The bindery floor is loud with the clatter of stitching machines. A young woman sets type and folds signatures, her hands quick, her wages short.
It is 1892.
She does not just work in the Chicago binderies. She organizes the women beside her into a bookbinders’ union and pushes them to demand better.
She does not just build one local. She catches the attention of the American Federation of Labor, which is widely recorded as having named her its first woman general organizer that year, sending her east to reach women no one else was reaching.
She does not just recruit garment workers and shoe stitchers. She carries the organizing effort into Massachusetts and beyond, working the mill towns where labor had long been treated as endless and cheap.
She does not just agitate for wages. She helps found an institution meant to bind working women and reform-minded allies together, a national body that would outlast any single strike.
Her Spark of Liberty was a builder’s insistence that the hands doing the work should shape the terms of it.
She had grown up around tools and trades, and she treated organizing itself as a craft to be learned and practiced. A union was something you assembled piece by piece, member by member, meeting by meeting. She believed that women workers would not be organized for by others but had to be organized with, brought into halls and onto committees where they spoke for themselves. That conviction, plain and stubborn, ran through every campaign she joined.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
She was born in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1864, and went to work young in the printing and binding trades. She moved to Chicago, where by the early 1890s she was organizing women in the bookbinding shops. During those years she spent time at Hull House, the settlement founded by Jane Addams on Halsted Street, which became a base for her labor work. In 1892 the American Federation of Labor appointed her as an organizer, and she traveled to cities including New York and Boston to build unions among women in the garment, printing, and shoe industries.
She married a Boston labor journalist in 1894 and continued her work in Massachusetts. She was involved in factory inspection and in efforts to enforce safety and hour laws. By some accounts her attention to workplace conditions was sharpened by the industrial disasters of the era, though the record ties her most firmly to the ongoing, less dramatic labor of inspection and organizing rather than to any single event.
In 1903, at the AFL convention in Boston, she helped found the National Women’s Trade Union League, an organization pairing wage-earning women with middle-class reformers to support women’s unionization. She served in its early leadership. She remained active in labor and reform circles for decades, and in her later years held a state position in Massachusetts related to industrial safety inspection, according to accounts of her career. She died in 1943.
Her name was Mary Kenney O’Sullivan.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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