Lead: Leadership in one field often emerges from convictions in another. Amelia Jenks Bloomer began by advocating temperance, but her vision came to include the wider rights denied women.
Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.
Content: Amelia Jenks was born in 1818 the daughter of a clothier. Despite a meager formal education, she was a prodigious learner and evolved into an excellent writer. Marriage in 1840 to Dexter Bloomer, an attorney and the editor of the County Courier in their hometown of Seneca Falls, New York, opened new opportunities for publication. He encouraged her to write on a variety of subjects. In 1848 she attended, but did not participate in the Seneca Falls Convention, the first national woman’s rights gathering. Four months later she launched The Lilly, a monthly women’s journal that at first focused primarily on temperance but at the urging of her Seneca Falls neighbor Elizabeth Cady Stanton, increasingly became a forum for women’s rights.
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