Reading through the digitized version of Mary Kenney O’Sullivan’s unpublished autobiography provides more than a glimpse of her personality. Her sense of humor, her passion for justice, and her fearlessness are apparent. Several times while reading her anecdotes, I thought, “this woman was afraid of NOBODY.” While she admitted to feeling intimidated by upper class women before she met the great Jane Addams, she seemed to have had a powerful sense of self-worth and self-respect that no ill treatment or condescension could diminish. She even described a childhood incident, where she refused to return to the private Catholic school where the nuns held her back a grade, as “my first strike.” But it’s her encounter with the legendary Susan B. Anthony in 1893 that really surprised and impressed me.
On pages 94 and 95 of her autobiography, Mary talks about the wonders of the Chicago World’s Fair. Fellow fans of The History Chicks podcast will know that “all roads lead to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893,” since so many of the historical women they speak of have a connection at this event. I was delighted to find Mary’s description of the fair as “a peep into the Book of Knowledge.” She writes,
“A part of every corner of the world was brought to us in Chicago. To a young girl with as limited an international background as I had, it was a miraculous opportunity. Lecturers came from all over the world and lectured on every phase of life.”
She might have been young (29) but she had already been sought out to come to Boston to expand the organization of wage-earning women there; and she’d been a close friend of the famous Jane Addams for about a decade by this point. So when she name-drops Addams and two other leaders of the Woman’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary, it’s not very shocking. She goes on to express how happy she was to have been given admittance to all the exhibitions and lectures, and how grateful she felt. But her next name-drop felt rather abrupt as she starts the next paragraph: “One night Miss Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Florence Kelley and I were speaking at the fair from the same platform. ” The first time I read that, I laughed in surprise, my mouth dropped open, and as I read it again I could hear the voice of The History Chicks co-host Beckett Graham in my head, remarking “Like you do.”
Not only does this unworldly 29-year-old factory forewoman share the platform with the 73-year-old éminence grise of the women’s suffrage movement, she makes sure to show her what’s what. According to Mary,
“Miss Anthony had always been opposed to unions and strikes. Her subject that night was “Suffrage” and mine was “The Value of Labor Organizations”. It was a hot, sultry August evening. The lecture building had a low ceiling. There had been a rain storm in the late afternoon, and the janitor had closed all the windows, which were very high. Mrs. Kelley, Miss Anthony and myself arrived at the hall and found the heat intolerable. The janitor refused to open the windows. I suggested to Mrs. Kelley and Miss Anthony that we see the manager, but he also thought it wasn’t necessary to open the windows for a few hours. I suggested to my two co-workers that we refuse to speak till the windows were opened. They agreed and we had our way. I couldn’t resist the opportunity of reminding Miss Anthony that we had just won a strike.“
I have searched extensively for the speeches that Anthony, Kenney, Kelley would have given on that hot August night, to no avail. I have found confirmation that not only did Susan B. Anthony spend most of 1893 at the event, but also that the National American Woman Suffrage Association held meetings there between August 7 and 12 as part of a Congress on Government. The earlier World’s Congress of Representative Women, held in May, has documented the speech Anthony gave that was written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. That and Mary Kenney’s speech from May 1893 were captured in a book edited by May Eliza Wright Sewall, The World’s Congress of Representative Women, vol. 2, Chicago: Rand and McNally, 1894. The wonderful Speaking While Female Speech Bank created by Dana Rubin has Mary’s May speech in its entirety here: https://speakingwhilefemale.co/jobs-kenney/.
Just as Mary insisted on the dignity of the other speakers and herself by getting those windows opened in the lecture hall, her speech called on women to learn, and then to act, and not to accept the miserable and demeaning conditions found in so many unorganized factory operations, which she called, “wholesale prostitution, crime, and degradation.” It was clear to me that someone who made no bones about publicly referring to factories as “no better than slave prisons” was not going to be intimidated by the opinions of the famous Miss Anthony, nor anyone else.
Quotes from pages 94-95 of the unpublished autobiography of Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, 1936, part of the Papers of Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, 1892-1943, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Mass.
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