Irish-American Labor Leader Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (1864-1943)

This Labor Day we celebrate Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (1864-1943), a nationally acclaimed union organizer who lived in Boston for 50 years.

A plaque in her honor is featured in the Women's Portrait Gallery next to Doric Hall at the Massachusetts State House. She and other Irish items at the State House are part of the Boston Irish Heritage Trail.

Born in 1864 in Hannibal, Missouri to Irish immigrant parents, Mary and her widowed mother moved to Chicago in 1888, where she immediately began organizing women working in the cigar-making, printing and bookbinding industries.

After spending a year in New York City as the American Federation of Labor's first salaried woman organizer, she was enlisted by Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, to organize women workers in Massachusetts, and she moved to Boston in 1893.

Here she married John O'Sullivan, labor editor at The Boston Globe, and settled in the South End. She began organizing rubber makers, shoe makers and laundry and garment workers, where women were poorly paid and suffered bad working conditions.

She was widowed in 1903 with three children, but continued to organize labor unions, helping to create the National Women's Trade Union League in New York City. She traveled to other Massachusetts cities like New Bedford and to Lawrence, where she was a strong supporter of the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike by the city's 30,000 textile workers.

At the State House, Mary is one of six Massachusetts women honored in an exhibit entitled "Hear Us," created in 1999 by artists Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Susan Sellers. The bronze busts of the women were developed with Robert Shure of Skylight Studios, the artist for the Boston Irish Famine Memorial.

The literature that accompanies this exhibit, written by Ellen K. Rothman of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, describes Mary Kenny O'Sullivan in this way:

"As leader of the WTUL, Mary O'Sullivan forged alliances between middle-and working-class women. A leader in Massachusetts reform circles, she focused her efforts on woman suffrage, housing for the poor, prohibition, and pacifism. However, her highest priority remained the advancement of working women.

For more about women in Boston, visit the Women's Heritage Trail here.

Mary Kenny O'Sullivan's collected papers are included at Harvard University Library.

For more information on Irish heritage in Massachusetts, visit IrishHeritageTrail.com.

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