The Bloomers went West, Mrs. Bloomer continuing to edit The Lily whenever they rested long enough to get out an issue. At one of these stops, she brought from the East a woman typesetter and, in a masterly fashion, put down the resulting strike of annoyed male coworkers in her establishment. In March, 1850, she reports that the legislature of Tennessee “have in their wisdom decided, after gravely discussing the question, that women have no souls” and, presumably as a consequence, “no right to hold property.”
Against such attacks, against divorce laws which tied frail but sober women to property-holding and soul-endowed drunken males, she lectured in the backwoods. As she proceeded from Chicago to Alton, she noted deer and other game along the railroad tracks. At St. Joseph her lecture was announced by bell ringers. On the way to Iowa, carrying “choice shrubbery and fruit grafts” to make glad the wilderness, she met Kit Carson on a stage-coach and was apparently interested in, but not favorably impressed by, his buckskin coat with fringes. When she arrived at Council Bluffs, the Omahas were dwindling away and she saw one of the last transfers of this vanishing race to a reservation. The city of two or three thousand inhabitants in which the Bloomers settled was a collection of log houses, and paths, through fields of sunflowers, served for sidewalks and streets. Cottonwood boards on the outside and muslin tacked to the logs within made the cabin warm and, if Amelia suffered, it was only with a nostalgia for civilization:
“Situated as we are three hundred miles west of the railroads connecting the Mississippi with the cities of the East, we, of course, neither hear the shrill shriek of the locomotive nor see the trains of cars dashing through our streets with a velocity that outstrips the speed of the light-footed deer; but we are living in full expectation of the day when these things will be familiar to us as they are now to my Eastern readers.”
But the West was to become the real pioneer in suffrage, and Mrs. Bloomer was happy there. She wrote, she spoke, and she participated fully in the life of the times. When the Civil War broke out, she was a loyal Federalist but, almost unique among women pioneers, she was not actually an abolitionist. It was her duty to present a flag to the infantry leaving Council Bluffs and she did it with her customary dignity and enthusiasm:
“Soldiers: We cannot part with you without a few words of counsel and warning. In the new and dangerous path you are entering upon, let us entreat you to guard well your steps and keep yourselves aloof from every vice. Avoid, above all things, profanity and the intoxicating cup. The latter slays annually more than fall on the battlefield. The hearts of mothers, wives, and sisters go forth after you. Many tears will be shed and many prayers offered in your behalf. See to it then that you so conduct yourselves that whatever may befall you in the service of your country, you will return to gladden the hearts of the loved ones you leave behind and to enjoy the peace you will have conquered—that no sting will pierce their hearts, no stain rest on your fair name. Go forth in your sense of right, relying on the justice of your cause, seek peace with God, your Savior, that you may prepare to meet His summons should it come suddenly, or to enjoy life should it please Him to spare you for many days.”
She was interested in everything that concerned women and she was apparently right in all her predictions. Inspired by a famous invention, she wrote: “It will be no strange thing to see, within a few years, women merchants, bookkeepers, jewelers, booksellers, typesetters, editors, publishers, farmers, physicians, preachers, lawyers. Already there are some engaged in nearly or quite all of these occupations and professions, and as men crowd them out of their old places, the numbers will increase. . . . It is well that it is so. Woman has long enough stitched her life and health away, and it is merciful to her that sewing machines have been invented to relieve her of her toilsome, ill-paid labor, and to send her forth into more active and more lucrative pursuits, where both mind and body may have the exercise necessary to health and happiness. Men are aiding to forward the woman’s rights movement by crowding women out of their old places. Women will be gainers by the change, and we are glad to see them forced to do what their false education and false delicacy have prevented them doing in the past.”
It was a full life and, except for the absence of children, a happy one. In it the part played by dress reform was extremely small and, serious as she was about it, Mrs. Bloomer would hardly have cared to be known by her costume alone. That costume was an entirely logical development. The dress of women in Mrs. Bloomer’s time was fantastic in appearance, dangerous to health, and appropriate only to a type of woman which was definitely dying out. In his Social History of the American Family, Arthur Calhoun notes that, by 1830, the domestic type of woman was being displaced not by the active professional type but by giggling triflers; “fashionable females had nothing to do but harass servants and gouge money out of husband and father.” A double revolution in the status of women was taking place. The ideal good wife was changing on one side into the idealized and silly lady and, at the same time, in other economic conditions, into a factory worker or a member of the learned professions. The former was supposed to be typical; she was socially dominant:
“The delicacy of American women during the first half of the nineteenth century was to some degree the realization of an ideal. Woman was supposed to be of finer clay; and this ‘finer-clay’ fragility, futility ideal was already pretty well established at the end of the eighteenth century. In American periodical literature of the early part of the nineteenth century, girls languishing of broken hearts . . . were an immensely popular theme, especially in ladies’ magazines. Women up to the War and beyond were nourished in the cult of female delicacy and refinement. Of course this theory was capable of complete application only in leisure-class circles; but it helps us to understand the neglect of physical training for girls and also to appreciate the remark of a physician of the first quarter of the nineteenth century who said that not one woman in ten enjoyed perfect health. At a much later date Catherine E. Beecher ‘made enquiries into physical health of American females and . . . among her immense circle of friends and acquaintances all over the union, is unable to recall ten married ladies in this century and country who are perfectly sound, healthy, and vigorous.’”
These were the women who could wear the clothes against which working women rebelled. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, after changing to the new costume, wrote that it was a positive joy to go “running up and down stairs with my hands free.” The girls in factories were almost naked to the waist and wore short skirts to keep out of the way of machinery. Every new free activity of women demanded some change in their style of dressing. The first change was made to a peculiarly unattractive costume which almost defeated its object. Before she went West Mrs. Bloomer had lived, like so many other reformers, in upstate New York where she became acquainted with the severe garb of the little sects and communities about her. From them, and from the least advanced women in the world, the slaves in the harem, came the Bloomer costume.
Her own description of it is so unattractive as to suggest that she took that “grim satisfaction in dreariness” which a reformer has called the characteristic of the time:
“We would have the skirt reaching down to nearly halfway between the knee and ankle, and not made quite so full as is the present fashion; underneath the skirt, trousers made moderately full, in fair mild weather coming down to the ankle, not instep, and there gathered in with an elastic band, the shoes or slippers to suit the occasion; for winter or wet weather the trousers also full, but coming down into the boot, which should rise at least three or four inches above the ankle. This boot should be gracefully sloped at the upper edge and trimmed with fur or fancifully embroidered, according to the taste of the wearer. The material might be cloth, or morocco, moose skin, and so on, and made waterproof if desirable.”
But the New York Tribune, describing her at one of her lectures, presents a much more attractive picture: “Mrs. Bloomer was attired in a dark brown changeable tunic, a kilt descended just below the kn
ees, the skirt of which was trimmed with rows of black velvet. The pantaloons were of the same texture and trimmed in the same style. She wore gaiters. Her headdress was cherry and black. Her dress had a large open corsage, with bands of velvet over the white chemisette in which was a diamond stud pin. She wore flowing sleeves, tight undersleeves, and black lace mitts. Her whole attire was rich and plain in appearance.”
Several generations later the bicycle brought the bloomer a new lease of life—a second blooming as it were—but, by that time, another dress reformer had gone farther and fared worse. Dr. Mary E. Walker was a fanatic. She had a few interests outside of dress reform and she expressed herself on all matters violently, but she seemed to believe that if women wore men’s clothes almost all the evils of life would be abated.
She dedicated her book on dress reform on four successive pages; first to her parents, then to her professional sisters “of whatever school or pathy”; then to the great sisterhood of women suffering “trials and worries that God has not given men the power to comprehend.” But finally and above all, the book is dedicated “to the practical dress reformers: The truest friends of humanity, who have done more for the universal elevation of woman in the past dozen years than all others combined. You who have lived the precepts and principles that others have only talked about. You who have been so consistent in your ideas of the equality of the sexes, by dressing in the manner to fit you for the duties of a noble and useful life. You who have written and spoken and been living martyrs to the all-important principles involved in a thoroughly hygienic dress, and thus given to the world an indisputable proof of your unflinching integrity. . . . To you, in a word, who are the greatest philanthropists of the age, this . . . Dedication is made.”
She had put on men’s clothes because, being a qualified physician and a first lieutenant on the surgical staff in the United States Army, she could not do field work during the Civil War in the usual costume of women. She was captured and spent some time in Libby Prison. She won a medal of honor, and the right to dress as she pleased was confirmed to her by a grateful Congress. Her own costume was not at all striking. More than twenty years ago, I saw her driving a buggy over a country road, sitting very erect and forbidding, and apparently unconscious of the jeers of small boys who ran after her carriage. She was dressed then in rather dingy black with an ordinary white shirt and black tie. But when she appeared in the court of St. James’s, she wore black silk trousers with velvet side stripes and a loose black silk coat with velvet bands on the pockets. This was not, however, the “American Reform Dress” that she offered to women with an earnestness and vehemence almost unique in the history of women reformers:
“The dress is made with high neck and loose waist, and whole drawers, and long sleeves with waistbands attached; thus making a complete undersuit in one garment. The drawers are folded over the ankles and the stockings adjusted over the drawers, thus keeping the ankles warm and also keeping the stockings arranged without elastics or other bands, or any troublesome or injurious arrangement, most of which impede the circulation and produce varicose veins and weariness in walking.
“The pants are made like men’s, and are either buttoned to the waist of the undersuit or are arranged with the usual suspenders. The dress is made to hang free of the body, the waist and skirt of one piece like a sack coat, and falling to the knees to prevent its being stepped upon when descending stairs, or of becoming soiled on rainy days; but principally because of a needed relief to women from its shortness. Thus for general wear but three garments are required.
“Woolen and cotton, flannel and silk may be made the same as the ordinary linen suits—with the exception of waistbands—when the season makes more clothing necessary, and these can be worn either under or over the linen; thus giving the required amount of warmth without expenditure of vitality to carry the clothes about, or of money to purchase them. The time is coming when every woman will dress in this style, for the advantages are too evident to be much longer overlooked.”
She never persuaded her own sex, who used to set bulldogs on her in the public streets. She was even unpopular with advanced Suffragists because she held that being a woman, and hence a citizen, she already had the right to vote—and considered it hardly worth having. A great many women in the Suffrage conventions were dress reformers, but they were turned back by the monomaniac vehemence of Dr. Walker’s arguments:
“So much of the nervous energy is expended on Dress and dressing and carrying the burdensome stuff that a morbid sensibility is induced which women cannot prevent. At the exhibition of this, men lose their patience, believing there is no necessity for a woman ever to be nervous and easily annoyed at such matters. Not only does the husband and father suffer from this continuous irritation, but the children that are, and those that are to be, partake of the same. . . . The greatest sorrows from which women suffer to-day are those physical, moral, and mental ones that are caused by their unhygienic manner of dressing! The want of the ballot is but a toy in comparison.”
One reform she accomplished; the back collar-button on the ordinary man’s shirt chafed her neck and, with a solitary outburst of domestic inspiration, she created the inside neckband which, by the insertion of a strip of linen, prevents the metal from touching the skin. Yet the grateful male can hardly rank her among the saints, for Dr. Walker, comparatively indifferent to drinking, was a violent enemy of nicotine, expressing herself in her usual ejaculatory manner:
“Many a lady has married a ‘mild Tobacco user’ who was not herself aware of the depth of her disgust for the weed until she found the restraints of society thrown off by her husband, and Tobacco used freely by him! . . . The Wife’s eyes are often dim with tears as she says half aloud: ‘Oh! I wonder if the men are all so selfish that they will smoke when they know how sickening it is to their wives? His breath is so bad, and his clothes are all full of the odor, and even in the washtub and in the ironing room, one cannot pass the door without catching something of the odor! Oh! If he would only not smoke, or if I could only endure it! But my heart is broken. He, yes, he promised so faithfully that he would not smoke any more! And now, when I am married to him, and must stay, I am to be tormented all the rest of my life with Tobacco! Oh, dear, dear, what would I give if I were only single again, and at my own home, where I would be out of all traces of Tobacco!”
She had one other interest—literary expression—and by this, too, she intended to make domestic life happier. She would gladly have cut down a ten-hour working day to eight hours of labor and two of literary composition. “Who will not say that the marriage relations would not be made much happier if the laborers had time to think and write, for as it affords me happiness in expressing my ideas, and makes me more noble, so it would another human being. Every noble expression adds a title to one’s own soul’s nobility. There are branches of labor where one cannot stop and pen the burning words that rush out of the brain and demand paper to rest upon and a pen to hold them there. But if they labor a fewer number of hours they would not be so weary that they would forget how to clothe their beautiful ideas. . . . Many a laborer has listened to such appeals with a sorrowing heart, knowing that his or her want of time to clothe would result in the interment of the neglected gems, and they could only attend the funeral, for that takes but little time, and so everybody can attend funerals. The immortal Tupper, in the following words, has beautifully expressed the necessity for clothing the ‘naked’ ideas as soon as they are called for:
‘Hast thou a thought upon thy brain
Catch it ere it fly
Or other thoughts will intervene
And it will soon take wing.’ ”
She prefaces her book with a few remarks about herself but, recalling that it is not considered decent for women to use the personal pronoun, she says, “Next to self is the phrenologist,” and quotes one on her capacities. She believes sincerely in work and alludes with contempt to the “shoddyocracy” who look down upon labor. She worked for t
he reform of marriage laws and, with Mrs. Stanton, believed in a woman’s right to keep her own name after marriage.
Dr. Walker had herself no opportunity to be a “Lucy Stoner,” as she never married; the odd thing is that Lucy Stone herself could hardly be called one. Like Frances Willard and Mrs. Stanton, Lucy Stone believed in the right of a married woman to keep her own name. Mrs. Stanton had said: “A woman’s dignity is equally involved in a lifelong name, to mark her individuality. We cannot overestimate the demoralizing effect on woman herself, to say nothing of society at large, for her to consent thus to merge her existence so wholly in that of another.” Lucy Stone agreed and, in accordance with the principles of psychoanalysis and of common sense, she kept her name and put the right to do so out of her mind. It was very far from being her major interest in life and it was certainly not an obsession. When, on May Day, 1855, the Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson married Lucy Stone and Henry D. Black-well, the high contracting parties issued a joint protest of which Doctor Higginson so approved that he had copies made and sent them to other clergymen. It was a protest against the injustice of the marriage laws by which “the legal existence of the wife is suspended during marriage.” The two signers agreed that, in case of dispute between man and wife, it would be preferable to choose an arbitrator, rather than trust oneself to the courts, for every law relating to marriage was in favor of the male. This protest does not mention the preservation of the maiden name, and, in fact, one of Lucy Stone’s journalistic supporters, publishing the protest, referred to her as Lucy Blackwell. Yet all her work for education, abolition, temperance, and suffrage is nowadays forgotten in favor of the incidental circumstance that she kept her maiden name.
The Stammering Century Page 36