The Very Light Craft of Hope: An Irish “Agitator”

Leonora O’Reilly

Those who include themselves among what W.B. Yeats called “the indomitable Irishry” need neither great men nor a fifth-century saint to serve as models. Common people have always been the heroes of the Celtic nation, from James Connolly, who rose from extreme poverty to lead the 1916 Easter Rebellion, to Bernadette Devlin, the charismatic civil rights firebrand of the 1970s.

Irish Americans can look to Leonora O’Reilly for inspiration. She was born in New York in 1870 to Irish immigrants, her mother a garment worker, her father a printer. John O’Reilly died a year after Leonora was born. Her older brother also passed, leaving her mother, Winifred, to raise the child on a meager salary.

Leonora went to work in a collar factory when she was eleven. She labored six days a week, ten hours a day. When she was sixteen, she joined the Knights of Labor. The group was an early effort to address the low pay, unsafe conditions, and child labor rampant in industrial America.

In spite of long hours on the job, the teenager acted on a penchant for helping others. She soon organized a club, the Working Women’s Society. “I am not going to give you any taffy,” she told an all-male committee. “You men in politics are not leaders, you follow what you think is the next step on the ladder . . . The next step in democracy is to give to the women of your nation a ballot.”

A gift from a patron allowed her to take a year off and complete her education. She graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn at the age of thirty and began teaching sewing at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls and working in a settlement house that catered to the needs of immigrants.

It was an intense period for labor organizing. O’Reilly found in herself a gift for oratory that made her a featured speaker at meetings and street rallies. She helped organize a garment workers’ strike in 1909. She was called “The Agitator” because of her colorful and vehement language.

A sketch of O’Reilly speaking by artist Wallace Morgan

The greed of employers had a severe impact on the lives of working women. In one sweatshop on New York’s lower east side, young women were forced to work sixteen-hour days in dangerous conditions with no bathroom breaks. If they talked on the job, they were fired. Exits were locked to keep out union organizers.

On March 25, 1911, that ninth-floor shop, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, caught fire. O’Reilly stood on the street and watched victims as young as fourteen catch fire, leap from windows, and thud to the pavement. The conflagration killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women.

Victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, 1911

It was among the worst industrial accidents in American history, and it gave new urgency to O’Reilly’s efforts. She mobilized pressure for an investigation. Although the factory owners were acquitted of manslaughter, significant reforms were enacted.

O’Reilly saw that the issues of labor reform and suffrage were closely linked. In 1912, she took her eloquence to Washington, D.C., where she testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. “I ask this committee in all seriousness to understand that we working women are not asking for the vote for fun,” she said. “We need the vote for self-protection.”

Never one to avoid direct talk, she went on: “We only ask you to do the thing you have done since Adam, namely, turn the burden of responsibility over to woman when it gets too big for you or you fear the consequences. We want the ballot in order that we may straighten out all of this economic and political mess that your superior intelligence has gotten us into. Is that straight? Well, that is what the working woman wants.” An explosion of applause filled the room.

First International Congress of Women, 1915

O’Reilly traveled to the Hague in 1915 to attend the International Congress of Women, which opposed war. ”Peace cannot and will not come,” she said, “if we sit with folded hands while human beings are slaughtered by the millions.” World leaders needed to work tirelessly so that “no child born on this planet may be deprived of its rightful inheritance of peace and plenty.”

O’Reilly’s views were influenced by her family’s Irish heritage. She insisted that Americans recognize the injustice of the British domination of Ireland and drew attention to the violent suppression of the Easter Rebellion, including the execution of James Connolly and schoolteacher Patrick Pearse.

In 1920, O’Reilly founded the Irish Women's Consumer League to boycott British goods. Working with Cumann na mBan, the Irish Women's Council, she helped organize a month-long strike of Irish longshoremen against British ships. She and her fellows dressed in suffragist white, donned green capes, and paraded with signs reading: “There Can Be No Peace While British Militarism Rules the World.”

Having worked in sweatshops from childhood, Leonora understood that all anyone can do is to keep at it, use your skills to push back against the darkness in the world. “We set sail,” she said, “in a very light craft of hope on a seething sea which might rise up and submerge us.”

A life of unrelenting toil began to take its toll during the 1920s. As her health failed, Leonora, who had never married, was sustained by her friends from the labor movement. She died in 1927 at the age of fifty-seven.

As Yeats wrote of the martyrs of 1916:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

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