Sarah bagley alexandria
- •
Sarah Bagley
Labor leader in New England during the 1840s
Sarah George Bagley (April 19, 1806[1][dubious – discuss] – January 15, 1889) was an American labor leader in New England during the 1840s; an advocate of shorter workdays for factory operatives and mechanics, she campaigned to make ten hours of labor per day the maximum in Massachusetts.
Her activities in support of the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, put her in contact with a broader network of reformers in areas of women's rights, communitarianism, abolition, peace, prison reform, and health reform. Bagley and her coworkers became involved with middle-class reform activities, demonstrating the ways in which working people embraced this reform impulse as they transformed and critiqued some of its key elements. Her activities within the labor movement reveal many of the tensions that underlay relations between male and female working people as well as the constraints of gender that female activists had to overcome.[2]
Early life
Sarah George Bagley was born
- •
Introduction
“Let no one suppose the ‘factory girls’ are without guardian. We are placed in the care of overseers who feel under moral obligation to look after our interests.”
-Sarah Bagley, 1840
Lowell Offering
“I am sick at heart when I look into the social world and see woman so willingly made a dupe to the beastly selfishness of man.”
-Sarah Bagley, 1847
Letter to Angelique Martin
Between 1837 and 1848, Sarah Bagley’s view of the world around her changed radically. While much of her life remains surrounded by questions, the record of Bagley’s experiences as a worker and activist in Lowell, Massachusetts reveals a remarkable spirit. Condemned by some as a rabble rouser and enemy of social order, many have celebrated her as a woman who fought against the confines of patriarchal industrial society on behalf of all her sisters in work and struggle.
Lowell Mill Girl
Sarah George Bagley was born April 19, 1806 to Nathan and Rhoda Witham Bagley. Raised in rural Candia, New Hampshire, she came to the booming industrial city of Lowell in 1837 at the age of 31, where she
- •
Lowell Stories: Women's History
Sarah George Bagley was born in Candia, New Hampshire on April 19, 1806. She had two brothers, Thomas and Henry, and one sister Mary Jane. Her mother Rhoda Witham and her father Nathan Bagley were both members of large New England families. Nathan and Rhoda farmed, sold land, and even owned a small mill trying to make money to support their family.
In 1837, at the age of 30, Sarah first appeared in Lowell working at the Hamilton Mills. She published one of her first stories Pleasures of Factory Life in an 1840 issue of the Lowell Offering. The Offering was a literary magazine written, edited, and published by working women, some of them very young. Their purpose was to show the world that women who worked could also write and have a thirst for learning.
In late November of 1842, 70 weavers at the Middlesex Mills walked off their jobs, protesting the requirement to tend two looms instead of one.
Copyright ©mobthaw.pages.dev 2025