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The Daring Life of Boston Journalist and Activist Mary Boyle O'Reilly (1873-1939)



Journalist, social activist and Boston native Mary Boyle O'Reilly, died on October 21, 1939 at her home in Newton at age 66. The eldest of four girls, she was born in Charlestown on May 18, 1873, and was the daughter Irish patriot and poet John Boyle O'Reilly and Agnes Smiley Murphy.

Her passion for protecting children and young women was a hallmark of her life.  In 1901 O’Reilly helped establish the Guild of St. Elizabeth, a Catholic settlement home for Children in Boston’s South End.  From 1907-1911 she was Massachusetts Prison Commissioner.   In 1910, she went undercover under an assumed name and uncovered the infamous baby farms that housed unwed mothers and their babies under inhumane conditions.  She helped create a law to prevent abuses at these facilities. 

On the labor front, O'Reilly investigated conditions for women working in canneries and also wrote about the women garment strikers in New York in 1913.  

During the World War, she wrote syndicated dispatches from England, France and Russia for the Newspaper Enterprise Associates of America. Her stories appeared in Harper's Magazine, the Boston Pilot, the Boston Globe and other print media.  

According to the New York Times, "she entered Belgium disguised as a peasant at the beginning of the war, was in London for the Zeipplin raids, witnessed the burning of Louvain and was finally imprisoned by the Germans."  When she returned to the United States in 1918, O'Reilly went on the lecture circuit to help raise war relief funds. 

Later in her life, she moved to Aburndale in Newton, Massachusetts and built a small stone cabin in memory of her father, John Boyle O'Reilly. 

She amassed a personal library of more than 1200 volumes, including what she described as a most complete collection of war propaganda books.  A collection of her papers, including correspondence is at the Boston Public Library and many of her journalist writings are at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College.  

She is buried at Hollyhood Cemetery in a plot with her parents and sisters. 

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