Mary Morton Kimball Kehew
Mary Morton Kimball Kehew was a prominent labor organizer and education reformer born in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 19th century. As the daughter of a wealthy banker and the granddaughter of a former governor, she was well-placed to influence social reform. Kehew dedicated her efforts to improving the lives of young women transitioning from rural to urban settings, becoming involved with the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, where she played a critical role in promoting vocational training and supporting women's rights in the labor market.
Under her leadership, the union not only offered employment counseling but also advocated for welfare legislation and organized efforts to improve working conditions for women. Kehew was instrumental in founding the National Women's Trade Union League in 1905, working to empower women in various industries, including laundry and garment work. Her commitment to trade unionism, along with her pioneering work in educational opportunities for women, distinguished her as a key figure in the progressive reform movement.
Throughout her life, Kehew engaged in numerous reform activities, reflecting her broad social reform interests. She passed away in Boston at the age of fifty-eight, leaving behind a legacy of advocacy for women's rights and labor reform that resonated within her community and beyond.
Subject Terms
Mary Morton Kimball Kehew
- Mary Morton Kimball Kehew
- Born: September 8, 1859
- Died: February 13, 1918
Labor organizer and education reformer, was born in Boston, the third of five daughters and the fourth of eight children of Moses Day Kimball and Susan Tillinghast (Morton) Kimball, both of whose ancestors had emigrated to New England in the seventeenth century. Her maternal grandfather, Marcus Morton, was governor of Massachusetts. Her father, a Unitarian, became wealthy as a banker and merchant. Mary Kimball attended private schools and studied in Germany, France, and Italy for two years before marrying William Brown Kehew, a Boston trader in oil. They had no children.
Mary Kehew’s first reform project was educating young women from rural areas who were new to urban life. In 1886 she joined the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston (WEIU), then nine years old; she became a director in 1890 and president in 1892. Under her leadership the union continued to offer young women a social milieu as well as employment counseling and assistance in legal matters, but it began to focus on encouraging independence by providing vocational training in such fields as dressmaking, housekeeping, and sales techniques. The union also sponsored programs of education and research in social issues and began to urge welfare legislation and to assist various humanitarian efforts in the era of progressive reform activism. (Simmons College in Boston, established in 1902, with Kehew as an influential trustee, absorbed the union’s sales and housekeeping schools.) The union gave birth as well to activities that gained their own special organizational forms, such as the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind.
Kehew’s interests in reform included the defense of trade unions. Through one of her sisters, she induced Mary Kenney (later Mary Kenney O’sullivan), a Chicago bookbinder and Hull House labor activist, to move to Boston in 1892; with the help of the WEIU, the two organized the Union for Industrial Progress (UIP), hoping to engage more women in the labor movement. In the next decade the UIP contributed to trade unionism among female laundry, bookbinding, tobacco, and garment workers in Boston.
Kehew became the first president of the National Women’s Trade Union League in 1905. when it met in conjunction with the American Federation of Labor and elected Jane Addams as its vice president. For the cause of women’s trade unionism, Kehew mobilized arguments from the information supplied by the research department of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, a bureau, begun in 1905, that provided for the United States Bureau of Statistics of Labor data on women’s wages and hours in Boston. Well armed with facts, Kehew and the union pressed for protective legislation dealing with milk sales, sanitary working conditions, inspection of factories, a minimum wage, the regulation of installment buying, and small loans. Kehew served occasionally on administrative bodies directed toward effective enforcement of such legislation.
Kehew was involved in a wide range of reform activities, including the Denison House (a Boston settlement house), the American Park and Outdoor Association, the Civil Service Reform Association, the College Settlements Association, the School Voters’ League, and the Milk and Baby Hygiene Association. Her reform catholicity reflected an identification with the progressive reform impulse in general, as did her determination to employ social scientific methods as a weapon in coping with economic conditions and human need. She differentiated herself from many other progressives, however, by vigorously espousing trade unionism and welfare legislation for women and by furthering the cause of diversified educational training for women. Kehew died in Boston of nephritis at the age of fifty-eight. She was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge.
Pragmatic in negotiating with political bosses and legislators, Kehew did not hesitate to utilize ties, provided by her family background, with professional leaders and the elite society of Boston. She became known to economist and reformer Emily Greene Balch as “the greatest social statesman I have ever known”—a characterization suggesting traits then not stereotypical of a leader of women workers.
The article in Notable American Women (1971) contains a full bibliography. See also the annual reports of the WEIU; the memorial scrapbook on Kehew in the WEIU files; and S. A. Donham, “History of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union” (unpublished ms. at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, 1955); E. M. Johnson, “Labor Progress in Boston,” in E. M. Herlihy, ed., Fifty Years of Boston (1932); G. Boone, The Women’s Trade Union Leagues in Great Britain and the U.S.A. (1942). Editorials and obituaries appeared in the Boston Transcript, February 13, 1918; the Boston Herald and Journal, February 14, 1918; and Life and Labor, April 1918.