American Journalism Author Interview
Amelia Bloomer, The Lily, and Early Feminist Discourse in the US
Tracy Lucht
Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa USA
The Lily, a temperance and woman’s rights publication started by Amelia Bloomer in 1849, was among the first periodicals published by and for women in the US. This study argues that Bloomer’s editorship of the Lily from 1849–1854 advanced the cause of woman’s rights in the US through discourse, dialogue, and practice. The issues addressed in the Lily—marital relations, political representation, property ownership, education and work opportunities, fair wages, fashion customs, women’s health, religion, and gendered social norms—reflected a broad-based agenda for feminism that is familiar today. At the same time, the journal’s privileging of middle-class white womanhood exposed fissures and blind spots related to race and class that would reverberate for generations. In her role as editor, Bloomer helped show readers the personal was political, earning her a significant place in feminist media history.
Q: How were you introduced to Amelia Bloomer?
A: I became interested in Bloomer when I was asked to write an encyclopedia entry about her for a volume on women in politics. I knew, like other historians, a bit about her and what she had done, but in doing the research for that encyclopedia entry I became even more interested in her story. Additionally, given that I’m at Iowa State University, I was particularly interested in the fact that she had moved from Seneca Falls, New York, by way of Ohio, to Council Bluffs, Iowa and eventually settled there.
She did not continue publishing the Lily once she had made that move, but she was very active in the suffrage movement here in Iowa. There are materials related to her that I had proximity to. So, initially, I was interested in that move, and I was interested in knowing if that had contributed to the way that I would say she’s been overlooked in a lot of early U.S. feminist history.
Q: You were a copy editor for a while. Was there anything about her editing a publication that just drew you to her?
A: Well, I will say that I found her writing to be so good. She was a very powerful and clean writer. I mean, her prose is just, it’s very nuanced, and it’s articulate, and I admire her for that. This project also got me thinking a lot about the role of editors, which I think sometimes gets underplayed. A lot of focus is placed on writers and the role of writers in facilitating discourse and bringing ideas to the table, but through this project, I was also able to gain a greater appreciation for the role of editors in bringing different voices together.
She did this in a way that I found fascinating because she would bring together voices that were sometimes in disagreement with each other. She didn’t always take sides—sometimes [she] republished things that had been printed in other publications, as part of the newspaper exchange practice that was common at the time. And sometimes she would make a little comment on it, but she was really influential in bringing in the voices of other feminist writers. I think that this is an important function in public discourse and one that maybe we are guilty of overlooking at times when we write [media] history.
Q: There is something so interesting about the temperance movement. We often hear about the intersection of early women’s rights movement and the abolition movement. I was surprised to learn about the intersection of women’s rights and temperance movements. What in your research process surprised you? What was your favorite part of your research?
A: That is a really interesting point. One reason I think that historians have overlooked the importance of the temperance movement to early U.S. feminism is the role played by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This to me was probably the juiciest part of what I found.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were two very well-known figures in the women’s suffrage movement. Amelia Bloomer actually introduced the two of them to each other. It happened after an anti-slavery meeting in Seneca Falls. The three of them were part of an effort to organize the New York State Women’s Temperance Society. Their reason for doing this was that they felt women’s voices weren’t being heard within the broader temperance movement; they were getting drowned out by men who were dominating the movement.
Bloomer, in particular, really saw temperance as a women’s issue and as central to women’s rights in all sorts of nuanced ways. They also felt that for women to have their own organization would be a way for them to learn to take on leadership roles, to be more comfortable speaking out, to learn how to organize and petition, and be part of making change happen, when in the past they’d been left out of a lot of these efforts.
But they eventually had a falling out in 1853. It happened because Anthony and Stanton and some others outside of the New York State Women’s Temperance Society had decided that, if they really believed in gender equality, they needed to invite men not only to be part of the association, because they already were, but also to allow men to be officers.
The group’s founding constitution had said that men could be members, but only women could be officers in the organization. Stanton and Anthony said true equality means equal roles for men and women, and we must practice what we preach. Amelia Bloomer and others were opposed to that change because, they said, “We have this great thing going. This is our space. Why would we give that up? This is a way that we are bringing women into this movement. This is a way that we are educating them. And if we invite men to be officers, they’re just going to take over again and we’re going to be right back where we started.”
Bloomer also argued that they had raised money on the premise that this was an organization where women were in leadership positions. So, she felt that it would be betraying the donors because they’d be going back on what they initially raised money for.
Stanton and Anthony lost the debate, and they left the organization. Their version of what happened ended up taking priority in the historical narrative. So when they said, “Oh, those temperance women, we had to leave that movement because they were just too conservative,” historians really bought into their account of what had happened. Stanton and Anthony were very savvy about writing the history of the early suffrage movement. They wrote their History of Woman Suffrage and tailored it to privilege their perspectives and to highlight parts of the history that they wanted to highlight.
Probably the juiciest, most fascinating thing I found in my research was when I went to Seneca Falls, N.Y., to the historical society and sat with the Amelia Bloomer papers. I read the letters between Bloomer and Stanton and Anthony disagreeing with each other over this whole narrative and how it should be written—how Stanton and Anthony were changing the things that Bloomer had sent them, and how they had left her out of the story.
Getting to sit with that tension and that conflict and realizing how much it has been glossed over in the dominant narrative of feminist history was just really interesting for me. It made me empathize with Bloomer because she had really put herself out there. She was the public face of the dress reform movement for a while; she was giving public speeches, she was getting ridiculed, she was publishing this newspaper.
She had done all of this work and then for her close friends to turn around and say, “You’re just not enough of a feminist”—I could imagine how hard and painful that must have been, and I believe that it was a reason that she ended up relocating.
The Seneca Falls Historical Society has the one remaining copy of the issue of the Lily that was published after that fateful meeting of the New York State Women’s Temperance Society. It included a full account of what had happened at that meeting, and it also included Bloomer’s commentary, so that was a big deal for me, to get to read that, because it had been missing from all the other collections of the Lily that I had been using to that point.
Q: Can you tell me your thoughts on the intersection of women’s rights and the temperance movement?
A: Right. When I started the research, I read what other scholars had written about the Lily and about temperance and women’s rights. The way that it had been written about often treated the two issues as separate. The Lily was described as a newspaper that started with a focus on temperance and then, because of the influence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, eventually shifted its focus to women’s rights. What I found was that women’s rights was intertwined so closely with Bloomer’s and other activists’ feelings about temperance that you can’t treat them as separate.
Making women’s lives better and empowering women to change their lives and to control their lives—that was part of her focus from the very beginning. She was influenced by Stanton, but it wasn’t nearly as decisive as I had been led to believe.
It was radical stuff. Her interpretation of Scripture was fascinating. You know, redefining or reinterpreting what the Bible said about gender and men’s and women’s roles. She didn’t believe that men and women were the same, but she believed that they were equal and that it was offensive to prohibit women from reaching their full potential. She had a very strong faith, which, again, I think that maybe we think of as culturally conservative, but which was very rooted in ideas about social justice. It was quite progressive for the time.
Q: Is there any further research or anything you’ve done yet with Bloomer? Is there more work with her in the future?
A: There’s so much I still need to know. I really want to dig more into the tension of defining feminism and what it meant to be a feminist. Of course, the concept of feminism didn’t cohere until the end of the nineteenth century, so it wasn’t a word that these women would have used at the time. However, I think it is an accurate word to describe their belief systems. I want to learn more about her relationship with Stanton and Anthony. I want to learn more about her effort in the later suffrage movement. That was something that this paper didn’t get into and that I still want to address.
My next of slice of research about her is about the concept of spectacle. I’m really going to dig into dress reform and what happened when she became a spectacle. It drove up circulation of the Lily, so it gave her greater reach and influence at the same time she was objectified and made into an object of ridicule. I’m interested in that theme as it relates to women in journalism. I need to learn more about the dress reform movement, more generally, and I want to learn more about the temperance movement. I always feel like there’s so much more to learn.
Q: If people read this and they want to learn more, are there other sources with further information I can direct them, besides your work or going to Seneca Falls, NY?
A: A book called The Myth of Seneca Falls [by Lisa Tetrault] is really important and very, very good. In terms of broader feminist discourse, Suzanne Marilley wrote a very good book about feminist discourse in the nineteenth century. There’s also a book that I need to mention and it’s really the only one that I think does justice to the [early] temperance movement. And that is Carol Mattingly’s Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. I think if somebody wanted to dig into the relationship between temperance and women’s rights, it’s a great place to start. I think this is an area that definitely needs more attention.