preference is a male dress, ought not to be blamed for adopting it. I close…by recording my prediction, that in ten years male attire will be generally worn by women of most civilized countries.
Paulina Wright Davis received Weber’s letter via Mildred Spofford, an American living in France, who assured the Worcester audience that the French feminist was “lady-like, modest, and unassuming.” Her deviance in dress was understandable, Spofford urged, for Weber was “a practical agriculturist” who personally conducted “the entire business of her farm.” Although just 25 years old, Weber also was “in the front rank of essayists in France,” and had “a perfect command of the English language.” She not only practiced her feminism in her apparel, but also wrote feminist theory: “She has labored zealously on behalf of her sex, as her numerous tracts on subjects of reform bear testimony,” Spofford concluded. “No writer of the present age has done more.”
One of the Worcester attendees who must have nodded his head in agreement with Weber’s words was Gerrit Smith, Stanton’s cousin and the father of Elizabeth Smith Miller. He had inherited a fortune through a family partnership with New York millionaire John Jacob Astor, and the Smith home in western New York near Seneca Falls was a haven for both runaway slaves and the era’s most prominent liberals. Stanton later remembered his estate as a place where “one would meet the first families in the State, with Indians, Africans, slaveowners, religionists of all sects…each class welcomed and honored.”
Gerrit Smith (Library of Congress)
No one was a stronger advocate of dress reform than Gerrit Smith. Long after women had given up the fight, he argued for making this area a “battleground.” To the end of his life, he believed that women would find greater political success if their appearance were not so strikingly different from that of men. He received isolated support for this reform, often from other men. As early as 1787, Philadelphia’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, a founder of the nation’s first medical school, had written, “I…ascribe the invention of ridiculous and expensive fashions in female dress entirely to the gentlemen, in order to divert the ladies from improving their minds…to secure more arbitrary and unlimited authority over them.” Many others, especially physicians, echoed the same thought, particularly after the Gilded Age brought even more confining corsets and bustles.
Because Gerrit Smith could not model ideal feminine clothing himself, it was no surprise that his daughter did. Cousin Elizabeth liked the idea, too, and soon Seneca Falls was seeing a second revolution, more visual than the first. “I wore the dress for two years,” Stanton recalled, “and found it a great blessing.”
What a sense of liberty I felt, in running up and down stairs with my hands free to carry whatsoever I would, to trip through the rain or snow with no skirts to hold…ready at any moment to climb a hill-top to see the sun go down, or the moon rise, with no ruffles or trails to be…soiled. What an emancipation from little petty vexations.
Her friend Amelia Bloomer already was on record: she had defended Fanny Kemble’s “pantalettes” in one of the first issues of Bloomer’s temperance paper, The Lily. Seeing the practicality of Miller’s costume up close, Bloomer also adopted the style. When she wrote about it in The Lily, her name forever would be attached to the garment. To her chagrin, it was soon clear that many women were more interested in clothing than in temperance, and when she included sewing patterns, subscriptions soared. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was quick to pick up this second hot story from Seneca Falls, and soon people around the globe were debating the merits of the “Bloomer Costume.”
Although she had not intended to create this “furor,” Bloomer wore the style for “some six or eight years.” That she stuck with it longer than Stanton is probably due to the fact that the Bloomers moved from Seneca Falls to Iowa in 1853. Practicality always has priority over fashion in frontier situations, and it therefore was not surprising that among those Stanton listed as long-term bloomer wearers were “many farmers’ wives.”
Other women’s rights leaders who experimented with the costume included Lucy Stone, the Grimké sisters, and Susan B. Anthony. For the latter women, the change was an especially daring one from the modest Quaker dress of their youth, but for all women, wearing the new style meant inviting controversy and worse. Preachers, in Gerrit Smith’s words, ran “to the Bible, not to learn the truth, but to make the Bible the minister to folly” in preaching against the garment. Using scripture such as “male and female He created them,” clergymen argued that it was sinful for a woman to dress like a man. Any outing in the new clothes became a trial. “People would stare,” Stanton said. “Some men and women make rude remarks; boys follow in crowds, or shout from behind fences.”
In the end, she and others decided to surrender their freedom of movement at least in part because the experiment was literally threatening to the men in their lives: when strangers jeered at the women, “the gentleman in attendance felt it his duty to resent the insult by showing fight.” Elizabeth Smith Miller’s husband especially suffered while trying to support his father-in-law’s visionary ideas. “No man,” Stanton said in praise of Charles Dudley Miller, “went through the ordeal with [such] coolness and dogged determination.” The cousins called on him to escort them in sophisticated places as well as on country outings, and when Washington and New York City were just as hostile to the style as rural bumpkins, the women decided the battle was not worth it. Helene Maria Weber’s prediction was wrong. Male attire was not “generally worn” within the century, let alone within the decade that she forecast. Gerrit Smith, however, would not give up. In 1855, he even refused to attend the annual women’s rights convention over this issue. He railed to his Cousin Elizabeth about women’s timidity: “I am amazed that intelligent women…see not the relation between their dress and the oppressive evils which they are striving to throw off.”
Stanton replied with equal force. She had lived with the experiment of dressing like a man, but Smith had never considered what public reaction would be if he were to adopt any aspect of female apparel. She argued that image was exactly that: a matter of style, not substance, upon which no individual rights should be based. Moreover, women had no reason “to hope that pantaloons would do for us” any more good than pants did for black men. It was not acceptance of apparel that mattered, but acceptance of ideas.
While she “fully agreed that woman is terribly cramped and crippled in her present style of dress,” this was not the battleground on which to win the war. She pointed out that New York women recently had achieved an emancipating property law, something far more important than a fashion victory. “Depend on it,” Stanton wrote, “when men and women…think less of sex and more of mind, we shall all lead…higher lives.”
Smith did not let the issue rest with his cousin; he wrote an article on the subject that Frederick Douglass published in his reform newspaper. When Frances Dana Gage read it, she responded with an angry letter to the editor:
This article, though addressed to Mrs. Stanton, is an attack upon every one engaged in the cause…. He has made the whole battle-ground of the Woman’s Rights Movement her dress. We must own ourselves under the law first, own our bodies, our earnings, our genius, and our consciences; then we will turn to the lesser matter of what shall be the garniture of the body.
Gage, Stanton, and others made a reasoned case for a pragmatic solution to their problem, and most women agreed. They logically concluded that the political battle was both more important than the social one, and that it was more likely to be won if women were not engaged in a war on two fronts. A few women, however, ignored both the movement’s leadership and the derisive jeers of scoffers to continue to wear the garment.
Perhaps the most dedicated and successful was Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck. She adopted pants earlier than the more famous Elizabeth Smith Miller. Late in life, she was openly resentful
