Speaking for women’s rights

Daily Reading for July 20 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Ross Tubman

Unfortunately, her name is forever associated with a type of woman’s undergarment, but Amelia Bloomer was actually a distinguished writer, publisher, and social reformer and a pioneer in the woman’s suffrage movement. She was also devoted to her church. When she moved to Cedar Bluffs, Iowa, she helped organize an Episcopal congregation in the community and entertained visiting missionaries in her home. She took it for granted that God was at work in the causes she espoused, writing, “The same power that brought the slave out of bondage will, in His own good time and way, bring about the emancipation of women, and make her the equal in power and dominion that she was in the beginning.”

Bloomer became an articulate speaker for women’s rights. Using her magazine Lily as a vehicle, she wrote that women ought to be admitted to institutions of higher learning, that they should own property and receive paychecks in their own name, and that the law should do more to protect victims of abuse. She even produced a woman’s Bible to challenge patriarchal views.

And, yes, she did advocate less restrictive clothing. The whalebone, tight-laced corsets, and voluminous skirts then fashionable restricted movement and injured health. Dressing like this made women, in Bloomer’s words, “unpaid street sweepers.” She didn’t invent the garment that was given her name, but Bloomer did popularize it. She gave up wearing bloomers herself after eight years, though, because she felt they detracted attention from issues that mattered more.

From “Amelia Bloomer” in A Year With American Saints by G. Scott Cady and Christopher L. Webber. Copyright © 2006. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

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