<P> 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 familiar 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 . </P> <P> Sarah George Bagley was born April 19, 1806 in Candia, New Hampshire to Rhoda (née Witham) and Nathan Bagley, both members of large New England families . Nathan and Rhoda farmed, sold land, and owned a small mill to support their family . She had two brothers, Thomas and Henry, and one sister, Mary Jane . </P> <P> In 1835, Bagley first appeared in Lowell, Massachusetts, working at the Hamilton Mills . She worked initially as a weaver and then as a dresser, and by 1840 she had saved enough money to make a deposit on the house which her parents and siblings were living in . Bagley was dissatisfied with working conditions however and published one of her first pieces of writing, "Pleasures of Factory Life", in an 1840 issue of the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine written, edited, and published by working women . These "pleasures", she wrote, were like angels' visits: "few and far between". </P> <P> In late November 1842, 70 weavers at the Middlesex Mills walked off their jobs, protesting the newly - introduced requirement to tend two looms instead of one . The workers were fired and blacklisted, and shortly afterwards, Bagley left the Hamilton Mills and went to work for Middlesex . Between 1842 and 1844, over 1,000 textile workers left Lowell as a result of wage cuts and stretch - outs due to an economic recession . In March 1844, under improved economic conditions, the textile corporations raised the wages of male--but not female--textile workers to the 1842 levels . </P>

Who was sarah g bagley and what role did she play in the workplace