Sarah Bagley (1806-?)

Sources

Labor leader

Lowell Girl. Like thousands of Francis Cabot Lowell’s “mill girls,” Sarah Bagley grew up in rural New England. Born into a New Hampshire farm family, Sarah left home at twenty-one to become a mill operative in the Hamilton Manufacturing Company mill in Lowell, Massachusetts. In 1837 Lowell still retained something of the original optimistic spirit with which Francis Cabot Lowell had set out to create an ideal factory town for the young republic.

Changes. Bagley seemed to thrive in the surroundings. She organized an after-work school and wrote articles for the company newspaper, Lowell Offering, titled “Pleasures of Factory Life.” But conditions were beginning to change. A vast expansion in the number and size of Lowell’s textile mills (as well as similar mills throughout the region) had begun to saturate the market for cheap cotton goods, driving down prices. The managers of the Lowell mills looked for ways to reduce their production costs and maintain profits. They required mill workers to tend many more spindles or looms than they were originally assigned and steadily increased the speed of the machines, making an already difficult job even more trying. Moreover, while these changes yielded sharp productivity gains and stable profits for the mill owners, the mill workers themselves suffered a decreases in pay.

Resistance. In response to these changes Bagley wrote scathing articles in the Lowell Offering condemning the mill owners for sacrificing the health of female operatives in mills filled with cotton dust, smoky lamps, and raucous machinery for the sake of profits. Soon the paper refused to accept any more articles from Bagley, who turned instead to collecting signatures for a petition asking the Massachusetts state legislature to investigate conditions at the mills and pass a bill reducing the hours of daily labor to ten. Faced with two thousand signers, the legislature invited eight textile workers to testify but refused to pass a ten-hour bill, citing the danger such legislation might pose to the competitiveness of Massachusetts industry. A second petition drive yielded four thousand signatures and another committee hearing, with the same result.

LFLRA. Angered by this response, Bagley and a dozen fellow workers organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) in January 1845. The LFLRA lobbied for a ten-hour day and improvements in working conditions, asking fellow workingwomen to “throw off the shackles” of oppression and work “for reform in the present system of labor.” “For the last half century,” Bagley argued, “it has been deemed a violation of woman’s sphere to appear before the public as a speaker, but when our rights are trampled upon and we appeal in vain to legislators, what shall we do but appeal to the people.” The LFLRA joined forces with regional labor-reform groups such as the New England Workingmen’s Association (of which Bagley became a vice president), and Bagley took to touring the mill districts of New England to rouse reform sentiment and organize local Female Labor Reform Associations (FLRAs).

Tactics. Bagley’s LFLRA and its sister organizations did not advocate strikes or walkouts, and their tactics to increases membership and strength included fund-raising picnics and health benefits for dues-paying members, Still, the mill owners considered them a threat. Some mill towns (under pressure from the owners) refused to open city halls for FLRA meetings, and organizers such as Bagley were constantly in danger of being fired or put on the infamous blacklist (labeled as a radical and denied employment at any of the mills). These threats, and genuine disagreement with the LFLRA’s views, kept many workers from joining the movement (which continued to grow none theless), but they only further radicalized Bagley herself. In the organization’s newspaper, The Voice of Industry, Bagley started a column that she promised would be “devoted to woman’s thought,” and which “will also defend woman’s rights, and while it contends for physical improvement, it will not forget that she is a social, moral and religious being. It will not be neutral because it is female, but it will claim to be heard on all subjects that effect her intelligence, social or religious condition.” What had been an organization dedicated to improving working conditions and shortening the workday became a movement with a much more wide-ranging reform agenda, one that demanded a new voice and a new recognition for workingwomen.

Last Chapter. When mill owners in the late 1840s and 1850s began hiring large numbers of poor Irish immigrant men, women, and children (who could ill afford to be as confrontational as the LFLRA), the reform movement faltered. Bagley continued to serve in the labor-reform cause and became interested as well in the socialist utopianism of Charles Fourier. But little is known of her later life. In 1847 she surrendered the presidency of the LFLRA to Mary Emerson and became superintendent of the Lowell Telegraph Office. The next year found her back at the mills, but the end of her life remains hidden in obscurity.

Sources

Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979);

Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From the First Trade Unions to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1982).