Overlooked No More: Leonora O’Reilly, Suffragist Who Fought for Working Women

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. This latest installment is one of many ways The New York Times is examining the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

The date was March 13, 1912. The occasion was a joint Senate committee hearing in Washington on women’s suffrage. And the star witness about to testify was the labor organizer Leonora O’Reilly, a charismatic and powerful public speaker who was representing the country’s eight million working women.

“I am not going to give you any taffy,” O’Reilly chided the all-male committee. “You men in politics are not leaders, you follow what you think is the next step on the ladder. We want you to understand that the next step in politics, the next step in democracy, is to give to the women of your nation a ballot.”

O’Reilly, who was in her 40s, had been working since she was 11 and had experienced the conditions typical of garment and textile work at the time, toiling six days and 60 hours a week for wages that barely covered the expenses of food, lodging and clothing.