“I refused to do a man’s job without a man’s pay.”
Mary Kenney O’Sullivan was born on January 8, 1864 in
Hannibal, Missouri. She was working
class Irish and began her formal schooling at age nine but in her early teens
she left school and became a dressmaker and then worked in a printing and
binding factory in Missouri and several binderies in the Chicago area. She was supporting her invalid mother after
the death of her father. She learned
every job available to a woman and became a forewoman. She knew the working conditions to be
horrible and this propelled her to organize her co-workers to form a
union. She established the Chicago
Women’s Bindery Workers’ Union finding much support for this union from Jane
Adams and Hull-House where she did volunteer work. In 1891 she was appointed the first woman
general organizer of the American Federation of Labor, appointed by Samuel
Gompers. During the time she held this
post she organized garment workers in New York City and Troy, New York, and
printers, binders, shoe workers and carpet weavers in Massachusetts. This led
her to travel extensively throughout New York, Massachusetts and Illinois
organizing women’s unions.
In 1894 she married John F. O’Sullivan the labor editor for
the Boston Globe. They had four children
but Mary continued her labor work, organizing local rubber makers and laundry
workers speaking frequently at union meeting.
In 1902 John was run over by a train leaving Mary to support
herself and their three children, which she did, while still remaining in the
forefront of the labor movement. At the
age of fifty she became a factory inspector for the Massachusetts Department of
Labor and Industries, a position she held through her seventies.
