Attacking the Women’s Rights Movement
Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–1894) wrote for her husband’s newspaper, the County Courier of Seneca Falls, New York. In 1848 she attended the women’s convention there and began her own biweekly newspaper, The Lily, focusing on temperance and women’s rights. In 1851, Bloomer enthusiastically promoted — and serendipitously gave her name to — the comfortable women’s costume devised by another temperance activist: loose trousers gathered at the ankles topped by a short skirt. Fearing women’s quest for equal dress and equal rights, humorists such as John Leech ridiculed the new female attire. Here, bloomer-attired women smoke away and belittle the male proprietor as “one of the ‘inferior animals,’” a thinly veiled effort by Leech to reassert men’s “natural” claim as the dominant sex. From Punch 1851, John Leech Archive.