BLOOMERS!
by Rhoda Blumberg & illustrated by Mary Morgan
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)