Womens Fashion Clothing – Did Meriva Carpenter Actually Wear Her Bloomer Costume
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What about Grandma’s funeral, I know it’s acceptable to show up halfnaked to the Oscars.
Can you wear this to a formal event?
Are you supposed to wear it around the house? You don’t really get plenty of it’s almost inevitably the case with all professional styles that are OK to wear at the office, and women being cold at the office is an enormous, widespread workplace issue, as I’ve covered before. In 1994, the Cortland County Historical Society received a phone call from the Homer National Bank about a trunk that had been stored there for an unknown interval.
Inside the trunk lay a bloomer costume with documents indicating that it had been owned by Meriva Carpenter, a resident of Homer, New York City.
Piecing gether where the garment fits into the history of dress reform required that I combine genealogy with a material analysis of the item itself a close reading of the clothing, How the garment came to be in the bank’s possession is unknown.
While others felt that adopting maleinspired trousers more bluntly asserted their gender equality, written accounts indicate that some women thought this design was more hygienic.
Actually the original design recommended by Amelia Bloomer included harem pants. Thus, though the bloomer costume was advertised as functional clothing, the detail work on this garment the elaborate silk applique and embroidery that adorned it implies that it was worn for show and not housework. Nevertheless, I found no indication that Carpenter sewed her own clothing, and the skill level necessary to create this particular elaborate garment suggests that she had it commissioned. Women in upstate NY commonly wore their trousers in the style of men. Bloomer trousers stood out as well. A well-known fact that is. It was exciting for me to compare these conjectures to material evidence from the period. As pointed out by them, for women’s rights reformers, the bloomer costume symbolized their protest against ideas of feminine inferiority that, were perpetuated by fashionable clothing.
My research centers on the 19th century American women’s dress reform movement and the cultural roles of fashion and antifashion.
In response, she began wearing a garment consisting of a shortened skirt and trousers.
In my study, Peterboro, New York City, plays a significant role. Of course the bloomer costume should later be adopted as the uniform of the women’s dress reform movement. Certainly, peterboro long appreciated for its significance to the history of the American anti slavery movement had an intriguing part to play in the antebellum women’s reform movement as well. In 1851, Peterboro resident and abolitionist Elizabeth Smith Miller became frustrated with her long skirts while gardening. Provide few details about regular women’s adoption of dress reform, textual sources detail the experiences of reformers in wearing the bloomer costume. Right after journalist Amelia Bloomer publically endorsed it, with that said, this clothing will become popularly known as the bloomer costume. Needless to say, City University of NYC since Ping is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center. Ping holds a master’s degree in history from Virginia Commonwealth University and a bachelor’s in history from the University of Iowa.
Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, The Sibyl and Corresponding about Women’s Suffrage, could be published in NY History Journal.
While Throwing off ‘the Draggling Dresses’, her dissertation.
Women and Dress Reform, ‘1820 1900′, discusses the ways in which fashion and function intersected in the 19thcentury American dress reform movement. Her forthcoming article, ‘He May Sneer at the Course We are Pursuing to Gain Justice’. Therefore a short term research fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, the National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of NYC Dissertation Fellowship, and a Writing Across the Curriculum fellowship with the City University of New York City since Ping is the recipient of the Thompn dissertation fellowship. It’s a well NYC since Ping is an adjunct lecturer in the history department at Queens College in Flushing. Known while the idea of convenient clothing was appealing, plenty of women complained that, the bloomer costume was ugly.
So this suggests that despite dress reformers’ assertions that men were compelling women to dress a certain way, women themselves embraced fashion.
Historically the dress reform movement is considered a failure as long as it did not result in any ‘longterm’ changes in fashion.
By the way, the fashionable hourglass shape is maintained and the embroidery is delicate and beautiful, the most radical element of the bloomer costume. Was embraced. Wanted a garment that was also attractive and feminine. Saw the functional merits of shortening the skirt and adding trousers.
Meriva Carpenter’s bloomer costume also reflects this view. Fact, I would also recommend looking at the blog, Two Nerdy History Girls for more costume, textiles, and interesting sidelights on material culture and history. Textile and costume historians are doing this kind of analysis for many years, and the results of their work been published in a couple of places, including the journal of the Costume Society of America, the quarterly bulletin of the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums as well as in the Proceedings of ALHFAM’s annual meetings, and the MESDA Journal.
When I was invited to Peterboro for a fundraiser to support the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark and the Smithfield Community Association an event that was all about women’s dress reform I jumped at the chance, in the fall of 2013.
Most significantly for my research, an authentic bloomer costume from 1855, on loan from the Cortland County Historical Society, was also on display.
It had a fascinating story, one warranting further research and careful contextualization. On p of that, called In the Kitchen Tea, the fundraiser featured tea and finger sandwiches, volunteers in recreated bloomer costumes, a brief history of dress reform, and songs about the bloomer. Known around wn for being artistic, Carpenter’s bloomer costume reflected her reputation. Her husband a flawless miller and dyer, Meriva Carpenter was a painter of miniatures. Considering the above said. Blouse was likely worn under the jacket.
Basically the blackish skirt buttoned down the front and ended below the knees, approximately 6 inches from the ankle.
Created from blackish cotton with silk applique and embroidered leaves, the 1855 garment includes a blackish jacket with long, turned cuff sleeves.
Like men’s pants, the bloomer trousers are split leg and almost white with matching blackish cloth sewn from knee to ankle and cut straight. However, whenever making the garment appear as one piece rather than two, the waistband of the skirt connected to the jacket by buttons. Determining the dominant textiles used, how a garment was constructed, the presence of any labels, and the wear and tear sustained by a piece can help to establish how it fit into the life and world of its owner, and the purposes it served both functional and symbolic.
