Even in her own lifetime Amelia Bloomer was best known for wearing, as well as editorially defending and popularizing, "bifurcated trowsers"; although the costume was not her own invention, she was deluged with requests for patterns for and information about the pantaloons soon internationally known as "bloomers." But Bloomer made much more substantial contributions to both the nineteenth-century temperance and woman suffrage movements as editor and publisher of the Lily. Although the Lily was initially established as a temperance organ, Bloomer included articles on woman's rights from the outset, and the Lily can be considered the first American woman suffrage periodical.

The youngest child of Ananias Jenks, a clothier, and Lucy Jenks. Amelia Jenks was born in 1818 in Homer, New York, where she attended the district school. Her earliest memory was of playing a childish prank on some Indians who had come to sell her father a knife...