Sarah Bagley
| Sarah George Bagley | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 19, 1806 Candia, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, U.S. |
| Died | Circa 1888 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Labor organizer |
| Known for | Working in textile mills |
| Spouse(s) | James Durno (m. 1850-1871; his death) |
Sarah George Bagley (April 19, 1806 – c. 1888) was an advocate for women's rights and one of the most important labor leaders 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. Sarah Bagley and her coworkers became familiar 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.
Sarah George Bagley was born in 1806 in Candia, New Hampshire to Rhoda (née Witham) and Nathan Bagley, 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. She had two brothers, Thomas and Henry, and one sister, Mrs. Mary Osgood.
In 1835, Bagley first appeared in Lowell, Massachusetts, working at the Hamilton Mills. She published one of her first stories “Pleasures of Factory Life” in an 1840 issue of the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine written, edited, and published by working women, some of them very young.
In late November 1842, 70 weavers at the Middlesex Mills walked off their jobs, protesting the requirement to tend two looms instead of one. Shortly after this “turn-out” or strike, Bagley left the Hamilton Mills and went to work for the Middlesex Mills as a weaver, possibly taking the place of striking workers. Between 1842 and 1844, over 1,000 textile workers left Lowell as a result of an economic depression, which caused wage cuts and stretch-outs. In March 1844, under improved economic conditions the textile corporations raised the wages of male textile workers but not female workers to the 1842 levels.
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