Happy Birthday to editor, activist, and reformer Amelia Jenks Bloomer (b. May 27, 1818, in Homer, NY), who helped create and operate the first American newspaper produced specifically by women for women: The Lily. As she later wrote, “The Lily was the first paper published devoted to the interests of woman and, so far as I know, the first one owned, edited, and published by a woman. It was a novel thing for me to do in those days and I was little fitted for it, but the force of circumstances led me into it and strength was given me to carry it through. It was a needed instrumentality to spread abroad the truth of the new gospel to woman, and I could not withhold my hand to stay the work I had begun. I saw not the end from the beginning and little dreamed whereto my proposition to the society would lead me.” She used its pages to build support for her most enthusiastic social reform cause, which was the temperance movement. She proclaimed: “Like the beautiful flower from which it derives its name, we shall strive to make the Lily the emblem of ‘sweetness and purity’; and may heaven smile upon our attempt to advocate the great cause of Temperance reform!”
Citations: D. C. Bloomer and Amelia Jenks Bloomer, Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer (Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1895), 39-45, https://archive.org/details/lifeandwritingso028876mbp; “Amelia Bloomer,” in A Woman of the Century, eds. Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore (Chicago: Charles Wells Noulton, 1893), 99, https://books.google.com/books?id=zXEEAAAAYAAJ.
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