Introduction

When Amelia Bloomer began editing and publishing a temperance and woman’s rights periodical in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1849, she was in a place and time where numerous others had been making radical analyses of women’s condition. Just the year before, in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had called the first woman’s rights convention. Stanton, Bloomer and many of the other women involved in initiating the woman’s rights movement had also been involved in anti-slavery, women’s health, temperance, poverty and other social issues, each of which had directly or indirectly raised issues of women’s inequality.