![]() Voted the Association’s president-and, soon after, fired from her mill job-Bagley quickly threw herself into her new role, at once broadening her audience and sharpening her rhetoric. Earlier strikes by women workers- in 18-had ended similarly.īagley watched all of this go down, and in December of 1844, she and five other women formed the Lowell Labor Female Reform Association-“one of the earliest successful organizations of working women in the United States,” writes the National Park Service. When a group of 70 women went on strike in response, they were not only fired, but blacklisted from ever getting another mill job. Another mill tried to double the number of looms that each weaver was responsible for. Many of these changes were sexist: In one mill, management cut wages for everyone when the need for austerity ended, pay was raised again, but only for men. In the early 1840s, as factory owners tried to maximize profits in the face of a recession, the already-high demands of mill work ramped up. In the piece, called “Pleasures of Factory Life,” Bagley ruminated on the various good parts of her job-the new friends, the learning opportunities, the potted plants the women placed around the factory floor-but she gave special weight to the space the job left for thinking.Īs the body goes through the motions of twisting, pulling, and plucking, Bagley wrote, “all the powers of the mind are made active.” The looms themselves inspired further thought: “Who can closely examine all the movements of the complicated, curious machinery, and not be led to the reflection, that the mind is boundless,” she wrote, “and that it can accomplish almost any thing on which it fixes its attention!”Ī few years later, exactly where Bagley had fixed her attention became clear. Like many of the mill girls, she embraced the cultural environment in Lowell, and in 1840, Bagley published a short essay in the Lowell Offering, a monthly literary magazine written and edited largely by mill girls. Twenty-eight-year-old Sarah Bagley made her way to Lowell in 1835, leaving her home in New Hampshire in the hope that she’d be able to send some extra money back to her struggling family. ![]() In their few hours of free time, many attended lectures, swapped books, or learned from fellow workers in the dormitories. While most “Mill Girls” took these jobs in order to send money home, they found their new employment came with a certain measure of financial and intellectual independence. The Industrial Revolution changed the makeup of the global workforce, and in the early 1820s, young women from across the United States flocked to Lowell, Massachusetts, seeking employment in one of the city’s many textile mills. Driven by the foresight of the so-called “Lowell Mill Girls,” American women have been going on strike at least since the 1830s, and thanks to the powerful rhetoric of one woman, Sarah Bagley, they began officially organizing not long after. While the problems these strikers aim to address are, famously, far from new, the tactics they’ve chosen are more storied than many people may realize. They’re participating in “A Day Without a Woman,” a nationwide action that aims, in the words of its organizers, to “recognize the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system, while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities.” Today-March 8, 2017-people across the United States are taking the day off work, eschewing most purchases, and dressing in red. A 19th century tintype of two “Lowell Mill Girls.” Center for Lowell History/Public Domain
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