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Today in our virtual campus #suffrage parade: early @simmonsuniversity trustee, the indomitable Boston reformer MARY MORTON KEHEW. Kehew was “a woman of great energy and force of character” who shaped the college before it even opened its doors. #SimmonsSuffs
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Tho there are few public images of her, Mary Morton Kehew led a staggering number of #Boston institutions & organizations, inc the WEIU & the WTUL. She exemplifies the increasing appeal of #suffrage to reform-minded women who saw #votesforwomen as a powerful tool for change.
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Mary was born in Boston in 1859. Her family was wealthy & well connected. Her mother Susan Tillinghurst Morton, was daughter of Massachusetts governor Marcus Morton; her father Moses Day Kimball, a merchant and banker.
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Mary Kimball received her education at private schools and displayed an interest in social science early in her life. In 1880, she married manufacturer William Browne Kehew, who was supportive of his wife’s reform work. Their lived on tony Beacon Street in Boston.
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In 1886, Kehew joined the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) of Boston. Founder Harriet Clisby’s vision was of an Institution that would meet "the needs of all classes of women," a place "held together by love.. mutual service & healthy co-operative activities.”
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The WEIU sought to improve working conditions for the women of Boston. Though led mostly by wealthy white women, its membership was also open to working class women on an equal basis. And it truly did bring together women of different classes, races, and ethnicities.
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The WEIU's officers included Irish-Catholic labor leader Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, Black clubwoman Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Jewish Progressive reformer Alice Goldmark Brandeis. Not all WEIU members were #suffragists, but O'Sullivan, Ruffin, Brandeis, and Kehew were.
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Kehew became WEIU director in 1890 and was elected president 2 years later. During her tenure, she reorganized the Union to focus heavily on legislative labor reform, forming a research dept to gather information about working conditions for use in future legal actions.
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Following her term as WEIU president, Kehew sought to expand her labor activism further, hoping to reach a broader demographic of women workers. She recruited Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, a factory worker who became a labor leader, to help found the Union for Industrial Progress.
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Kehew established a women’s vocational training program at the WEIU, offering courses in dressmaking, millinery, housekeeping, and salesmanship. #SimmonsUniversity adopted this program as one of its founding Schools when the College opened to students in 1902.
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In 1903, Kehew became a founding member of the National Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), serving until 1913 as its first president, and remaining on the board for the rest of her life.
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Kehew also opened her Beacon Street home as a boarding house for working women in an effort to bring attention to class inequalities in the city of Boston. All this in an era when labor unions were considered quite radical.
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Kehew was involved w a multitude of other organizations as well, including the Denison Settlement House, the Massachusetts Minimum Wage and Child Labor Commissions, the Boston Tuberculosis Association, and the American Park and Outdoor Association.
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Kehew also maintained an interest in providing services for blind women, supporting the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind, the Loan and Aid Society for the Blind, and the Woolson Settlement House for blind women.
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Kehew worked for #suffrage thru her many organizations: running campaigns for the WTUL, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the School Voters’ League, and hosting at least one meeting of Boston’s Ward 8 Suffrage Association at her home.
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#Suffragist Mary Morton Kehew died of kidney disease in 1918. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. At her memorial, Emily Green Balch called her “the never failing fairy godmother” of social and labor reform in Boston.
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Another Boston reformer, Louise Bosworth, remembered Mary Morton Kehew as a person who inspired "wholesome awe" even at the State House; "a wonderful woman" who was sometimes disparaged as a snob but who worked quietly to achieve much.
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As a member of the Corporation that created Simmons College in the first place, and as a longtime Simmons trustee, Mary Morton Kehew injected her expansive activism into the very design of the college. Stay tuned for more about the many #SimmonsSuffs who followed her lead!
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