Born in Homer, New York, on May 27, 1818, Amelia Jenks was educated in a local school and for several years thereafter taught school in Clyde and tutored pupils privately in Waterloo, New York. In April 1840 she married Dexter C. Bloomer, a Quaker newspaper editor of Seneca County, through whom she became interested in public affairs. She began contributing articles to newspapers on various topics and was an early and staunch member of the local ladies╒ Temperance Society. Bloomer attended but took no part in the Seneca Falls convention organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in 1848. In January of the following year, however, she began a newspaper for women╤probably the first to be edited entirely by a woman╤The Lily: A Ladies Journal Devoted to Temperance and Literature, and opened it to women╒s-rights advocates as well as temperance reformers.
Although she was rather slow to embrace the cause of women╒s rights, by 1853 she had become quite active, making speaking appearances in New York City and elsewhere. She became involved in a dress-reform movement as well when she began appearing in public wearing full-cut pantaloons, or ╥Turkish trousers,╙ under a short skirt. She attracted considerable ridicule for appearing in the costume, which came to be called ╥bloomers.╙ Although she had not originated the costume╤among others, Fanny Kemble and Lydia Sayer (Hasbrouck) had worn it as early as 1849, and Elizabeth Smith Miller had actually introduced it to Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton early in 1851╤Bloomer╒s defense of it in The Lily spread word of it and linked her name with it indissolubly. The episode had the unfortunate effect of distracting attention from her reform efforts, but she continued to publish The Lily in Seneca Falls, where she was also deputy postmistress, and later in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, where she assisted her husband on the Western Home Visitor. In 1855 she and her husband moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and she sold the newspaper. Her interest in reform, expressed in writing and lectures, continued until her death in Council Bluffs on December 30, 1894.
