‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

Abstract

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.