Sarah George Bagley

• Sarah G. Bagley
• Born: April 29, 1806
• Died: c.

Textile mill operative and labor reformer, was born in Candia, New Hampshire, the daughter of Nathan Bagley and Rhoda (Witham) Bagley. Granddaughter of two Revolutionary War veterans, Bagley descended from generations of New England yeoman farmers. The third of five children, she spent her childhood on family farms in Candia and Gilford, New Hampshire, and received a common-school education. By 1827, the family moved to the village of Meredith Bridge (now Laconia), New Hampshire, where Nathan Bagley was an incorporator of the Strafford Cotton Mill Company in 1833. Few facts from this period document Sarah Bagley’s activities, but given her father’s business connections, she may have worked in one of the small cotton mills of Meredith Bridge.

Women textile mill operatives, recruited from the farms and hill towns of New England, accounted for a substantial proportion of the early nineteenth-century industrial work force. They came to Lowell, Massachusetts, and other factory towns to work and participate in the more active social and cultural life these towns offered. Beginning in 1837, Sarah Bagley was employed as a weaver in the Hamilton Company’s mills at Lowell. She rose to prominence as a labor leader and reformer during the Ten Hours movement of the 1840s.

Before becoming involved in labor reform, Bagley wrote for The Lowell Offering, a literary magazine produced by mill women. By 1845, however, she denounced the Offering for being controlled by the manufacturing interests, and she served as an editor of the Voice of Industry, the weekly newspaper of the New England Workingmen’s Association (NEWA), after the paper’s relocation in Lowell in October 1845.

Such a transformation was not uncommon among mill workers of the period, but Bagley’s speaking and organizing ability led her to play an important role within the reform movement. Her position as an officer in the NEWA, the Union of Associationists, and other male-dominated groups, as well as that of editor of the Voice of Industry, gave her power and recognition in the New England labor movement.

As first president of the Lowell-based Female Labor Reform Association (FLRA), founded in 1844, Bagley organized several other chapters among the mill towns of New England. Although employed as an operative in February 1845 when she testified before the Massachusetts legislature’s special committee on the hours of labor, shortly thereafter Bagley must have left the mill. During 1845, she became more involved in labor reform activities. She attended numerous labor conventions in that year, speaking at a July 4 meeting on operatives’ rights and ..heir vindication in support of the Ten Hours movement:

A Convention of working men and women of New England was holden on the 4th inst. at Woburn in a beautiful grove. ... Several men spoke, and then Miss S. G. Bagley of Lowell, a lady of superior talents and accomplishments, whose refined and delicate feelings gave a thrilling power to her language and spellbound this large auditory.... She took her seat amidst the loud and unanimous huzzahs of the deep-moved throng. (Voice of Industry, 10 July 1845)

The FLRA had a regular column in the Voice, often contributed by Sarah G. Bagley as president. She also wrote a series of editorials on “The Ten Hour System and Its Advocates,” and served as editor in chief for several issues in 1846.

Through the Voice and the FLRA, Bagley and her colleagues reached working women throughout New England. The strength of the female commitment to the movement was evident by 1846, when the type and press of the Voice became the property of the FLRA and Sarah Bagley herself was taxed as their owner.

Climena Butler Bagley, worked as a dressmaker in partnership with and in 1846 as superintendent of the telegraph office in Lowell. She was the first woman to hold such a position in the United States.

Her labor movement duties and journalism did not cease, however. In the fall of 1846, Bagley reported to the Vox Populi, a liberal Lowell newspaper, on her visit to the Massachusetts State Prison, commenting that the inmates had recourse to a good library, and “what is better, they have time to read. They work four hours less per day than the operatives of Lowell.” Earlier that autumn she had visited the New Hampshire State Prison, remarking in a letter to the Voice of Industry that a handsome forger there, had he made “a more judicious selection for the practice of rascality,” would have passed as a mill owner, an Appleton or a Lawrence, “a man of wealth ... respected without regard to the means by which it was procured.” Reporting to her readers on prison reform was the ostensible reason for these visits, but certain aspects of prison life, such as working hours, provided provocative comparisons with factory conditions for furtherance of the Ten Hours cause, and point up the commonality of reform issues in this period.

Bagley’s writing expressed a consciousness of the need for reform at all levels of society. Indeed, many of the men and women active in the labor movement participated in other reformist causes as well, such as abolition of slavery and an end to capital punishment. Sarah Bagley served as vice president of the Lowell Union of Associationists, the local chapter of a Utopian socialist group formed in response to the writing of Fourier. Bagley’s last letter to the Voice, dated September 23, 1846, was written from Boston when she attended the convention of the American Union of Associationists as the delegate from Lowell. By the end of 1846, Bagley faded from the Lowell scene. She made no recorded appearance in 1847. Ill health was probably the cause of her retirement, but during her absence, the FLRA lost its commitment to labor reform, and Ten Hours petition activity subsided.

In April 1848 Sarah Bagley returned to the weave room of the Hamilton Company and worked for nearly five months. Her reversion clearly demonstrates the rapid decline of the Ten Hours movement after 1846. In two short years, the most outspoken adversary of the corporation system was forced to return to the mill.

Bagley’s departure from Lowell in September 1848, due to her father’s death in New Hampshire, marks the end of written evidence about her life. No record has yet come to light documenting her death or deeds after this point.

Sarah G. Bagley was a pivotal figure, representing the entry of women into the industrial work force in the United States, their attempts to join with men in the labor reform movement of the 1840s, and the ultimate failure of women’s influence without a political power base. Her legacy of writing on labor reform and her activity on behalf of the Ten Hours movement identify her importance in the study of a period fraught with change and struggle for the rights of working people throughout the industrialized northeast.

Bagley’s two signed pieces written for The Lowell Offering, “Tales of Factory Life, No. 1” and “Tales of Factory Life, No. 2, The Orphan Sisters,” both originally appeared in Vol. I (1841) and are reprinted in B. Eisler, The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women 1840-1845 (1977, 1980). Her editorials and columns for the Voice of Industry are reprinted in P. Foner, ed., The Factory Girls (1977).

Biographical sketches have appeared in Biographical Dictionary of American Labor Leaders (1974), Notable American Women (1971), and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930). M. Stern We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth Century America (1963) emphasizes the primacy of Bagley’s career. The most complete account of her life is H. Wright “Sarah G. Bagley: A Biographical Note,” Labor History, vol. 20, no. 3 (1979).