Life and writings of Amelia Bloomer

by D. C. Bloomer

A life spent in satisfying the pleasures of sense alone leaves nothing of value to the ‘pilgrims of night,’ for it passes away like a shadow and is gone. The greatest heritage that can come to the children of men—an inheritance that they should administer jealously—is a good name. As to other things we can carry nothing out of this world, but good character, like the ancient embalming, forever preserves a good name.

The ‘name’ which wisdom here mentions is that which has acquirement of reputation. This is suggested by the second member of the text. The old application would have limited it to one who had won fame. Evidently, reputation is to be the outcome of character just as the perfume is associated with the nard. The things in comparison are the good name which all delight to honor, and the fragrant odor of the good, i. e. precious, ointment which all enjoy.

But more than this. Names of the great and good have a diffusive power, subtly and incisively invading our spirits as their golden deeds are told off and become signs to the world that earth has souls of heroic mould. Then we are athrill with emotion as our souls thus catch better insight of humanity. The correspondence is in opening the box of delicate, pure and costly ointment, the odor thereof filling the house.

How comes it that the day of death is better than the day of birth? Solomon may have meant that life’s vexations, toils, temptations and trials were thus at an end. This is the justifying consolation that we give when our fellows depart hence and are no more seen. The passing hence is undoubtedly merciful relief in many instances. But life’s issues are varied and diverse, and to most of us life, in its purely temporal aspect, is the sweetest and closest companion of thought. There are but few to receive Solomon’s words. Possibly, they are designed for the few. At an earlier stage of his life he would not have written them. They came out of his experience. He may have been touched by a gloom of apprehension which sprung from ignorance, an ignorance that was done away in Christ our Lord. That life does not cease absolutely is knowledge which Christ’s religion has fixed in human minds. It is true that there is as yet no test of experience, save that I point you to Jesus Christ the Great Exemplar and those recorded cases who were subjects of his power. In the spirit’s return to God, the ancients did not know that to die is gain.

In view of acquirements attained from a well ordered and well spent life, may there not be a sense in which the day of death is better? As the three score and ten years come on, our minds contrast origin and decline, infancy and age. What prodigious issues are involved! The advances of time disclose two pathways, well worn and leading up to these issues. In moral aspect they bear the names of good and evil. Yet they are not so absolutely distinct as to be two separate paths. Rather, to the eye of discernment, the individual walks in two planes, the subject of two kingdoms. God, in His goodness and mercy, furnished a guideboard for the journey of life, and prophetic of the parting of the ways: Reject the evil; choose the good. Behold the key to the good name that is better than precious ointment!

Such was the high animating principle that guided Amelia Jenks Bloomer through her womanhood. Born in Homer, New York, May 27, 1818, she removed from her native place at an early age, and after a residence in two other villages in the same state, during which her life passed through girlhood to young womanhood, she finally came to Seneca County. She was little aware of the destiny that awaited her, and of the probability that the precincts of her new dwelling place were to become the theatre of events in which she would play the part of leading character.

On her mother’s side she inherited a trend toward an earnest and positive religious bent. This was supplemented by the mother-love instilling into the child those principles of belief in things supreme which become a part of moral fibre and the basis for action. The one avenue of woman’s employment from time immemorial, the public school, she seems to have eschewed. This may have been owing to possession of talents for larger and higher educational function; talents which found successful trial in a happy and peculiar relation of governess in a family with three children.

This relation was terminated for another and more sacred bond, she being joined in marriage the twenty-second year of her age. Her married life began at Seneca Falls, New York, where was Mr. Bloomer’s home.

In the beginning of the decade of years which are known as the ‘forties,’ there were gathering forces of a distinctively moral movement which had for its object the regeneration of society. Re-proclamation of an old truth in new form took aggressive phase of agitation against the evils of intemperance with a view to lessen them. The instrument employed was the ever truthful and laudable agency of moral suasion. In due time there came into the purview of such as were enlisted heart and soul in this noble effort, the additional agency of suppression by means of legal enactment. This first and new demonstration gathered momentum until 1856, when it seems to have spent its force in electing Myron A. Clark, of Canandaigua, to the governorship of New York.

A glance at the early endeavors which led to the upheaval of society and had a widespread effect for good, enables us to see the sway of the agitation in that part of the state where dwelt the honorable subject of this memorial. The movement had taken form in the concrete by virtue of an organization named the Washingtonian Society. To the influences of this society we are indebted, indirectly at least, for the new firmament which spread above this land in woman’s emancipation, and for its bright peculiar star, Amelia Bloomer.