General fiction

A Study in Bloomers, Or, the Model New Woman - A Novel

by George Franklin Hall

270 pages · First published 2011

A young woman determined to embody the turn-of-the-century ideal of the independent “New Woman” embraces education, reform, unconventional dress, and opinions that unsettle more traditional people around her. Her enthusiasm for bloomers and modern ideas repeatedly collides with courtship, social expectations, and the practical complications of living according to a theory. George Franklin Hall uses comic misunderstandings and romantic complications to explore contemporary debates about women’s changing roles. The result is an early-twentieth-century social comedy whose heroine’s experiments with independence make fashion only the most visible part of a larger argument about freedom.