. It was cinched in to produce an hourglass figure with a tiny waist, accentuated by wide skirts. Women’s underclothes alone could weigh as much as 14 pounds. The physical restrictions of corsets were not only uncomfortable but potentially dangerous to a woman’s health: causing poor blood circulation, fainting, curvature of the spine, and deformities of the ribs.

Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, New York, the daughter of Gerrit Smith (an abolitionist) and second cousin to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, decided to do something about this fashion faux pas, declaring, “[T]his shackle should no longer be endured.” She was inspired by the loose-fitting tunics and leggings worn by their Native American Iroquois sisters and substituted “the heavy, untidy and exasperating old garment” with “Turkish trousers to the ankle with a skirt reaching some four inches below the knee”. Countless women worldwide embraced this new costume liberation, as it was popularized by Amelia Bloomer in her 1849 newspaper The Lily - the first paper devoted to the interests of woman, and the first one owned, edited and published by a woman. Amelia Bloomer also introduced Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to each other in 1851. Their friendship went on to become a famous lifelong partnership for women’s rights.

The new radical “bloomers”, as the Turkish trousers came to be known, were not enthusiastically embraced by all, especially by men. They saw it as an affront to their authority. And though the two great women’s rights pioneers, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wore them for a few years, they finally had to leave dress reform to future generations since the attire was distracting audiences from their message – women were citizens and as such deserved the right to vote. Bloomers would make a fashion comeback in the 1890s.