Sarah Bagley

Sarah George Bagley (April 19, 1806^{[1][dubious – discuss]} – January 15, 1889) was an American labor leader 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. Bagley and her coworkers became involved 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.^[2]