Where does Bagley fit?

A few thoughts (without any particular claim to coherence) on Sarah Bagley as I read further into her own words and the literature on women's rhetoric:

1) Is it more historically and textually accurate to look at Bagley as primarily a labor activist? That, consciously or unconsciously, agitating for labor was a priori to women's rights agitation (i.e., to what extent would the vote have been useful if women laborers had no time in which to exercise it?) However, this is not to say that her gender was absented (in fact, it might have found expression through absence) from her rhetoric, rather it played into a rights talk that strategically emphasized labor rights over women's rights. Perhaps Bagley had to choose (I use this word very, very tentatively) which to emphasize, and she chose the former. But, if she strategically chose the former, How? Why?

2) Building off point #1, to what extent does Bagley fit into a line of women that includes Mother Jones and Emma Goldman, rather than Angelina Grimke, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony?

3) There appears to be a dialectical tension between Bagley as labor reformer and Bagley as woman. How does this compare to women who agitated primarily for rights other than women's rights? This poses an interesting problem: One the one hand, such a woman would be a de facto feminist by virtue of her existence and rhetorical style (for breaking gender norms, speaking on behalf of herself and class, advocating in public). But on the other hand, such a woman would be anti-feminist based on substantive content (women as lowly servants to men in their joint(?) goals).

4) Perhaps these three points lead to an additional reason, aside from a possible class bias, that resulted in the exclusion of Bagley from the women's rhetoric canon. Was her contradictory position as lower-class, laborer and woman responsible for her exclusion? In this case, I'm wondering if something along the lines of W.E.B. Du Bois' double consciousness is at work here? (And in what ways that phenomenon has lead to the exclusion of other women from the feminist canon, most notably non-white women--see especially bell hooks).

5) Most controversially: To what extent has the study of women's rhetoric suffered from the constraints of canonization--a process that has virtually eliminated the presence of Sarah Bagley? With few exceptions, does Bagley's rhetoric demonstrate how class has been suppressed by historical and contemporary understandings of feminist rhetoric? Are we being tyrannized by the canon? Or is it just a blind spot?

Any thoughts?

Walter Benjamin on Writing

A little inspiration from Walter Benjamin as the semester becomes more and more writing intensive. These days I find myself thinking about #6. I always find #7 oddly encouraging.

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses

1. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

2. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

3. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

4. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

5. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

6. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

7. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

8. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

9. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.

10. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

11. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

12. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

13. The work is the death mask of its conception.

Sarah G. Bagley on Religion and the Laboring Class

"...They attend church as much--nay more than could be expected, under all the circumstances. If they should not go to church at all, they would be quite excusable, and if at the day of retribution the operatives of our country should be found guilty of a want of religious devotion, how much more will the teachers of religion have need of repentance and forgiveness for their sanction of the system which disqualifies them to attend church and cultivate the spirit of the gospel.

"It will be said, that we are infidel to offer an apology for a neglect to attend church? We are aware that the operatives are rapidly verging to infidelity to the religion that lays heavy burdens upon their shoulders, that it will not remove with one of its fingers. Is it strange that the operatives should stay away from the churches where they see the men filling the 'chief seats,' who are taking every means to grind them into the very dust, and have no sympathy with them, and look upon them only as inanimate machines, made to subserve their interests?"

Voice of Industry, May 6, 1846

Something interesting is going on here. Many reform movements founded and organized by 19th century women have found their rallying call in/through religion, yet in the quote above Bagley insists that religion is in some way anathema (too strong a word?) to the interests of the laboring classes. In fact, instead of using religion to call for labor reform, she appears to be using the condition of labor to call for religious reform.

Any thoughts?

Historical Context – Sarah Bagley and Labor Reform

Writing in 1845, Reverend Henry A. Miles described the working conditions of the female Lowell Factory laborers. “From the boarding-houses to the mills are laid side-walks of brick and stone, for the comfort of the operatives in wet and muddy walking,” says Miles. “The mills themselves are kept of uniform temperature, being heated in cold weather either by steam, or by hot-air furnaces. The rooms are lofty, are well ventilated, and are kept as free from dust as is possible, while the machinery is carefully boxed, or otherwise secured against accidents”.[1] However, at one point in his description, Miles is forced to confront some of the apparently negative descriptions of factory life that were then circulating. After appropriately detailing some of the seeming objections to his glowing report, Miles can only conclude:

A walk through our mills must convince one, by the generally healthy and robust appearance of the girls, that their condition is not inferior, in this respect, to other working classes of their sex. Certainly, if multitudes of them went home to sicken and die, equal multitudes of their sisters and neighbors would not be very eager to take the fatal stations which were deserted. The united testimony of these girls themselves, of the matrons of their boarding-houses, and of the physicians of the city, can be reconciled with only one conclusion, and that only the prejudiced and designing will resist.[2]

It is not unlikely that Miles had in mind someone much like, if not particularly, Sarah G. Bagley. President and founding member of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, as well as the first female labor activist, Bagley’s perceptions of life in the mills was much different.[3] Perhaps she, too, had someone like Miles in mind when she said:

There is not a man in [the] community who would not blush to say in view of the physical organization of the female operative, that the laws of health are necessarily and unavoidably violated by them every day, in various ways. The long hours of labor, the short time allowed for meals, and the large number who occupy the sleeping and sitting apartments, all go to prove that physical inability must be the result. There is no time or accommodation for bathing in their sleeping apartments, a practice that has been deemed as necessary to health, as food or sleep, by the physiologists of our day. With but a few moments of time allowed to take their food, which is swallowed without being half masticated, and the pores of the skin being encrusted, or nearly so with cotton dust, it is not strange that so many of their number fall a prey to consumption, and find an early grave.[4]

From these accounts emerge two very different versions of the life of the women that have come to be known as the Lowell Mill Girls. Both accounts are indicative of a battle in Lowell over the definition of the conditions and nature of the woman workers who labored in the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. However, due to Lowell’s prominence in the factory scene at large, as well as the nascent labor reform movement that extended from Lowell into other New England states, these local disputes over the nature of workers in Lowell come to participate in a much larger dispute over the nature of labor reform generally. Lowell may provide the particular entrance into this rhetoric of reform, but the rhetoric in turn speaks to a generalized battle over the place of work and women in society, a battle in which women played a key role.