What Have We Learned? The Original Factory Women

The First Gig Workers

Lowell, Massachusetts. 1837. A 31-year-old woman from New Hampshire, Sarah Bagley arrives to work as a weaver. The job promises education, independence, a chance to send money home. The mill owners market it as a step up from farm life. It was pretty common at that time for women to work, especially if they were unmarried or widowed. Most working conditions were physically demanding, time intensive and insecure - working long hours, in unsafe environments, and strict behavior rules. Lowell’s hiring practice did target young, unmarried women from New England farms into wage work. Equal pay was as rare then as it is now. Women’s wages were typically lower than men’s for comparable work, and as today, women were concentrated in “women’s work”, typically domestic service, garment work, and certain factory tasks. There was also a social stigma at the time, with “respectable women” typically not taking work outside the home as it was a sign of family hardship or moral risk. Married women almost never worked outside the home, and poor women and non-whites were easier to exploit. 

Within seven years, Bagley would lead America's first organized movement of working women, testify before the Massachusetts legislature (when women speaking publicly was nearly taboo), found the nation's first working women's union, and trigger the first government investigation into labor conditions in American history.

She arrived believing the company line. She left having exposed it.

Today's gig economy makes similar promises: flexibility, independence, entrepreneurship. Uber's marketing sounds a lot like Francis Cabot Lowell's did in 1823. And just like the mill girls, today's workers are discovering that the reality differs from the pitch.

The Promise

Francis Cabot Lowell was clever. He'd seen the horrors of British textile mills, the exploited children and desperate poverty. He wanted something "different" for America.

His system recruited "respectable" young women from New England farms. He built company boardinghouses with strict moral codes. He paid decent wages for women (for the time). He sponsored lectures, libraries, and literary magazines. The women could save money, support their families, maybe even attend school.

By 1840, Lowell employed over 8,000 workers, with women making up nearly three-quarters of the workforce. The "City of Spindles" became an international showcase, promising a new future. Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and found it remarkably humane compared to British mills.

The Lowell Offering, a literary magazine written by the mill girls themselves, published poetry and essays celebrating factory life. One early contributor was Sarah Bagley, who in 1840 wrote "Pleasures of Factory Life," noting how the work left space for the mind to wander. Those pleasures, she added dryly, were like angels' visits: "few and far between."

It was the last nice thing she wrote about the mills.

The Reality

Conditions deteriorated steadily through the 1840s. Competition increased. Prices fell. The owners' response was predictable: cut labor costs, through exploiting labor.

What followed looks a lot like modern "productivity optimization":

The speedup: Workers were required to tend more machines. By the mid-1840s, a weaver might manage four looms instead of two, with no increase in pay.

The stretch-out: Hours expanded. Workers reported 12 to 14 hours daily, beginning before sunrise (with oil lamps burning) and ending well after sunset.

Wage cuts: In 1834, wages were slashed 25%. When economic conditions improved in 1844, wages were restored for men but not for women, who were already underpaid compared to men..

Housing costs: Boardinghouse rates increased while wages fell, squeezing workers from both ends.

A petition signed by Sarah Bagley and over 2,000 workers described conditions starkly: workers were "hastening through pain, disease and privation, down to a premature grave."

The company line about education and self-improvement? Workers had no time in the morning (called to the mill before finishing breakfast), thirty minutes at noon (to travel to the boardinghouse, eat, and return), and exhausted evenings spent maintaining their own clothes. Where, Bagley demanded, were the "leisure hours" the owners promised?

The Data Gap

What couldn't be measured couldn't be regulated.

In 1845, the Massachusetts legislature received petitions bearing over 2,100 signatures demanding a ten-hour workday. This was unprecedented. This was the first time women petitioned the legislature on labor matters. The women-led petition campaign was the first large-scale effort to get the government to systematically examine working conditions.

The legislature responded by creating a committee to investigate. The committee chair was William Schouler, newspaper editor, state representative, and friend to the mill owners. His strategy was transparent: require the women to testify publicly, expecting this would embarrass them into silence.

It didn't work.

On February 13, 1845, Sarah Bagley and five other women became the first female workers to testify before an American legislative body about labor conditions. They described exhausting hours, unhealthy conditions, and broken promises.

The committee's conclusion? The legislature lacked authority to regulate hours. The "remedy is not with us." Workers and corporations should negotiate directly. (Sounds familiar?)

But something important had happened. For the first time, a government body had investigated working conditions. The testimony was recorded. The facts were documented. What the committee chose to do with those facts was political. But the facts now existed.

The Voice

Bagley wasn't just an organizer. She was an editor.

In December 1844, she and five other women founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) in Anti-Slavery Hall (ironic?). Within six months, membership reached 500 and kept growing, with branches spreading to other mill towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

The LFLRA adopted the Voice of Industry, a worker-run newspaper, as its organ. Bagley became a lead contributor and briefly its editor. Her challenge to the workers: "The Press has been too long monopolized by the capitalist non-producers, party demagogues and speculators, to the exclusion of the people."

Through the Voice, Bagley and her collaborators developed what we might now call a counter-narrative. While the supposedly employee-friendly Lowell’s publication called The Offering painted a rosy picture of factory life, the Voice documented the reality. The LFLRA also published Factory Tracts, pamphlets providing "a true exposition of the Factory system and its effects upon the health and happiness of the operatives."

Bagley called The Offering "a mouthpiece of the corporations." The conflict became public. Eventually, under pressure from the worker press, The Offering folded.

The strategy was sophisticated: control the story, document the evidence, build the coalition. Workers were sharing information, building solidarity, and resisting "algorithmic control" before algorithms existed. Today’s workers are using the same playbook against digital management systems - sharing pay data on Glassdoor and Blind, documenting algorithmic bias through internal leaks and EEOC filings, and building coalitions through Slack, WhatsApp, and Discord to counter opaque AI-driven performance and scheduling tools.

The Invisible Hand (That Voted)

When the legislature declined to act, the LFLRA targeted Representative Schouler for defeat. The women couldn't vote. But they could organize, publish, and persuade those who could.

Schouler lost his next election. The LFLRA noted with satisfaction that voters had "consigned William Schouler to the obscurity he so justly deserves." (He was re-elected the following year. Progress is rarely linear.)

The petitions continued. More signatures. More hearings. More legislative inaction. But the political pressure mounted. In 1847, the mills reduced hours by 30 minutes. In 1853, the workday dropped to eleven hours. By 1874, Massachusetts had its ten-hour law.

It took thirty years. The women who started the fight didn't see it finished. But it won’t have happened with them starting it.

After Lowell

Bagley left the mills in 1846, her health declining. She became superintendent of the Lowell telegraph office, probably the first female telegraph operator in the United States.

When she discovered she was paid less than her male counterparts, she quit. "The world is quite satisfied with the present arrangement," she wrote to a friend, "and we can only protest against such a state of things."

She continued writing and organizing, working on prison reform, women's rights, healthcare, and peace activism. She collected 146 signatures on a petition to Congress calling for an international tribunal to resolve disputes without war. She eventually married a homeopathic physician and practiced medicine herself.

She died in 1889, largely forgotten. No photographs survive. Her exact birthdate was disputed until recent scholarship settled on April 19, 1806.

The Pattern

Consider what the Lowell women established:

Collective action: The LFLRA was the first union of working women in America. It proved women could organize systematically. Today’s examples include Starbucks union movement, starting with one store in Buffalo and scaled into a national movement. Today it may be even easier to create a coalition given the ability to “digitally” organize and share common grievances.

Documentary evidence: The petitions, testimonies, and publications created a record that couldn't be dismissed. Today, we need to worry about “fake” information. In fact, this has become such an issue that New York City’s Local Law 144 requires a bias audit so that we validate and verify information.

Legislative engagement: They demonstrated that workers could use political process, even without the vote. Today, workers and advocates increasingly pursue change through public rulemaking, city/state legislation, and sector-specific governance aimed at algorithmic control.

Counter-narrative: They built their own media to challenge corporate messaging. Today’s issues are complex given the rise of AI. An interesting example is the Writers Guild public guidance on their 2023 contract AI Provisions - explicitly framing what studios can and cannot do with AI as a writing tool.

Accountability: They targeted hostile legislators and helped defeat them. Today, accountability mechanisms now include audit-and-disclose regimes, negotiated AI guardrails, and public enforcement hooks.

Every subsequent labor movement borrowed from this playbook.

Today's Mill Girls

Here's the uncomfortable parallel.

The Department of Labor introduced new rules in 2024 to address gig worker classification. The intent: ensure that workers who are economically dependent on a single company receive proper labor protections. The new framework emphasized multiple factors: Does the worker have true independence? Can they profit from their own decisions? Do they work for multiple clients?

In May 2025, we took a step backwards and the administration rolled back worker protections. The Department of Labor announced it would no longer enforce these rules, directing companies instead to rely on older, more "business-friendly" guidance. The stated reason: the rules were "too restrictive." Companies needed "flexibility."

Schouler would recognize the argument. So would Bagley.

The European Union took a different approach. The Platform Work Directive creates a presumption of employment for platform workers who meet certain criteria. If the platform controls how you work, you're presumed to be an employee until proven otherwise.

Spain went even further, establishing a rebuttable presumption that delivery workers are employees.

The burden of proof shifts to the company.

The question Bagley asked in 1845 remains the same question in 2026: Does the law protect workers, or does it protect the fiction that workers are independent when they're actually controlled?

The Surveillance Question

There's another parallel worth noting.

Mill owners in the 1840s controlled workers through constant oversight. Company boardinghouses enforced moral codes. Foremen monitored behavior. Time was measured by factory bells, not personal discretion.

Today, 78% of companies use employee monitoring tools. By 2025, according to Gartner, 70% of large corporations had implemented employee monitoring. AI-powered "bossware" now tracks keystrokes, measures "productive" time, analyzes communication for "sentiment," and assigns daily productivity scores.

A 2024 ExpressVPN survey found that 61% of businesses use AI-powered analytics to evaluate employee performance, and more importantly, their location if they are a remote worker using Teams. These systems can now make decisions autonomously. As one researcher noted, "Surveillance systems now can completely remove humans from the loop."

Over 56% of employees report that being monitored stresses them out. Workers are fighting back with mouse jigglers and other workarounds. The battle between monitoring software and employee ingenuity echoes the speedups and stretch-outs of the 1840s.

Sarah Bagley asked: "Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand girls in Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it?"

Today's version might be: Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that workers use mouse jigglers because they're lazy, rather than because the monitoring is dehumanizing?

What Got Measured

The Lowell women forced the first government investigation into labor conditions. They demanded that someone count the hours, document the hazards, and record the testimony.

That act of measurement was itself radical. As the “father of modern management”, Peter Drucker subsequently stated: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

Today's measurement crisis is different but related. We measure productivity obsessively. We measure hours (or at least hours that appear active on screen). We measure keystrokes, email volume, application usage.

What don't we measure?

• Worker wellbeing

• Engagement and perceived fairness

• Sustainable productivity (as opposed to extractive productivity)

• The value of judgment, creativity, and collaboration that doesn't register in activity logs

• The cost of turnover driven by surveillance-induced stress

The mill owners measured output per loom. They didn't measure the cost of "brown lung" disease, the lost productivity from exhaustion, or the social cost of a transient workforce that left before organizing could take root.

What you choose to measure reveals what you value. What you refuse to measure reveals what you're willing to ignore.

Your Sphere of Influence

Last month, we asked you to pick one problem you could address in your sphere of influence. The Lowell women offer a model.

What Bagley Did	What You Might Try
Documented actual conditions vs. the company narrative	Audit the gap between your organization's stated policies and lived employee experience
Built coalitions across mill towns	Connect with peers in other organizations facing similar challenges
Created alternative media (Voice of Industry)	Document and share what you learn (internally or externally)
Engaged the political process despite lacking the vote	Advocate for policies even when you lack formal authority
Targeted accountable decision-makers	Identify who actually has power over the practices you want to change

Bagley started by writing one sarcastic essay about the "pleasures" of factory life. Four years later, she was leading a national movement.

She didn't wait for permission. She didn't have institutional backing. She had a pen, collaborators, moral clarity, civic purpose, stamina, resilience, and a willingness to document and express what she saw.

The Question That Remains

"Why should workers toil from thirteen to fourteen hours per day, without time for mental culture or social enjoyment?" Bagley asked. "Capitalists say they cannot afford justice. We say they cannot afford injustice."

The ten-hour day that Bagley fought for is now quaint. The forty-hour week came and went. "Flexible" work now means always-available work for many. Productivity tools meant to liberate often monitor and constrain. Yet today’s “agency” is often illusory. Workers are asked to believe they choose when and how they work, even as pervasive digital measurement systems track every click, keystroke, and idle moment and constrain behavior more tightly than the time clocks and overseers Bagley fought against.

The question isn't whether the details have changed. Of course they have. The question is whether the pattern has.

Are workers visible to the system that employs them, or just their outputs? Do they have voice, or just the illusion of choice? When they organize, does power respond, or merely adapt new strategies of control?

Bagley didn't answer those questions permanently. Nobody does. Each generation re-asks them in the context of its own technology, its own economy, its own political moment.

The mill girls couldn't vote, couldn't hold property, couldn't speak in public without scandal. They organized anyway. They documented it anyway. They testified anyway. They won anyway, eventually, long after the original organizers had moved on.

If Sarah Bagley could do this with a pen and courage, what will you do with the tools of today to make a difference?

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This is the second post in our 2026 series "What Have We Learned?" Next month: Blood in the Streets. The most violent era in American labor history, and what it took to secure the rights we now take for granted.