Bloomers and Their Backstory

 

Sometimes my mind just floats.  Yesterday, as I was looking at my blossoming bush lily out on the patio, I was thinking of the words spring and bloom.  Then my mind went to bloomer and, finally, bloomers.  I’ve always been intrigued by how words have come to be and how they might be related to each other.

I Googled bloomer, which gave me several articles about puberty.  But then I thought of bloomers and wondered whether there was some way that the bloomers some of us wore during gym class “back in the day” were related to spring blooms.  I realized that that was a stretch, but then you never know, do you?  Well, I ended up going down a totally different rabbit hole.

In the beginning, bloomers were elasticized pants underneath a looser garment.  The pants were long, but stuck out under a dress.  As time went on, bloomers grew shorter and shorter to the point that the elasticized pants could not be seen under a dress or as part of a one-piece outfit.

But instead of bloomers having any relationship to flowers, it turns out that bloomers were named after a woman named Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894).  She was a women’s rights activist who believed in temperance and women’s right to vote.  She was also a writer and editor of a newspaper for women.

Because she felt that the tight corsets and long, heavy skirts of her era were too constricting for women, she attempted to reform ladies’ fashion.  At the encouragement of her husband, she started wearing bloomers, which many men and women ridiculed at the time.

She did not invent bloomers, but heavily endorsed their usage.  Amelia wore them as she moved from town to town, campaigning in the 1850s for abstinence from alcohol.  As a sidenote, she was a friend to Susan B. Anthony, who shared her views about alcohol.  If you are interested, NPR has more information about Amelia Bloomer in this article.

Later on during the Civil War, women were discouraged from wearing bloomers because of their political association with women’s rights.  But because they were so practical, female nurses and volunteers wore them anyway.

So are bloomers still worn today?  Fashion has obviously evolved.  It appears that tee shirts and shorts as regular gym wear began somewhere in the 1980s.  Dancers and other performers, though, might still wear something like bloomers under their costumes.

But then consider those frilly, elasticized “diaper pants” under a baby girl’s dress.  They  have been popular for some time and probably will continue to be.  Those diaper pants – those bloomers – definitely help prevent messy baby clean-up.