Women in Trousers — from Bloomers to Rational Dress
Escaping ‘the kingdom of fancy, fashion and foolery’
“The 1848 Women’s Rights Convention was the first of its kind to openly advocate women’s dress reform. All of the assembled women agreed that the time had come for the simplification of the cumbrous fashions they were obliged to wear.”
The Pioneer Feminists of Seneca Falls
These first women’s dress reformers proceeded to practice what they preached by rejecting the constricting corsets and tight lacing of traditional women’s fashion and wearing a type of pantaloons under a shortened and less bulky skirt. The idea had in fact not been Bloomer’s, as many people assume; it had come from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s, feminist cousin Libby –Elizabeth Smith Miller – who had adapted her own style of pantaloons to make it easier to do gardening and other physical activities. But even Libby was not the first: she may well have got the idea from Utopian socialist communities on the East Coast, inspired by that set up by Robert Owen at New Harmony, Indiana in the 1820s.
The Birth of Bloomerism
The Campaign for Women’s Dress Reform
Like a captive set free from his ball and chain, I was always ready for a brisk walk through sleet and snow and rain, to climb a mountain, jump over a fence, work in the garden, and was fit for any necessary locomotion. What a sense of liberty I felt with no skirts to hold or brush ready at any moment to climb a hill-top to see the sun go down or the moon rise, with no ruffles or trails imped by the dew or soiled by the grass.
Together with the abolitionist and temperance advocate Susan B. Anthony, Stanton organized an anti-slavery convention at Seneca Falls in 1851, attended by women wearing bloomers; that same year some of these women, still proudly in bloomers, came to England on a lecture tour. Inevitably, they were mercilessly parodied in the satirical press and across the lecture of halls of Britain. Punch was full of cartoons of them. Such were the persistent levels of derision wherever they went that by the mid-1850s most of the advocates of bloomers had had to abandon wearing them.
Women in Trousers in War
The Dangers of the Crinoline
In the 1860s the dress reformers regrouped and turned their attention to the aesthetic dress movement promoted by the Pre-Raphaelites. Its languid elegance and soft, corsetless lines were epitomised in the photographs and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s muse, Janey Morris. Meanwhile a continuing campaign was being waged on medical grounds, to liberate women from the harmful long-term effects on their rib cages and internal organs of the corset and to promote public acceptance of certain decorous forms of female exercise that allowed less constricting clothes. Calisthenics and gentle gymnastics based around rhythmic exercise using dumbbells also helped promote adapted forms of the bloomer or bifurcated skirts as comfortable modes of dress for women to wear.
The Rational Dress Society
But it was the invention of the bicycle that dramatically changed things for women at the century’s end, literally propelling women’s dress reform toward the widespread popularisation of the ladies bifurcated trouser for recreational purposes.
The Advent of the Bicycle & Women’s Bifurcated Trousers
The Indefatigable Lady Harberton
It is not to be wondered at that women are regarded as perpetual infants, since they voluntarily trammel and bind themselves from head to foot with the garments that the traders in clothes offer them.
She herself made a point of going about in flat shoes, voluminous knickerbockers and an impressive hat. She was one of a committee who set up a ‘Short Skirt League’ in 1893 to promote dresses five inches above the ground to make walking more practical for women. She admitted however that 5” was insufficient as it only came to the top of the instep. She wanted to see skirts 11-13” above the ground ‘but it was thought wise to begin gradually’ with their campaign. Lady H. hoped that the world would eventually see the light and ‘come to perceive that trailing garments are neither pretty nor poetical looking when covered with dust and mud, and that dress is a thing that should be adapted to the temporary occupation of the wearer.’
Lady H never stopped fighting and was also an active crusader for women’s suffrage. When she died in 1911 aged 67, she specified in her will that ‘no one who professes to have any affection for me shall wear mourning or make the smallest alteration in their clothing on account of my death’. Lady H’s suffragette friends mourned her loss and the passing of a colleague who ‘made a firm stand against the conventionalism which would hold women captive’.