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Leonora O’Reilly
Leonora O’Reilly (February 16, 1870 – April 3, 1927) was an Irish-American trade union organizer, feminist and suffragist. She came from a working class background but became a full-time organizer of the Women's Trade Union League in 1909. She is noted as one of the original executive board members of the League.

Early years
Leonora O’Reilly was born in New York City to Irish immigrants John and Winifred (Rooney) O’Reilly. Her father had been a printer by trade and was naturalized in 1861 as a result of his early immigration to the United States. However, he passed away when Leonora O’Reilly was only one year old, and as a result, her garment-worker mother had to work longer hours to support the family.

Early Influences and Mentorship
Leonora O’Reilly attended public schools for a period of time but also received a lot of guidance under two different groups of acquaintances and friends – the first group consisted of working-class intellectuals of her father’s generation while the second group was made up of middle-class social reformers.

John Hubert, who O’Reilly called Uncle B, is noted as having been one of her most important early influences. Hubert was a French-born machinist of intellectual bent and had been influential in converting Leonora O’Reilly’s father to subscribe to socialism. Hubert was a member of the Knights of Labor and he made arrangements for O’Reilly to join the order in 1886. He ensured that she entered the radical inner circle that was active among the New York Knights – O’Reilly was sixteen at the time. One of the leaders of the circle, a French-born intellectual and Knights of Labor activist by the name of Victor Drury (1825-1918), became O’Reilly’s lifelong friend as well as mentor.

O’Reilly also received tutelage under Edward King (1846-1922) during the 1880s. King was a Scottish-born type founder who was active in New York’s Central Labor Union and as a disciple of August Comte, he gained a substantial following through lecturing at the Educational Alliance on New York’s Lower East side. O’Reilly participated in his reading group (or by some accounts a self-education group), the Synthetic Circle. On some accounts, it was at the Synthetic Circle, rather, that O’Reilly met Victor Drury.

O’Reilly was also supported and guided by middle-class women and reformers. Through speaking for the Knights of Labor in Boston, O’Reilly met one of her first middle-class acquaintances, Louise S.W. Perkins, a schoolteacher of Massachusetts. As a philanthropist and activist, Perkins had taken up the cause of labor reform in 1867. Perkins recognized the potential O’Reilly had and over the course of the next four decades, the two women became friends and correspondents. Perkins also played a key role as Leonora O’Reilly’s benefactor.

Working Women’s Society and the Social Reform Club
Early in her Knights of Labor days, O’Reilly started to hold meetings in New York with women workers and in 1888, with the support and guidance of Louise Perkins and her friend Josephine Shaw Lowell, a leader in organized charity, the Working Women’s Society was created. The first public meeting of the Working Women’s Society was held on February 2, 1888. The aims and activities of the Working Women’s Society led by O’Reilly can be considered a precursor to the Women’s Trade Union League, of which O’Reilly would become a part of the first Executive Board. As part of the Society, women workers discussed the underpayment, overwork and abuse which many of them faced and sought remedies. Notably, the Society was successful in helping to secure the passage of a New York state law in 1890 that provided for women factory inspectors. Their work and activities also led directly to Lowell’s founding of the Consumers’ League in 1890, which aimed to make consumers bear some responsibility for industrial conditions.

Louise Perkins also introduced Leonora O’Reilly to the Social Reform Club, a New York organization founded in 1894 by Edward King, among others. The group included labor leaders and reformers concerned with industrial working conditions and committed to discussing the political economy. O’Reilly joined the Social Reform Club and was elected as vice president in 1897, serving alongside Annie Winsor. While she maintained a high level of involvement in these groups, O'Reilly continued to work ten-hours a day at a shirtwaist factory, organizing a local of the United Garment Workers of America in 1897.

O’Reilly tirelessly followed a weekly schedule - she not only worked six days a week as a forewoman in George W. Bellamy’s shirtwaist factory to support herself, she also attended meetings of the Social Reform Club twice a week, engaged with weekly King’s Synthetic Circle gatherings and took evening classes at the YWCA in business methods and “physical culture”.

Henry Street experimental workers cooperative
O’Reilly’s carefully planned weekly schedule was disrupted a year later, in 1897, as her middle-class friends, with Louise Perkins at the lead, undertook to provide her with a year’s financial support so that O’Reilly’s potential as a reformer would not be sacrificed to her laboring hours at the shirtwaist factory. This financial support allowed Leonora O’Reilly to engage in what her benefactors considered a more useful undertaking, the fruits of which emerged in the form of a workers cooperative. Their experimental cooperative shirtwaist shop opened in the fall of 1897 at Lillian Wald’s Nurses’ Settlement on Henry Street. O’Reilly managed the cooperative, which sought to train young women with marketable skills. The shirtwaist shop survived for only a year but its establishment marked a pivotal moment as O’Reilly never returned to factory work after.

Industrial education
With Louise Perkins’ continued financial support, O’Reilly enrolled in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, hoping to gain certification as a teacher in the expanding department of industrial education. She took a two-year course (1898 – 1900) in domestic arts at the Institute and served as head resident of Asacog House, a Brooklyn settlement house, during her second year. O’Reilly continued working in that position for two years after her graduation in 1900 and fostered another enduring friendship, that of Mary Dreier, a woman five years Leonora O’Reilly’s junior and who was a member of the settlement’s board at the time.

After leaving Asacog House in 1902, O’Reilly worked at the New Manhattan Trade School for Girls, acting as a supervisor for machine sewing instruction. In the following seven years, she became highly involved in the wider movement for industrial education, which she distinguished from trade training. O’Reilly sought to nurture the intellectual development of her students and included discussions of Aristotle and Emerson in her department; she considered it more important for her students to be able to gage the meaning and value of their work than to be trained in specific skills that would prepare them for employment.

Women’s Trade Union League
Leonora O’Reilly is also credited with taking part in the 1903 founding of the national Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), a coalition of middle and working-class women that was committed to bringing women into the organized labor movement. On account of her work at the New Manhattan Trade School for girls, the WTUL for a time took second place for O’Reilly. However, William English Walling, who had co-founded the national WTUL and was a key mover in the organization of the New York branch of the League, made an effort to have Leonora O’Reilly appointed to the original executive boards of both. Walling sought O’Reilly’s advice and it was upon her suggestion that Mary and Margaret Dreier were brought in as middle-class members. O’Reilly was thus integral in bringing in two of the women who would become major leaders of the WTUL.

O’Reilly’s ambivalence towards the League reflected what she regarded as a conflict between her working class background and her work in a women’s organization. She was a feminist and valued sisterhood but at one point also denounced the League as an elitist organization that did not hold the interests of working-class people. She vacillated between insisting that the League should not interfere in union affairs and emphasizing that the League should enact its policies in an autonomous manner. Her difficulty in resolving these conflicts led her to peremptorily resign from the national and New York leagues in December 1905. Alternatively, another source claims that her resignation resulted from her disgust at the League’s unwillingness to repudiate a book written by Dorothy Richardson called The Long Day, which O’Reilly considered gave a misguided perspective on the life of working women in New York and was an example of the exploitation of working-class women by middle class League members. It was her friend Mary Dreier who helped to bridge the divide and in late 1907, Dreier was able to convince O’Reilly to accept an annuity from her, allowing her to be free from the burdens of self-support, and to return to the New York League. Although Leonora O’Reilly continued until 1909 to commit her time and efforts to the Manhattan Trade School, she increasingly prioritized the Women’s Trade Union League. She became a full-time organizer of the WTUL in 1909, serving as the vice president of the New York branch from 1909 to 1914. O’Reilly also sat on the board of the national league from 1909 to 1911 and occasionally took part in special missions such as helping to bolster the shaky Kansas City branch in 1912.

O’Reilly’s main contributions to the WTUL involved her work in New York City. As a WTUL activist, she was engaged in picketing and fund-raising and helped to organize strikes, including the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909. Following the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the New York branch of the WTUL led the campaign to mobilize the shocked community into exposing the safety and sanitation abuses that occurred in factories, as well as to urge for corrective legislation to be enacted. O’Reilly chaired the league’s investigation committee that examined fire and safety conditions.

Leonora O’Reilly was recognized as an impactful public speaker who was able to effectively instill group loyalty and convey the principles of trade unionism to her labor audiences. She also served as a bridge between the working and middle-class as she was adept at communicating the needs and outlook of the laboring classes to the middle-class. O’Reilly felt strongly that working-class women should not be intimidated by the educational and financial advantages that some of the upper-class members had. She was vocal in expressing her disdain towards college women who entered the labor movement bearing lofty ideals of sisterhood and solidarity but who were ignorant about the realities of working for a living as well as labor organizing.

Suffrage work
O’Reilly was also a suffragist and advocated for women’s civil rights. She stressed the need for women to attain the vote to gain economic equality and protect their rights. From 1909 onwards until New York State successfully granted women’s suffrage in 1917, in the capacity that she could, O’Reilly worked to convert and activate working-class votes. Through the Wage Earners’ Suffrage League, which she founded and led beginning in 1911, O’Reilly organized street corner and mass meetings, located effective working-class speakers and galvanized strong contingents of working women to join the suffrage parades. She affiliated her own League first with New York’s Woman Suffrage Party, in which she was appointed chair of the industrial committee in 1912, and later with the New York branch of the Women’s Trade Union League.

A progressive for her times, Leonora O’Reilly also took a stand for black rights. Concerned with lynching and the exclusion of the black vote, as early as 1906, she attended meetings of the Constitution League (an interracial civil rights organization founded by John E. Milholland) and joined the National Negro Conference of 1909 which led to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Later years
Beginning in 1910, O’Reilly was also an active member of the Socialist party but was disillusioned by their factionalism. However, like many on the political left, Leonora was an advocate of peace and was critical of the United States’ entry into World War I. In 1915, she served as a delegate to the International Congress of Women at The Hague. Also known as the Women’s Peace Congress, the meeting brought delegates from twelve countries together to discuss proposals to bring the war to an end through negotiation. O’Reilly also attended the 1919 International Congress in Washington but her declining health reduced her role in the undertakings. A weak heart limited O’Reilly’s involvement in both the International Congress of Women and the Women’s Trade Union League and she stepped down from her post in the WTUL in 1914.

In her later years Leonora O’Reilly nursed her friend and mentor Victor Drury before he passed away in 1918. Leonora O’Reilly remained active in her final years, teaching a course on “Problems and Progress of Labor” at the New School for Social Research from 1925 to 1926 before she died of heart disease in New York City on April 3, 1927.