Sara Catterall

The State Historical Society of Iowa Board of Trustees has selected Amelia Bloomer: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon to receive the 2026 Certificate of Merit for the Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award.  “This award recognizes the author of the most significant book published about Iowa History during the previous calendar year. The board may give one award annually, along with one Certificate…

For Women’s History Month, I’ve been asked to talk in public about my biography of Amelia Bloomer, the bloomers, and why and how we remember history. I’ve talked to a college class, a podcast, two chapters of the League of Women Voters, and I’ve got a free online event coming up for the Alice Paul Center for Gender Justice in a couple of weeks. On Sunday I gave a sermon at the First Unitarian…

Before I spent so much time with Amelia Bloomer and her friends, I thought Western women didn’t start cutting their hair until the 1920s. But when I started to research the period when Bloomer, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and a whole crowd of women in Seneca Falls started to experiment with reform dress, I was startled to learn from Bloomer’s newspaper, The Lily, that not only were many women of…

The stifling conformity of traditional small town life is a familiar concept, and probably overdone. Conformity and fear of conflict are human qualities that follow most of us into city life as well. Opportunities for open individuality may be more abundant in a city but the desire for security, acceptance, and status are everywhere. Conflict frightens most of us, and few people are genuinely…

As my mother used to say. “Moms” have been all over the news this past week, thanks to the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, and the participation of straight white women in resisting the ICE occupation there. Heather Cox Richardson wrote in a recent newsletter: “On Sunday, David Marcus of Fox News warned that “organized gangs of wine moms” are using “Antifa tactics to harass and impede…

Don’t let yourself be isolated. The best antidote to feeling frightened and alone, is other people. Very much including people you don’t know well. Regular gatherings are key. Something where you can work and talk with people, including some you wouldn’t normally work or socialize with, and learn more about each other, and what’s going on around you. Book clubs, knitting groups, game nights,…

I’ve had a writing block for a few weeks on writing these blog posts, caught up in various necessary preoccupations. I’m now working to reset myself with the holidays. This morning I woke up very early and saw that snow was falling. I read, and napped on the couch, and woke up a few times; to the sound of the plow going by, to the sounds of my physicist getting up with the dog. We had coffee by…

Some thoughts on creeping misinformation for the end of Native American Heritage Month: I first encountered the idea that the women’s rights movement in the USA was founded on admiration for the greater rights of Native women when I started to research Amelia Bloomer. The late independent scholar Sally Roesch Wagner may have been the original modern source for this idea. She acquired a…

My sister just shared this CNN article with me: A witch in trousers? Weird It discusses the costume design for Cynthia Erivo’s character Elphaba in Wicked: For Good, which she and I and my physicist and our 3 Gen Z are all going to see right after Thanksgiving. It’s a smart design choice! Making Elphaba Black was the strongest choice. The second act trousers are an excellent accent mark.…

This time last year, the out of town nonprofit that ran the homeless shelter in my county abandoned it with little warning, leaving my Central NY college town of 30K without one, just as it started to snow. The county, which has been outsourcing that service for a very long time, hastily pulled together a Code Blue shelter in an empty bank, and reached out to nonprofits in the area to help…

Back in March, Madeleine Dallmeyer of Eschata Film sent a crew to interview me all day in various locations for an episode of the Arte Channel show, “Is It True That…?” on the history of gender and trousers. I just noticed it’s up on Youtube now! I love how the episode turned out. It’s a great pop history show in general, nice mix of fun and expertise.

Coal smoke, horse manure, body odor, and plain old dirt get plenty of attention in modern stories set in the past, but it was not until I read Amelia Bloomer’s paper, The Lily that I realized how much tobacco spit was everywhere. I knew about spittoons of course. They were still a grandpa joke when I was a kid in the 1970s, often in old cartoons and movies. But I didn’t realize that part of the…

In pursuit of a new biographical subject for another, related, book, I drove a few hours to a pretty little elite liberal arts college with a significant archive of the person’s papers. I have a new document scanner so I was able to be fairly efficient, scanning everything I could to read later. The finding aid on their website said the collection was “partially processed.” In this case that…

People who make all their clothes now are hobbyists, a persistent subculture. But not all that long ago, on the scale of human history, almost everything you wore would have been made by a family member, or possibly a dressmaker, fitted to your individual body. When most women made all the clothes for their families, often including the cloth, on top of feeding everyone, raising children,…

One of the women’s rights that Amelia Bloomer championed in her 1850s newspaper, The Lily, was the right to paid employment. In the 1840s when she started writing for little newspapers and founded her own, most jobs open to women were not paid anything close to a living wage, let alone enough to support dependents. The options were mostly teaching, needlework, some factory work, domestic work,…

Until she spent part of late summer in 1853 at the Glen Haven Water Cure, Amelia Bloomer was terrified of small boats. It’s unclear why, and perhaps there was no special reason. She had grown up around little rivers and on either side of Cayuga Lake, and often took the steam ferry up and down the lake from Seneca Falls to make travel connections in Ithaca. Glen Haven was a hydropathic health…

Today is the 105th anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” In 1973, this day was granted federal recognition thanks to the efforts of then NY Representative Bella Abzug, who pursued it as part of her efforts toward an Equal Rights…