Labor activism, organizing, and battles between owners of machines and the people who operated them have been going on ever since industrial machinery has existed. Sarah George Bagley was born in New Hampshire, in the US, on April 19,1806, and was a labor leader during the 1840s.
Bagley was born in a rural household; the family farmed and operated a small mill. She was one of four siblings, and by all reports had a perfectly normal childhood. When she was 31, though, she moved to Lowell, Massachusetts to work in the Hamilton Textile Mill. She was able to support herself, and even save some money, but was not pleased with the working conditions in that mill, not to mention the others in the local area (there were a lot of textile mills in Lowell, thanks to its location on a river — most of the buildings are still there, and many are now apartments and condominiums). Bagley published her first article, Pleasures of Factory Life, in the Lowell Offering magazine in 1840. She may have been an unrecognized pioneer in sarcastic titling; there weren’t really any “pleasures.”
Two years later, 70 workers at another Lowell sweatshop (er, that is, factory), the Middlesex Mill, walked off the job to protest the doubling of their work without any rise in pay. They were fired and blacklisted throughout Lowell — an early instance of strike breaking. Bagley, though, quit her job at the Hamilton mill and went to work at Middlesex (the reasons are not entirely clear). Over the next two years, the economy in Lowell declined and in the mills, workdays were extended and wages were cut. Many workers left the city. Then in 1844, when sales improved, the companies raised wages again — but only for men, not women.
That was a turning point; Bagley and five other women formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. It pretty quickly grew to 600 members and spawned similar organizations in other mill towns in the region. The association lobbied for the workday to be reduced from 14 hours to 10. To spread their ideas, they bought a printing press and started publishing The Voice of Industry newsletter, with Bagley as a writer and columnist.
The association managed to gather petitions with thousands of signatures, and presented their case to the Massachusetts State Legislature. A committee of state representatives told them the legislature couldn’t (or wouldn’t) rule on work hours, and it was between the workers and the companies. So their next step was to defeat the chairman of that committee in the next election. They kept up the political pressure, and although the legislature continued to refuse to help, the companies did shorten the workday in 1847. By 30 whole minutes. Bagley and her organization didn’t let up, though, and finally got the workday reduced to ten hours in 1874. It only took thirty years.
Bagley had acquired a following by then, thanks to her writing and activism, and also campaigned for election reform (at the time you had to own land to be able to vote), and for a peace movement that had arisen in response to the Mexican-American War (the US had unilaterally declared that Texas was theirs, no longer part of Mexico, and then proceeded to invade Mexico. If this reminds you of Russia and Ukraine, well, yup, same thing). She followed that up by writing about health care, prison reform, and women’s rights. She no longer worked in a mill by that time, but wrote and traveled throughout the region delivering lectures.
She got married relatively late, when she was 44. At that point, she and her husband moved to Albany, New York, and became homeopathic physicians. At that time, homeopathic care meant you used herbs and medicines for treatment instead of what “mainstream” doctors did, which was mostly bleeding patients. They provided care to the poor for free. Bagley’s husband was about ten years older than she, and died in 1871. Bagley lived another 20 years, and died in Philadelphia at 82. They never had children, and there are no known images of Sarah Bagley. A lot of her writing survives, though, and you can read it at the website ofThe Voice of Industry.
