Bloomers!

Libby Miller's arrival in baggy trousers instead of skirt and petticoat sends shockwaves through Seneca Falls, and inspires Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to don them as they champion the cause of women's freedom.

A significant subject--the early struggle for women's rights--receives disappointing treatment from a Newbery Honor winner. Blumberg ( Jumbo ) chronicles Libby Miller's 1851 invention of bloomers, a loose-fitting alternative to constricting corsets and petticoats (referred to as "the female's 'cage' " and as "a 'clothes prison' "). The bloomers serve here as a symbol of--and vehicle for--the growing women's suffrage movement. But Blumberg's text is choppy and didactic, plunging readers headlong into a jumble of social issues (women's fashions, voting rights, the temperance crusade, hair-bobbing, social mores and general oppression of women). She invokes a panoply of historical figures (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Amelia Bloomer as well as Miller), but doesn't delineate their achievements. Morgan's ( Jake Bakes a Cake ) workmanlike watercolors, lacking in facial detail, tend to trivialize the book's important themes. Ages 5-10.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On seeing friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton's trousers, Amelia Bloomer ``decided that women needed freedom not only from drunken husbands but also from cumbersome, crippling clothes.'' As with any revolutionary style change, ``bloomers,'' named for the editor of a women's journal, The Lily, shocked the public. But Bloomer's readers responded enthusiastically. Liberated from long skirts and confining corsets, women could move and breathe freely; soon they found they could also speak out and, led by Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Bloomer herself, began demanding equal rights. In lively prose supported by Morgan's subtly amusing watercolors, Blumberg (Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun, 1985, Newbery Honor) tells the youngest readers how the infancy of the women's rights movement put a twist in the knickers of American history. (Picture book. 5-10) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.