Mary Kenney O’Sullivan

• Mary Kenney O'Sullivan
• Born: January 8, 1864
• Died: January 18, 1943

Labor leader and feminist, was born in Hannibal, Missouri, the third of four children and second daughter of Michael Kenney and Mary (Kelly) Kenney, who had emigrated in the 1850s from Ireland to the United States, where they had married and worked their way westward in a construction gang. Michael Kenney became a railroad machinist in Hannibal. Raised in a small town atmosphere where she felt little overt evidence of sharp economic distinction, Mary Kenney began her education at a convent school and finished it in the fourth grade of a public elementary school. After her father died she helped support the family, first as an apprentice dressmaker, then in a printing and binding company. She became a supervisor after four years, migrating with the company to Keokuk, Iowa, where the plant shut down, forcing her to find work as a binder in Chicago.

This experience in the 1880s was a prelude to her life as a trade unionist. The conditions under which women worked in binderies convinced her of the need for trade union action. She joined a social club of women workers and made contact with the Women’s Federal Union Number 2703, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, organized a budding union of women bookbinders, and became a delegate to the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly. She began a friendship with Jane Addams, who held out the promise of continuing aid for organizing women. The bookbinders began to meet at Hull House and, with Addams, Kenney started an eating house for working women. (At her own expense Jane Addams printed prounion literature which she then handed out at lunchtime to the working women.) Kenney left Chicago for a while in 1892 to accept an appointment by Samuel Gompers as the first woman general organizer of the AFL; she worked for unionization among garment workers, printers, carpet weavers, and other tradespeople in New York and Massachusetts. Suspicious of feminist involvement in the labor movement, the AFL failed in 1893 to extend her contract, and she continued her work in the Chicago garment industry in coordination with Hull House. During three months in Springfield, the state capital, she helped lobby for the first factory law passed by the Illinois legislature. Enacted in 1893, it called for protective measures for working women and children—social reformer Florence Kelley became the head factory inspector, and Kenney was appointed her assistant. Kenney’s attempt to persuade the legislature to pass a woman suffrage act was unsuccessful.

On her tour for the AFL Kenney had met Jack O’sullivan, a trade union activist and labor editor of the Boston Globe, whom she married in 1894. Samuel Gompers was a witness at the ceremony. They lived briefly at the Denison House social settlement, in a poor area of Boston, where they had four children. O’sullivan, who tried to support his wife’s work as an organizer in every way, died in an accident in 1902.

After her move to Boston, Mary O’sullivan built a new labor career, working in the laundry, garment, and rubber industries in conjunction with the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union along with Mary Morton Kehew, a feminist social reformer. She became executive secretary of the Union for Industrial Progress, which she organized to investigate industrial working conditions. After her husband’s death, she supplemented her income by managing property and collecting rents. Real-estate activity also had its altruistic possibilities. The Ellis Memorial was a renovated tenement in South Boston, one of many entrepreneurial attempts to improve housing for the poor. O’sullivan managed it and used its basement to teach the English language and subjects such as housekeeping to the residents. In the summers, she worked with Denison House to run a camp for young working women in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

In 1903, at the Boston convention of the AFL, she launched what was perhaps the most significant venture of her life. With the approval of Samuel Gompers, O’sullivan helped found the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL), which promoted trade union organization among women as well as legislation protecting them in the factory. The league also had an interest in white-collar women workers. She became the first secretary, and soon afterward the league’s first vice president.

In its early years especially the league tended toward dependence upon the AFL, which opposed the bitter strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. Led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the strike aroused the antileftist feelings of not only the labor officialdom but of the general public. Although friendly with Gompers, O’sullivan was an independent spirit, having associated closely with committed progressives outside of the trade unions like Jane Addams, she felt that the strikers had serious and valid complaints. She ignored the initial diffidence of the NWTUL in Boston toward the strike, and, taking the lead in placing the IWW in contact with a legislative committee, made a personal and successful plea for the strikers to the president of the American Woolen Company.

With the outbreak of World War I, O’sullivan became a factory inspector for the Labor Department of Massachusetts, work she continued until 1934. Critical of the war and of American entry into it, she became a member of the new Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She also spoke in the campaign for prohibition, a cause she had favored for some time. Late in her life she was briefly married to a man named Tierney.

Mary O’sullivan was a pioneer labor organizer among women. Through Hull House in Chicago and other activities in Boston she tied her factory work to other reforms and to the general movement for social reform that is known today as progressivism. Her early leadership of the NWTUL was an important contribution toward institutionalizing the place of women within the labor movement. She also embraced feminism and resistance to war. This catholicity, as well as her individual efforts as a trade unionist, make her an important social reformer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College has an autobiography; Notable American Women contains a bibliography. See also A. Henry, Women and the Labor Movement (1923); A. F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform (1967); S. Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, I (1925); and K. K. Sklar, “Florence Kelley: Resources and Achievements” (1981). An obituary appeared in the Boston Globe, January 19, 1943.