The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association

The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) was founded in Lowell, Massachusetts, in January 1845 to advance the interests of the city's female workforce at the state level. It worked and raised funds alongside other local labor groups, including the New England Workingmen's Association and the New England Labor Reform League.

A poetry heading from the Voice of Industry, the newspaper the LFLRA began publishing in 1846. Public domain.

The ten-hour movement

The cause that united the LFLRA with other labor groups was the ten-hour movement: a push for a law limiting the working day in the corporations' mills to ten hours. As factories demanded more work without raising wages, the association pushed back, asking for time to rest and to pursue interests of its members' own.

Petitions to the State House

Petitions to the Massachusetts legislature were one of the association's main tools, and thousands of women signed them in support of better working and living conditions. An 1845 petition for a ten-hour law carried more than 2,000 signatures, and a later one nearly 4,500. For women in the labor and suffrage movements, who could not vote, a petition was one of the most effective ways to show lawmakers how much support a cause had.

A newspaper of their own

From 1846 the LFLRA controlled the Voice of Industry, which became the voice of both the association and the New England Workingmen's Association. Through it, the groups announced events and offered views on everything from war to politics, and its "Female Department" discussed women's rights. It also published creative writing by both men and women, and helped spread the word for the association's petitions.

Sarah Bagley

The association's best-known figure was Sarah Bagley (April 19, 1806 – January 15, 1889), a former mill worker who became a prominent labor organizer, president of the LFLRA, and one of the Voice of Industry's radical editors and writers. Her influence reached beyond Lowell: she helped start Female Labor Reform Association branches in other factory towns, such as Manchester, New Hampshire, hoping that women workers across the Northeast would join together to improve their lives.

No likeness of Sarah Bagley is known. This silhouette of a mill worker is from the Lowell National Historical Park collection.

This article is part of the National Park Service series Women's Activism in Lowell, between "Early Strikes in Lowell" and "The 1910 Convention."

Sources

• National Park Service, "Lowell Female Labor Reform Association" (Lowell National Historical Park): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lflra.htm
• The source gives a year for the start of Bagley's presidency that comes before its founding date for the association; this page states neither as her start date. It also spells "branches" as "braches."