O'Sullivan, Mary Kenney (1864–1943)

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O'Sullivan, Mary Kenney (1864–1943)

American labor organizer. Name variations: Mary Kenney. Born Mary Kenney in Hannibal, Missouri, on January 8, 1864; died in West Medford, Massachusetts, on January 18, 1943; one of four children of Michael Kenney and Mary (Kelly) Kenney; married John (Jack) F. O'Sullivan, on October 10, 1894; children: four, one of whom died in infancy.

Founded Chicago Women's Bindery Union No. 1 (1891); appointed first woman organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL, 1892); cofounded Union for Industrial Progress, part of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston (1894); was executive secretary, Union for Industrial Progress (1894–1903); co-founded National Women's Trade Union League (WTUL, 1903); served as WTULnational secretary (1903–06), treasurer (1907), and vice-president (1909–11); served as factory inspector, Massachusetts State Board of Labor and Industries (1914–34).

Mary Kenney O'Sullivan was born in 1864 in Hannibal, Missouri, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She went to work at the age of fourteen after only five years of schooling. As the only child still at home when her father died, O'Sullivan would support her invalid mother for the next 20 years. She started out as an apprentice dressmaker but soon went to work in a bookbindery. There, she rose to forewoman in four years and went to Keokuk, Iowa, when her firm closed its plant in Hannibal. By the late 1880s, O'Sullivan was in Chicago, working in a large bookbindery.

After her years as a bookbinder, a trade famous for limiting women's access to the higher-paid and more skilled facets of production, O'Sullivan felt that only through organization

could women hope to advance in the craft. She soon became a leader of the Chicago labor movement and in 1891 organized her fellow women binders into their first union. O'Sullivan lived at Hull House for a time and became friends with its founder, Jane Addams . In 1892, AFL president Samuel Gompers appointed O'Sullivan the first women's organizer. She spent several months organizing women in various trades in New York and Massachusetts but had limited success, due in part to the ambivalence of the AFL regarding the unionization of women. Returning to Chicago, O'Sullivan joined with Florence Kelley and other Hull House activists in agitating for a factory inspection law. In 1893, the Illinois legislation passed such a law, and O'Sullivan was appointed a deputy inspector.

In 1894, Mary Kenney married John O'Sullivan, a Boston labor leader. In Boston, she gave birth to four children (one of whom died in infancy), and continued to organize workers and develop contacts with middle- and upper-class women who were interested in labor issues. In 1894, along with Mary Morton Kehew , president of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, O'Sullivan organized the Union for Industrial Progress, which sought to investigate the conditions of labor for women in Boston. During the 1890s, both O'Sullivans were leaders of the Boston trade union movement and part of the labor reform community based in Denison House, a Boston settlement. Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, with the encouragement of her husband and the support of elite women reformers, organized women laundry workers, garment makers, and rubber workers. As Denison House co-founder and Wellesley College professor Vida Dutton Scudder later remembered, O'Sullivan was "a noble young woman on fire for her cause."

In 1902, John O'Sullivan died, and Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, with three children to support, took a job managing a model tenement. Along with William English Walling, a New York settlement house worker, O'Sullivan founded the Women's Trade Union League in 1903. The League, which sought to organize women workers and agitated for protective labor legislation, included working-class, middle- and upper-class women in its membership. O'Sullivan, the original secretary and an early vice-president, left the League in 1912 in protest over its lack of support for the striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In 1914, she became one of five women factory inspectors appointed to the newly created Massachusetts State Board of Labor and Industries. O'Sullivan was also an advocate of women's suffrage and an active pacifist. In 1926, she traveled to Dublin, Ireland, as a delegate to the annual conference of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She retired at the age of 70 and died of heart disease nine years later, in 1943, at her West Medford home.