"The Lily was the first paper published devoted to the interests of woman and as far as I know, the first one owned, edited, and published by a woman... It was a needed instrumentality to spread abroad the truth of the new gospel to women, and I could not withhold my hand to stay the work I had begun... "-Amelia Bloomer

  On January 1, 1849, the first issue of The Lily was published. It began with a circulation of about two or three hundred and within a year, increased to between six to eight hundred. In four years, The Lily reached six thousand.
  The Lily was owned and created by Amelia Jenks Bloomer. She was born, Amelia Jenks, in Homer, New York on May 27, 1818. After her education, she began teaching at public schools and later became a private tutor. In 1840, she married Dexter Bloomer, an attorney (and later a newspaper editor) from Seneca Falls, New York.
  In Seneca Falls, in 1848, a conference was held on the topic of women's temperance. This meeting was the first conference in America on women's rights and was established by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. The women formed a paper entitled The Declaration of Sentiments and based it on The Declaration of Independence. It called for women to organize and to stand up for their rights. Amelia Bloomer, at first, was slow to advocate temperance and women's rights, but by 1853, she was furthering the cause.
  In the year, 1850, a few women in Amelia's town began wearing a new type of outfit that consisted of short skirts with trousers underneath. Many thought the clothes scandalous, since it was thought that women's legs should not be seen. But Amelia thought the outfits were wonderful, giving great freedom for movement. She began to wear the outfit and also advocated and pictured it in her paper. This led to the outfit being dubbed the name "Bloomers."
  The Lily was a monthly paper and cost fifty cents a year. It was first devoted to "temperance and literature1" and was later stated to be devoted to the "Emancipation of woman from Intemperance, Injustice, Prejudice, and Bigotry1," finally it became a paper simply for equality for women. Amelia Bloomer published The Lily from a printing shop in Seneca Falls until 1854, when her husband was offered a newspaper job in Ohio. Amelia went with him and published The Lily in the same shop as Dexter's weekly. After a year went by, they moved to a frontier town in Iowa, where there were no modern printing presses and so Amelia sold The Lily to Mary Birdsall of Indiana.
  The Lily consisted of articles written by Amelia Bloomer herself and also by her readers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Grey Swisshelm. The Lily was important because it served as a "record of the ways in which early feminists used language to shape effective appeals and persuasive arguments, to raise feminist consciousness, and to provide model roles for feminist activists1." The paper also "reaffirmed readers as 'true' women in the sense of being moral, pious, and concerned with the domestic tranquility of home and family1." The femininity of the paper helped women expand their activity in their homes and communities. It basically helped facilitate a change in the roles of women.