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from Christine Lunardini, What Every American Should Know About Women's History: 200 Events that Shaped Our Destiny [Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media Corporation, 1997] pp. 41-42, 61-62

What Every American Should Know is organized in a different format from the other reference works used in this series: this book is organized and centered on events, not on the lives of particular women. Hence, the stories of two events in 19th century women's history will be used to discuss Sarah Bagley's role in women's history.

1834: Lowell Mill Girls [sic] Go on Strike
(Work)

      On February 20, 1834, women workers from the Lowell Mills went on strike to protest wage cuts of up to 15 percent.

      The Lowell Mills, In Lowell, Massachusetts, were the first mills that hired women in large numbers. Beginning i n the early 1830s, the Lowell Mills had begun recruiting young women from rural New England farms to work in the mills. Lowell succeeded in attracting the farm girls because they provided a protected environment, a deal maker for parents who would otherwise never allow their unmarried daughters to live away from home. Lowell girls slept in supervised boarding houses, ate family-style meals together in a common cafeteria, observed strict dress codes, were provided with educational and recreational programs including a library and lecture series within the mill complex, and in all ways were expected to behave with the same decorum that they would if they were at home. Moreover, they were paid their wages in cash and had the service of a bank to encourage savings. The Lowell girls [sic], as a consequence, developed a remarkable espirit de corps that made them excellent workers.

      That same espirit de corps, however, worked against the mill owners when the Lowell mill system began to unravel because of increased competition. In order to meet the competition and retain their profit margins, mill owners began cutting wages and increasing production expectations. The first strike took place on February 20, 1834, when the company announced intended wage cuts of up to 15 percent in certain departments. Workers from the affected departments held several meetings, and decided to go on strike and make a run on the company bank as well. The strike organizer was promptly fired by the mill agent, but when she left she took with her eight hundred coworkers, leading them in a procession around the town. The strikers issued what they called the "Lowell Proclamation," which stated that they would not return to work until wages were restored.

      The first Lowell strike did not succeed in the sense that wages were not restored. On the other hand, the strikers obviously had no intention of remaining off the job for more than a few hours, since they walked out on Saturday and returned to work first thing Monday morning. The wage cuts took place as scheduled about three weeks later, with no further protest. In another sense, however, the Lowell strike should have been instructive for both mill owners and labor organizers. The former because a few years later, in 1836, the Lowell girls [sic] again went on strike, and again met with no real success. But in 1846 they struck again and in that strike, they did succeed in achieving their somewhat limited goals. Each time they struck, the workers were more and more sophisticated about what they were doing and what they wanted. Eventually, they were in the forefront of women who fought for a ten-hour work day, which was finally secured in 1874. Labor leaders should have found Lowell more instructive because the Lowell women proved time and again that women could be as organized and persistent in achieving labor reforms as any group of male workers.

1844: The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association is Organized
(Work)

      In an effort to counteract deteriorating work conditions and decreasing wages, Lowell Mill employee Sarah Bagley founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in December 1844.

      Sarah Bagley's efforts to organize an effective union was not the first labor action involving working women. As early as 1824, female textile workers in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, joined their male counterparts in America's first strike, initiated to halt wage cuts. In 1825, the United Tailoresses of New York City waged an all-woman strike for higher wages. These incidences are the first recorded instances of American women joining in modern-style factory labor actions. Despite traditional beliefs held by male union leaders that women would not support strike actions, early union activity, including strikes, found women participating on a large scale. Women shoemakers in Saugus, Massachusetts, successfully struck for higher wages in 1833, and inspired a similar strike in nearby Lynn, Massachusetts. Women shoemakers in Philadelphia struck for months in 1836, and women textile workers in Pennsylvania went without wages for several months in favor of maintaining their strike against a cotton mill.

      While the Lowell Mill strike of 1834 did not succeed, it did establish Sarah Bagley as a union force to be reckoned with. The mills in Lowell had long had a reputation as model factories. Almost all the workers were young women from rural areas in Massachusetts and neighboring states. Sarah Bagley left her home in Meredith, New Hampshire, in 1836 to work for the Hamilton Company in Lowell. Women workers were housed in company-owned and -operated dormitories, and lived according to rigid rules designed to ensure that their behavior was proper, for it was only in these circumstances that middle-class families would allow their unmarried daughters to live away from home. Their ultimate discontent was not with this regimen -- in fact, the women enforced it more severely than did the owners -- but instead with the grueling, twelve-hour days and an attempt by the owners to cut their pay. In October 1836, the "girls" working at the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, including Sarah Bagley, walked off their jobs, demanding higher wages and a ten-hour day.

      When the strike did not bring success, discontent among the workers festered. They formed a loose organization in 1836, and in 1844 Bagley transformed it into the large and vigorous Lowell Female labor Reform Association. Its several hundred members collected more than two thousand signatures on a petition for the ten-hour day. Bagley led a five-member delegation to testify before the Massachusetts legislature regarding working conditions, thereby joining the handful of women who dared to speak in public before a "promiscuous" group. When their efforts met with defeat, Bagley found a way to retaliate. She campaigned against a local legislator who had opposed them, and forced him out of office. The legislator secured his own revenge when he was able to link Bagley with corruption by a male union member that had been uncovered. Bagley was convinced that, for the good of the union, she had to resign and leave the mill, even though she was innocent of any wrongdoing.

      These early struggles for improved conditions failed in their immediate objectives, but they showed the potential of collective action. In fact, so prominent were the young women form the dormitories in leading the labor agitation that new construction of these facilities was forbidden in Lowell, and all newly hired women had to seek lodgings in privately run tenements or as boarders with families. Thus, the potent combination of working and living together was ended, which, along with the arrival of Irish immigrant labor in the later 1840s, brought to a close this first episode of female labor organizing.

For More Information

      from Lowell Mill Girls by Harriet Robinson

      from Factory Rules from the Handbook to Lowell, 1848

      Uses of Liberty Rhetoric Among Lowell Mill Girls

      Engines of Our Ingenuity

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