Read an Excerpt
1. Sarah Bagley Sarah Bagley The Determined Mill Girl 1837–1846
Let us trust on and try to leave a little seed on earth that shall bear fruit when we shall pass away.
When Sarah Bagley walked through the doors of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company on her first day in 1837, she could scarcely believe her ears. It was so loud! Everywhere around her, noisy pieces of machinery called power looms whirred and spit out strands of cotton thread. Young women just like her operated the spinning machines and scurried around with bundles of cloth. The thunderous racket filled the room, and seemed to never stop. It couldn’t have been more different from the quiet fields and green forests of her hometown in Candia, New Hampshire. But that was exactly why Sarah was there. Like so many other young women of her era, she wanted more than a quiet domestic life. She was looking for an adventure—or at least, a taste of freedom.
At first, Sarah loved her new job. She had been excited to leave her sleepy hometown and move to bustling Lowell, Massachusetts, to work as a weaver in one of the city’s textile mills (big factories where fabric like cotton was manufactured). It wasn’t just about her own desires, either; her family had fallen on hard times, and she needed the money to help them out. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and Sarah was right there in the middle of it. It was a time of huge social and economic change. For example, in 1837, when Sarah moved to Lowell, it was still unusual for a woman like her—a white, New England farm girl from a rural family—to have a job at all. Most women in her position were expected to stay home, get married, and care for their children. Her life had already been planned out for her since the moment she was born. But the world had opened up since then, and Sarah became part of a new generation of young women who were leaving home and traveling to industrial cities across New England to find work in factories.
Factory owners liked hiring young women to work in their mills; they thought that the “mill girls” would only stay for a few years before leaving to get married. Factory owners also assumed that young women were weak, obedient, and willing to accept much lower wages than their male counterparts. Like many of her coworkers, Sarah didn’t have time to think about gender equality; she was just excited to jump into her new life and start earning her 50-cent daily wage. When she got to Lowell, she rented a room in a company-owned boardinghouse alongside several other young women workers. Sarah was a little older than most of her new friends; she was 31 when she started, but still had to obey the “house matron” who monitored the young women’s behavior.
Working in the mills gave many a new sense of independence. It wasn’t true freedom, but for that first wave of women, who would have otherwise been doomed to lives of isolation or domestic drudgery, it was at least something new. For the first time in their lives, women like Sarah were able to earn their own money and decide how to spend their free time. What little time they had away from the factory was entirely their own, with no parents, siblings, or farm animals demanding their attention. Their paychecks also gave them room to dream: to save up for college or future weddings, to buy nice clothes and accessories, and to help support their families. The mill girls also enjoyed cultural activities, and were far more intellectual than the mill bosses assumed. They attended lectures from thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, formed debate teams and political clubs, and started “self-improvement circles.” They created their own spaces to discuss literature, art, and philosophy. Eventually, as they began to trust one another more, these conversations turned political... and the “girls” started to talk about their awful working conditions.
Some of them also wrote for the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine that was overseen by the factory owners but written by and for the workers. It was the first magazine in U.S. history to be wholly run by women. The magazine started off as a collection of personal poems and essays and fit well with the young workers’ interests in art and philosophy. It was founded to emphasize the positive things about the mills, but that soon changed. Sarah was a contributor and early on, wrote an essay called “The Pleasures of Factory Work” that praised some aspects of her job. But as conditions inside the mills got worse, notes of dissatisfaction and even rebellion began to show up in the workers’ writing. Some wrote about the difficulties of working in the mills, while others shared political views. A worker named Betsey Chamberlain wrote a passionate piece about her dreams of an eight-hour workday and equal wages for men and women (the factory owners probably weren’t thrilled about that one). It didn’t take long for Sarah to change her tune, too, and begin writing very different essays.
Betsey had had plenty of inspiration for her own essay, and as she spent more time at the factory, Sarah quickly learned the truth about their jobs. The mill girls’ days were long, dusty, and loud. They would spend 12 to 14 hours standing in front of a screaming spinning machine or power loom, breathing in cotton fibers and the stench of oil lamps. Bloody accidents were common, and there were no such things as safety regulations. Workers often got caught in the machine and were left missing fingers or other limbs. Some were scalped when their long hair was yanked into the machines, leaving them in agonizing pain. Cotton dust filled the air and put workers at risk of developing serious lung diseases. There was no ventilation, either. Managers intentionally nailed the windows shut to keep the air thick and humid, which helped keep thread pliable. They didn’t much care how unbearable it was for the workers, especially when the mills became boiling hot in the summer.
When the “girls” finally got to go home to their small apartments, there was barely time to eat and sleep before the work bell rang again. Their free time was still theirs, though there was precious little of it. Frustrated and beaten down by the horrible conditions, many of them left the mills altogether, and went back home to their families. They decided that a smaller, safer life at home was worth giving up on their own dream. By the 1840s, enough of the original mill girls had left that the factory owners began hiring Irish immigrant women instead. This was intentional, too. The bosses knew that these poor immigrant workers were desperate for jobs and would accept lower wages, since some money was better than nothing at all.
Things seemed to get worse and worse, and Sarah’s positive view of her job soon curdled. She realized that the mills weren’t an empowering new adventure but were instead a terrible grind. She saw how the factory owners did not care about how tired, ill, or uncomfortable they were. It seemed obvious that all they cared about were their own profits, so they kept cutting wages and forcing the workers to speed up production. Sarah’s bosses thought they could get away with it, too. Because the mill workers were young women, the rich men who employed them assumed that they’d be too scared to stand up for themselves. Those men couldn’t have been more wrong.
By 1844, Sarah had had enough. She began organizing her coworkers around what seemed like an almost impossible goal: the ten-hour workday. Betsey had dreamed of only eight, but to these workers, even 10 would have been a huge improvement. It seemed possible, too, since federal workers had won it in 1840 and skilled workers in various industries had done the same years earlier. The mill girls were still working up to 16 hours a day, and they were sick of it. That year, 15 young workers in Lowell—including Sarah—founded a labor organization called the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Their first meeting took place in December 1844 at the Anti-Slavery Hall in Lowell. It was organized as a chapter of the New England Workingmen’s Association, and Sarah was elected as its first president. By 1845, the organization had gained 600 members, and they were determined to convince the Massachusetts state legislature to pass a law shortening the workday to 10 hours. It was a big goal, and they knew they’d need to build power outside their own workplaces to get there. The mill girls connected with members of the New England Workingmen’s Association and worked together to send petitions to the legislature.
Thanks to their efforts, Massachusetts launched a formal investigation into the working conditions in the Lowell mills. State Representative William Schouler, who was the publisher of the Lowell Offering before he ran for office, was called to lead the investigation committee. He knew very well how terrible things were for the mill girls, since he’d spent years reading their writings about it. In 1842, after he bought the Lowell Offering, the magazine stopped printing Sarah’s writing. By then, she had become a fierce advocate for workers’ rights, and Schouler thought it was a bad idea to give her a platform to spread her ideas. He was a friend to the factory owners, and Sarah’s writing was a liability. It would’ve been hard to have picked a worse person to lead the committee.
The odds were stacked against them, but Sarah still stood up to publicly testify about how bad it was for her and her coworkers. Other young mill workers joined her on the stand, which must have been nerve-racking for them. At the time, it was very rare for women to testify in front of men—or speak in public at all—and these young women were speaking directly to powerful politicians who had never even seen the filthy guts of a factory. But they did it anyway and held firm to their message. Sarah and her coworkers were fighters, and they knew their cause was just. Unfortunately, the legislature ignored their pleas, and decided not to take any action against the mills. Schouler and his colleagues didn’t care what a bunch of raggedy young women had to say and didn’t want to risk upsetting the wealthy factory owners.
Sarah got back at them later, though, when Schouler was running for reelection to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1845. Women did not have the legal right to vote yet, so she and her coworkers couldn’t vote against him themselves. But Sarah and the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association had gotten very good at getting their message across. They used all their energy to convince their male coworkers in Lowell to vote Schouler out. “As he is merely a corporation machine, or tool, we will use our best endeavors to keep him in the ‘city of spindles,’ where he belongs, and not to trouble Boston folks with him,” they wrote at the time. He ended up losing his election. The mill girls had not yet won their fight for the ten-hour workday, but they certainly won their battle with William Schouler.
Sarah started writing again, too. On May 29, 1845, the New England Workingmen’s Association launched a new magazine called the Voice of Industry. A young mechanic named William F. Young was its editor, but he quickly invited Sarah to join the publishing committee. She wrote essays aimed at women workers, and ran the Female Department of the magazine, which printed letters and other writings by mill girls. She became known for her fiery, inspiring words about the factory owners’ hypocrisy and the mill system’s failings. “Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a room 12 hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntarily!” Sarah wrote in the Voice of Industry. “The whip which brings us to Lowell is necessity. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery.”
She was also very critical of the Lowell Offering, which had survived but became very owner-friendly in the years since Schouler had forced her to stop writing for the magazine. In a Fourth of July speech, she called its then-editor Harriet Farley “a mouthpiece of the corporations.” Farley was a former mill girl herself and did not appreciate the insult. Sarah refused to take back her words, and the two women kept up a public feud for years. Things had certainly come a long way from “The Pleasures of Factory Work” and Sarah had no interest in pretending to play nice with anyone who didn’t appreciate the workers’ struggle.
She spent two years as the president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. During that same time, she was also an officer in the predominantly male New England Workingmen’s Association, and was the vice president of the Lowell Union of Associationists. In early 1847, she left the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association after a series of disagreements over its direction. She also stopped writing for the Voice of Industry in late 1846, after clashing with its new male editor. He disagreed with her over the role women should take in publishing the magazine, saying that her writing was “too radical.” Sarah had heard it all before: she was too loud, too passionate, and too determined. She had come a long way from those early days as a bright-eyed farm girl, and had spent nearly a decade fighting to improve conditions in Lowell’s mills, take down greedy factory owners, and ease the pain of her fellow mill girls. It had been a grueling, tiring fight, and Sarah was ready to leave the mills behind and try something new. The factory owners were probably very happy to see her go.
Sarah was a labor pioneer in many ways, but no one would have been able to predict her next move. In 1846, she relocated to Springfield, Massachusetts, and became the nation’s first female telegraph operator. The tabletop telegraph machines must have felt tiny compared to the massive power looms she was used to, and the relative quiet of her new office must have been a relief. However, Sarah found that this job came with an old problem: she was being paid a quarter as much as her male coworkers. By then, she was totally over the unequal treatment she’d received during her entire life as a worker and refused to put up with it for a minute longer. After making history in her new job, she quit.
Her later years brought a lot more movement. She briefly went back to Lowell to work in the mills again, then moved to Philadelphia, and also spent time in Brooklyn. In 1850, she made yet another big change. She married a Scottish man named James Durno, and they moved to Albany, New York. James worked as a homeopathic doctor, and they set up a patent medicine business. Patent medicines were big business during this era, despite the fact that they claimed to treat all kinds of diseases but rarely worked. Some people got rich by selling these medically dubious potions anyway, and the Durnos got in on the action by selling their own cold remedies. Unlike the grifters and hucksters who dominated the patent game, Sarah became a real physician. She focused on treating women and children and was especially interested in respiratory diseases. Helping women and children with their breathing problems must have taken her back to her days in the mills, with their hot, cotton-filled, non-ventilated air. She had probably spent years working alongside other young women with nagging coughs, scratchy throats, and bleary eyes. Some part of that memory must have stayed with her. No matter how far she traveled, Lowell was always in her heart.
After Sarah left the labor movement, she never gave up on the fight for justice. She became deeply invested in the struggles for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, and was also involved in antiwar activism and the prison reform movement. Sarah died in 1889 at the age of 83 and was buried beneath the rolling green hills of Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. She did not live to see American workers win the eight-hour workday, which was not formally passed until 1938—over one hundred years after she first stepped foot in Lowell and walked through those Hamilton Manufacturing Company doors. But we wouldn’t have gotten there without her.
