Sarah George Bagley (April 19, 1806 – January 15, 1889) was an American labor leader in New England during the 1840s; an advocate of shorter workdays for factory operatives and mechanics, she campaigned to make ten hours of labor per day the maximum in Massachusetts.
Her activities in support of the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, put her in contact with a broader network of reformers in areas of women's rights, communitarianism, abolition, peace, prison reform, and health reform. Bagley and her coworkers became involved with middle-class reform activities, demonstrating the ways in which working people embraced this reform impulse as they transformed and critiqued some of its key elements. Her activities within the labor movement reveal many of the tensions that underlay relations between male and female working people as well as the constraints of gender that female activists had to overcome.
Early life
Sarah George Bagley was born April 19, 1806, in Candia, New Hampshire, to Rhoda (née Witham) and Nathan Bagley, both members of large New England families. Nathan and Rhoda farmed, sold land, and owned a small mill to support their family. She had two brothers, Thomas and Henry, and one sister, Mary Jane.
Adult life
Textile work
In 1837, at the age of 31, Bagley first appeared in Lowell, Massachusetts, working at the Hamilton Mills. She worked initially as a weaver and then as a dresser, and by 1840 she had saved enough money to make a deposit on the house which her parents and siblings were living in. Bagley was dissatisfied with working conditions however and published one of her first pieces of writing, “Pleasures of Factory Life”, in an 1840 issue of the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine written, edited, and published by working women. These "pleasures", she wrote, were like angels' visits: "few and far between."
In late November 1842, 70 weavers at the Middlesex Mills walked off their jobs, protesting the newly introduced requirement to tend two looms instead of one. The workers were fired and blacklisted, and shortly afterwards, Bagley left the Hamilton Mills and went to work for Middlesex (some historians has described this action as "strike breaking"). Between 1842 and 1844, over 1,000 textile workers left Lowell as a result of wage cuts and stretch-outs due to an economic recession. In March 1844, under improved economic conditions, the textile corporations raised the wages of male – but not female – textile workers to the 1842 levels.
Labor activism
In December 1844, Bagley along with five other women met in Anti-Slavery Hall in downtown Lowell and formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Its aim was to improve health conditions and lobby for a ten-hour day; at that time, women worked from 12 to 14 hours a day in the Lowell textile mills. As president, Bagley saw the LFLRA grow to nearly 600 members, with branches in Waltham, Fall River, Manchester, Dover and Nashua.
With the encouragement and assistance of French feminist and Fourierist Angelique Perrine LePetit Martin (mother of American painter Lilly Martin Spencer), the LFLRA purchased a printing press and published their own labor newspaper, The Voice of Industry, for which Bagley frequently contributed articles and edited a women's column.
In 1845, Bagley and the LFLRA members gathered names of textile workers on petitions sent to the Massachusetts Legislature, demanding a ten-hour workday. As a result of dozens of petitions totalling over 2,100 signatures, a state legislature held hearings to investigate the conditions of labor in the manufacturing corporations. Bagley and others testified to the long hours and unhealthy working conditions in the mills. The committee, led by Representative William Schouler, reported that the legislature did not have the power to determine hours of work and that the ten-hour day must be decided between the corporations and the textile worker. In response, they campaigned to defeat Representative Schouler in the next election.
Bagley and the LFLRA continued sending petitions to the state legislature for a ten-hour day; they gathered over 10,000 names from throughout Massachusetts, more than 2,000 of which were from working women and men of Lowell. Again hearings were held to investigate working conditions, and again the Massachusetts Legislature refused to take action. However, labor and political pressure on the Lowell textile corporations was so great that in 1847 the mills shortened the workday by 30 minutes. As the labor reform movement persisted the Lowell textile companies again reduced the hours of labor to eleven in 1853 and ten in 1874.