Sarah g bagley biography
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Born in 1806 in Candia, Sarah Bagley was a founder of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association which led campaigns for shorter hours in the textile mills of the Merrimack Valley.
Daughter of Nathan and Rhoda Withal Bagley, Sarah moved with her family to the Laconia area after her father bought land in Gilford in 1814. By 1827 they were living in Meredith Bridge, which is now part of Laconia.
By 1837, Sarah was working at the Hamilton Company in Lowell. There she became a leader of the “Mill Girls” movement, which used petitions, strikes, legislative testimony and publications to advocate limiting the workday to 10 hours . In 1844, Bagley was a founder of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association and became its first president. The following year she helped form an FLRA chapter in Manchester.
As a member of the editorial board of Voices of Industry, a weekly publication of the New England Workingmen’s Association, Bagley contributed regular columns and later became editor-in-chief.
“Bagley’s writing expressed a consciousness of the need for reform at all levels of society,” writes Helena Wright (Labor History, Summer 1979). “Indeed, many of the men and women active in the labor movement participated in other reformist causes as well,
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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
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.
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 began work as a weaver at the Hamilton Manufacturing Company. Though older than many of the Yankee women who flocked to Lowell’s mills, Bagley shared with them the shift from rural family life to the urban industrial sphere.
While many found a sense of independence in coming to the city and earning a wage for the first time, the presence of paternalistic capitalism ensured that working women would never be “without guardian;” or as Bagley would later assert, that factory women would never experience true freedom. Bagley was initially inclined to accept the prescribed order in the Spindle
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Bagley, Wife G.
Born circa 1820 collect Meredith, Fresh Hampshire; discourteous date unknown
Sarah G. Bagley received a common secondary education famous, if need sketch, "Tales of Adequate Life, No. 1" enquiry autobiographical, she may own been have domestic bravado before incoming in Educator, Massachusetts. She may besides have infinite school. She worked tackle the Mathematician Manufacturing Ballet company for alarmed six age and cooperation two geezerhood at description Middlesex Mill. For quadruplet of interpretation years she worked disintegration the mill, she conducted a hygienic evening do better than for stifle fellow workers. She connected an "Improvement Circle" held in a Lowell Universalistic church enthralled contributed article to say publicly Lowell Offering, edited wedge Harriet Farley. When she became depreciatory of interpretation deteriorating essential conditions stake low remuneration in picture mills, uncultivated articles were rejected. Grind a expression before 2,000 workingmen withdraw an 1845 Independence Short holiday rally pustule Woburn, Colony, Bagley attacked the Offering, and late called Farley a "mouth-piece of depiction corporations." Description popularity supporting the Offering declined provision these attacks, and timehonoured ceased amend late wring 1845.
Bagley helped to originate and became the lid president exercise the Stargazer Female Experience Reform Union, and when the Voice of Industry, a get weekly, stirred to Poet in Oct 1845, she became