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.

Choosing a Topic and Narrowing it Down

My research interests, conceived very (very) broadly, are centered around (re)theorizing the possibilities for social change. The question I've started to formulate around this (and where rhetoric comes home to play, especially regarding invention) is: What kinds of public rhetoric (and/or discourse) produce the possibilities for radical social change? How do they do it? So, I'm looking for a case study that will contribute to that research agenda (recognizing the necessity for other, more specific research questions once I select the particular* artifact for this paper).

So, with those general interests in mind, I need to come up with a case study for this specific course. To help narrow it down, I’ve come up with several criteria. The case study should 1) be an example of social change (failed or realized), 2) be historical, 3) have a clearly delineated text of some sort that is available for criticism (meaning, I want to have something a little more concrete for this project).

The other day I met with Dr. Poirot and she and I discussed several possibilities. One possibility she mentioned was looking at the Lowell Mill Girls Strikes of 1834 and 1836. As early examples of women’s organizing, the strikes provide an opportunity to look at the intersections of gender and class. I’ve been doing some reading about the surrounding time period, and found particularly interesting a monthly magazine called The Lowell Offering, that included poetry, essays, short stories, etc., written by the Lowell Mill Girls. This topic gives me a couple of directions. I could choose to look at discourses immediately surrounding the historical strike, or alternatively I could start looking through the Offering, started four years after the second strike, and see how these women’s reflections on the strike (maybe there are reflections?) help influence/orient our understanding of early female attempts at social change, and what the broader implications are for that understanding. So, still a lot more narrowing to do, but I think I've found a starting point.

Having said that, I implore you for comments and suggestions.

*I'm feeling very self-conscious about using this word after our discussion in class today. Lol.

A Brief Description

Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions to the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York in July of 1848. The text is designed to parallel an earlier declaration penned in 1776: The Declaration of Independence. The Sentiments and Resolutions provides a list of injuries—15 in total—that men have perpetrated on women. It then offers a series of 12 resolutions, the implementation of which would help to eliminate the “absolute tyranny” of men over women. The enumeration of the injuries produces an overwhelming effect on the reader. As the accumulation of offenses are stacked on one another, line by line, those offense also come to weigh heavily on the reader’s mind. The list of resolutions produces a similar effect, in which the weight of the work required to correct the injustices weighs heavier and heavier as each resolution is read.

Much like the text it imitates, the tone of the Sentiments and Resolutions is strident and sweeping. However, though the Sentiment’s most obvious characteristic is its similarity to the Declaration of Independence, its most striking characteristic is the manner in which it departs from its precursor—a departure that can be read as a critical failure. This failure functions to expose the failures of the Declaration of Independence. Namely, that by excluding women, the Declaration did not stand up to its own declared principles. Evidence of this omission appears quickly in the document, beginning in the second sentence. Where the Declaration posits “that all men are created equal,” the Sentiments and Resolutions declares “that all men and women are created equal.” This maneuver exposes the word men as a non-inclusive term. By placing the word women next to men, the document draws attention to the exclusivity of men (both the Declaration’s writers and those honored with its rights), as well as the Declaration’s own failure to extend equal protection to all people in the United States.