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.

Sarah Bagley was one of the most vocal and influential of those women who decided to use their factory experiences to benefit labor reform. In fact, in Hannah Josephson’s landmark work on the woman factory workers of Lowell, Massachusetts, she says that Bagley “was undoubtedly the most nimble-witted, the most energetic, and the most fertile in devising schemes to advance the cause of reform.”[5] However, before delving further into what little is known of Bagley, aside from her extensive writings, it is important to consider the broader social and cultural context from which she emerged and in which she participated. To aid in the analysis of Bagley’s writings (that I don’t undertake in this blog post), I first provide a general discussion of factory work in Lowell, Massachusetts. I then briefly move into earlier, more spontaneous attempts at labor reform, followed by the Ten Hour Movement in the 1840s, of which Bagley played a significant role. I end by providing a brief biography of Bagley.

Factory work in Lowell. Studying the Mill Girls offers opportunities for understanding the relationship between labor, class, and gender. Thomas Dublin notes that it is from the Mill Girls that scholars can hope to best understand “the experiences of the first generation of American women to work outside of the home setting.”[6] Although the woman workers were initially “from the town poor rolls, orphans, and widows,” by the 1820s and 1830s, young women in general were leaving farms to enter factory work.[7] However, women at this time were not entirely new in the workforce. Gerda Lerner has noted that women worked outside of the home during the colonial periods with substantially less opposition and with substantially more economic freedom.[8] Lerner argues that the 1840s marked for men an increase in upward mobility based not on status, but rather on merit. However, the same was not true of women. In contrast to colonial times, women working outside of the home “no longer met with social approval.”[9] Though conditions were improving for men, they were getting worse for women. With the exception of nursing and teaching, women were displaced from the jobs they once held during the colonial era. Coinciding with this displacement was the rise of the factories, where owners found they could hire women for significantly less cost than hiring men.[10] Lerner argues that the New England textile mills especially precipitated women entering this particular working field due to the “respectability of the job and relatively high status of the mill girls, the patriarchal character of the model factory towns, and the temporary mobility of women workers from farm to factory and back again to farm.”[11] However, the respectability of the job was almost entirely a creation of corporate interests.

As noted in the introduction to this essay, conditions in the mills were disputed. As Philip Foner has argued, built into the American factory system was fear, perhaps even dread, of the European factories.[12] Thus, when the Boston Associates began to build factory towns, their intent was to “overcome the argument that the factory system would bring in its wake an impoverished, vice ridden, ignorant laboring class as it had in the Old World, and that this would constitute a threat to a democratic republic.”[13] The Lowell Offering, a monthly magazine edited by Harriet Farley that featured poetry, stories, and essays by the most literary-oriented and talented woman mill workers, as well as the Lyceum lectures, were perhaps founded with the aim to prevent the proletarianization of the American factory worker.[14]

Despite suggestions otherwise, there were competing worldviews as to the nature of factory work. What is known is that women worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, 309 days a year, and were given three holidays: Fast Day, 4^th of July and Thanksgiving.[15] In the winter, they worked from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, while in the summer work began at five in the morning. They were given 30-minute breaks for breakfast and lunch (or, what would have been called dinner during that time).[16] Women worked and lived in the mills, as part of the Waltham system, where the factories were fully integrated. The Lowell Offering suggested factory work was ideal and pleasurable. The corporate interests, of which the introductory account by Miles is a good representation, likewise argued for the superiority of factory conditions. However, the leading labor activists and newspapers, and the woman workers whose writings populated their pages, tell a much different story. One anonymous woman writing in the Factory Girls’ Album described “hundreds of operatives who work in our mills, are scarcely paid sufficient to board themselves, and are obliged to dress poorly, or, run in debt for their clothing. The consequence is, they become discouraged—lose confidence in themselves, and then, regardless of consequences, abandon their virtue to obtain favors.”[17] Another woman exhorted her readers to “think of girls being obliged to labor thirteen hours each working day, for a net compensation of two cents per hour, which is above the average net wages, being $1.56 per week. Two cents per hour for severe labor!”[18] Though these women were speaking much later than the renowned strikes of 1834 and 1836, their complaints were similar to the earlier labor demonstrations.

The early strikes. In 1834 and 1836 the woman factory workers “turned-out” or went on strike. Though the strikes were unsuccessful, historians have described them as significant for understanding female solidarity among the early factory workers. Dublin has noted how the structure of the work, the boarding system, and the homogeneity of the workers contributed to a sense of community that made possible those early strikes.[19] Sandra Adickes also notes that “the most meaningful part of the experience for each of the women was being, for the first time in her life, in the company of a large group of women.”[20] For these factory workers, the experience of work and sisterhood were intimately connected. Though largely unsuccessful, the strikes were perhaps influential in developing an increasing class-consciousness that would prove important for the labor agitation that would occur in the 40s. Scholars have suggested that the Ten Hour Movement was perhaps an extension of these early attempts at reform.[21]

The Ten Hour Movement. The Ten Hour Movement was the most significant source of agitation by woman labor reformers in New England. It is also where men and women united to a remarkable degree, despite the eventual failure of the movement’s goals.[22] The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was formed to work with other labor organizations, such as the New England Workingmen’s Association, to agitate for a ten-hour workday.

Despite the cooperation of women and men in the early labor movement, sex differences remained. Dublin notes that the ten-hour movement “reminded operatives that they were women workers, as opponents regularly held their femaleness against them.”[23] Unlike Philip Foner, who emphasizes class solidarity more frequently in his writing about the Mill Girls, Dublin tends to emphasize gender distinctions. Although women worked cooperatively with male labor associations, even holding high positions in some of them, their womanness provoked different rhetorical considerations, independent of whether they fought primarily for labor rights over gender rights. However, this distinction is at once too problematic because it ignores the interconnectedness of the two causes. For example, female labor organizers additionally agitated for equal pay for equal work—their labor power was intrinsically tied up with their gendered differences.[24] The association between women and labor (and class) was always conjunctive for women—their position was always dual—whereas men were laborers primarily without regard to their sex. Maleness appears to be a neutral category in the labor reform movement. In this sense, men were always only class-conscious, whereas female class-consciousness seemed to necessitate a gender consciousness. As such, many labor reformers engaged in a critique of the “cult of true womanhood.”[25] Bagley’s speech to the New England Workingman’s Association, where she describes that “in the last half a century, it has been deemed a violation of woman’s sphere to appear before the public as a speaker”[26] is one such demonstration of a woman’s dual experience as Labor Reformer and Woman.

In the beginning of her study of the Lowell Mill Girls, after listing several prominent women among the Girls, Josephson notes “it is rather as a group than as individuals that the mill girls stood out.”[27] Josephson’s concept is astute and telling of the time period—it was the 1950s—when she published her work, a time when the study of women could perhaps more easily pass muster when they were seen as a large, socially significant aggregate. However, after decades of studying the Lowell Mill Girls as a significant group for understanding early attempts at labor reform, it is time to look at them as individuals, as undoubtedly they were. This move to look at key individuals in a collective movement is especially amenable to the rhetorical critic. However, I recognize that the position entails its own set of ironies. First, to consider the individual in the relations of class antagonisms is to perhaps place too much emphasis on the individual in what is otherwise the study of collective action. Second, and following from the first irony, is that the position of the liberal individual was generally accorded to middle class reformers, where the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dwelt. However, the privilege with which one class asserts individuality while the other is confined to collective groaning should be critiqued. One way to do this is by the looking at how working class women themselves were influenced by one another—and what they spoke and wrote. Generally speaking, the writings of the lower class have been poorly preserved, but in the case of Bagley there is a substantial collection of writings that allow the scholar to consider in a more systematic way some of the ironies above mentioned. And on that rather long note, I now devote my attention to Sarah G. Bagley.

Sarah G. Bagley. Bagley’s life is shrouded in mystery. Contemporary accounts of her life are sparse. In the mid-1990s she made the rounds as a ‘this-day-in-history’ curio in the side columns of many newspapers. Interestingly, in those bulletins she is noted not as the first female labor activist, but rather as the first female telegraph operator.[28] Luckily, scholars have not been shy to investigate Bagley’s life. However, for being so prolific, many scholars have been at a loss to explain how little is known about Bagley. Benita Eisler, noting in her collection of writings from the Lowell Offering of Bagley’s sudden disappearance from public life in 1847, mentions in a footnote a “forthcoming biography of Sarah Bagley by Helena Wright” that “promises to dispel some of the mystery.”[29] However, the promised biography turned into a published biographical note in Labor History, suggesting the search for a more detailed understanding of Bagley’s actual historical existence is perhaps impossible. Wright notes that “although she was perhaps the most visible and the most articulate of all the women labor leaders during this period, she also retained a certain anonymity.”[30] Why Bagley’s personal life remained so anonymous, while her writings were so prolific, is unclear. Furthermore, the dearth of information available on Bagley makes an understanding of her significance through her writings and speeches all the more important. Having said that, to this point Wright’s short essay remains the authoritative writing on the first female labor organizer. It is my hope that a rhetorical analysis of her writings will provide increased information about Bagley’s beliefs as well as help scholars to better understand the nature of early American labor reform efforts and the relationship between gender and class in those early efforts. Before addressing her writings (which occur in a later post), however, I now turn to a brief accounting of Bagley’s life.[31]

Bagley was born in Candia, New Hampshire in 1806. Records suggest her family experienced relative periods of prosperity followed by, what would become ultimate, periods of severe economic distress. Wright suspects that it was her family’s last financial crisis that precipitated Bagley’s movement into the mills. There is, however, little information about her early life in New Hampshire. Though it is likely that her income would have made a significant, if not primary contribution, to her family’s income. Despite the lack of information, Wright suggests that Bagley followed a pattern similar to other women, in which “schooling and farm chores, domestic spinning and weaving, and food preparation can be assumed” to have occupied much of her time while in New Hampshire.[32] The historical record becomes much clearer as Bagley transitioned into mill life and ultimately achieved some level of prominence in the labor reform movement.

Bagley began work in the Lowell Mills in 1837, approximately a year after the ‘turn-out’ of 1836. Wright notes “her speaking and organizing ability as well as her political consciousness led Bagley to play an important role within the sphere of female labor reform…as well as other male-dominated groups.”[33] During a time of marked division between the sexes, it is significant that Bagley was able to seemingly overcome feminine limitations not only as a public speaker who addressed her own sex, but also as an accomplished orator who spoke to male audiences. In 1845, Bagley was elected as vice-president of the New England Workingmen’s Association. According to a report by the Voice of Industry describing Bagley’s speech to the Workingmen’s Association, she spoke with a “thrilling power to her language and spell-bound this large auditory, so that the rustling of the leaves might be heard softly playing with the wind between the intervals of the speech.”[34] Hyperbole and 19^th century-beliefs in the power of oratory aside, Bagley’s speech was probably impressive. The report continues, “she took her seat amidst the loud and unanimous huzzas of the deep moved throng.” That she was so well received by a mixed-sex audience, with men undoubtedly in the majority, is a point of special consideration. Foner argues there were class distinctions involved in male recognition of women-led reform movements. Middle-class women and lower-class women were both rejected by middle-class men. Conversely, lower-class men apparently respected their working-class female peers.[35] Foner doesn’t note whether that same respect was accorded middle class women as well. However, that working-class men showed respect for their fellow woman-laborers perhaps says something of the nature of worker solidarity at this time. This consideration is especially important as Foner argues that there was not cross-class gender solidarity. In other words, middle-class women largely ignored their working sisters.

The class distinction also speaks to the sheer significance of Bagley’s rhetoric. While middle-class women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were free to engage in a variety of social reforms in their ample leisure time, Bagley organized labor groups and meetings, delivered petitions, and wrote extensively all while engaged in factory life, sometimes working over fourteen hours in the mills.[36] Bagley was not alone, her prominent labor compatriots Huldah J. Stone and Mehitabel Eastman were also working while they were organizing.[37] Though she was offered some reprieve from factory labor when she and a friend went into business together making dresses, much of her political activity occurred while she was a spinner.

Bagley left the public scene by the end of 1846, leaving both the Voice of Industry (where she briefly served as editor) and the Female Labor Reform Association. Before leaving public life, Bagley’s writings began to embrace a large range of reform causes, “express[ing] a consciousness of the need for reform at all levels of society.”[38] Some of those causes included abolition, ending capital punishment, prison reform, issues regarding health care and the insane, as well as Utopian socialist movements (in addition to her many roles, Bagley was vice-president of the Lowell Union of Associationists, a group inspired by the writings of Charles Fourier.) Little is known about why Bagley left public life and the labor reform movement. Though the FLRA’s loss of commitment to labor reform may have precipitated Bagley’s retirement from the group, Wright speculates that ill health was probably the more likely reason for her departure. Independent of the cause, Bagley was apparently forced to return to factory work for a period of five months in 1848. “In two short years,” Wright notes, aware of the situation’s tragic irony, “the most outspoken adversary of the corporation system was forced to return to the mill.”[39]

Potential research questions. How was Bagley able to navigate the duality of her position as woman and worker? What can that tell us about the rhetorical exigencies of the time? How was she and her audience constituted as women and workers? How were femininity and issues of class co-constructed in this context?

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[1] Henry A. Miles, Lowell, As It Was, and As It Is (Lowell, MA: Merrill & Heywood, 1846), 116.

[2] Ibid, 127.

[3] Benita Eisler, The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977/1998).

[4] Sarah G. Bagley, Voice of Industry, May 8, 1846. All primary sources, unless otherwise notes, are take from the excellent collection of Factory Girl writings compiled by Philip S. Foner, ed., The Factory Girls: A Collection of Writings on Life and Struggles in the New England Factories of the 1840s by the Factory Girls Themselves, and the Story, in Their Own Words, of the First Trade Unions of Women Workers in the United States, ed. Philip S. Foner (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977).

[5] Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), 251.

[6] Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University, 1979), 2

[7] Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York: Free Press, 1979), 20.

[8] Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800-1840," in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979): 182-196.

[9] Ibid, 184.

[10] Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, notes they earned half as much as men earned.

[11] Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl,” 189.

[12] Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement.

[13] Ibid, 22.

[14] The Offering perhaps smoothed things over without ever enlivening or strengthening women’s democratic recourse—it might have instead functioned as a pressure valve, relieving class and gender anxieties, instead of allowing their development into productive societal changes. That Sarah Bagley would see through the corporate guise of The Offering is all the more significant reason for understanding her role, and the labor movement generally, in one of America’s earliest labor movements.

[15] See Dublin, Women at Work, 59. Interestingly, Dublin does not list Christmas Day as one of the holidays. Miles, Lowell, however, lists four holidays and includes Christmas Day as one of them.

[16] Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 26.

[17] Factory Girls’ Album, Exeter, N.H., October 31, 1846.

[18] Ibid, June 20, 1846.

[19] Thomas Dublin, "Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: "The Opressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us"," Labor history 16 (1975): 99-116.

[20] Sandra Adickes, "Mind Among the Spindles: An Examination of some of the Journals, Newspapers, and Memoirs of the Lowell Female Operatives," Women's Studies 1 (1973): 280.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Dublin, Women at Work, 113.

[23] Ibid, 125.

[24] “The labor of one person ought to command the same price as the labor of another person, provided it be done as well and in the same time, whether the laborer be man or woman,” Faculty Girls’ Album, Exeter, N.H., April 25, 1846. See also Voice of Industry, April 2, 1847.

[25] Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl,” 190.

[26] Voice of Industry, June 5, 1845.

[27] Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads, 8.

[28] For example, see Buffalo News, “Reporters Notebook,” February 21, 1992; Salt Lake Tribune, “Today in History,” February 21, 1992, E5; Salt Lake Tribune, “This Week in History,” February 22, 1993, B5; The Washington Times, “Freeze Frames,” February 21, 1993, A2.

[29] Benita Eisler, The Lowell Offering, 220.

[30] Helena Wright, "Sarah G. Bagley: A Biographical Note," Labor History 20 (1979): 399.

[31] I draw largely from Wright, "Sarah G. Bagley." Any divergence from Wright’s biographical account is noted.

[32] Wright, “Sarah G. Bagley,” 403.

[33] Ibid, 399.

[34] Voice of Industry, July 10, 1845.

[35] See Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 72.

[36] Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 66.

[37] Stone, who was less militant than Bagley, was eventually blacklisted from working in the mills. It is unclear why Bagley was never blacklisted. Wright speculates that factory owners might have hoped avoided blacklisting Bagley for fear it would have aided her anti-mill corporation cause.

[38] Wright, “Sarah G. Bagley,” 410.

[39] Ibid, 412.