Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests/Mary Margaret O'Reilly

Mary Margaret O'Reilly

 * This is the archived discussion of the TFAR nomination for the article below. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests). Please do not modify this page. 

The result was: scheduled for Today's featured article/October 14, 2015 by — Chris Woodrich (talk) 00:57, 30 September 2015 (UTC)



Mary Margaret O'Reilly (1865–1949) was the Assistant Director of the United States Bureau of the Mint. She worked at the Mint from 1904, for 34 years. One of the highest-ranking female civil servants of her time, she often served as the Mint's acting director in the absence of the director from 1916 until 1924, when she was formally made assistant director. She was known as the "sweetheart of the Treasury". O'Reilly was born and lived her early life in Massachusetts. She left school around age 14 to help support her widowed mother and her siblings, and worked in Worcester for twenty years as a clerk. In 1904, O'Reilly succeeded in gaining a position at the Mint Bureau. She rose rapidly in the hierarchy, unusual for a woman at that time, and with many of the directors under whom she served having little knowledge of or interest in the bureau's operations, the task of running the Mint often fell to her. Beginning in 1933, O'Reilly served under her first female director, Nellie Tayloe Ross, and soon forged a strong bond with her. O'Reilly was so indispensable to the bureau's operations that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt postponed her retirement, scheduled for 1935, to 1938.
 * Most recent similar article(s): no female mint director yet
 * Main editors: Wehwalt
 * Promoted: August 2015
 * Reasons for nomination: 150th birthday on 14 October, please find a way to get close (I stepped in for Wehwalt)
 * Support as nominator. Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:20, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Support Of the usual quality for our numismatic articles. Ceoil (talk) 05:07, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Support. Educational, encyclopedic, and high quality. Everything we want our encyclopedia to represent in level of quality and representation. &mdash; Cirt (talk) 05:56, 27 September 2015 (UTC)