By Tom deignan

ONE hundred years ago this week, mourners went to St. Peter’s church in upstate Troy, New York, to bid farewell to Kate Mullany, a trailblazing labor leader who’d spent the better part of her 60-plus years on earth fighting to make the lives of working men and women a little better.

Of course, there was a time not too long ago when the term “working women” was a bit clunky, so you could imagine how odd it might have seemed in the 1860s, 1870 and 1880s, when Mullany was organizing, and eventually leading, unions.

It’s not that women did not work under harsh conditions back then. It’s just that no one really cared.

Well, Mullany, and many other Irish-born women like her who had come to the U.S. in the middle of the 19th Century at the height of the Irish Famine, cared. And she did something about it. And now, she’s finally getting recognition from some big name politicians.

Late last year, President George W. Bush signed legislation making Mullany’s former home on North 2nd Street in Troy a national historic site. Senator Hillary Clinton and Congress-man Mike McNulty were among the lawmakers who pushed for historic recognition of Mullany’s home.

Clinton first visited the Mullany home in 1998. The new historic designation honors Mullany’s life and also allows the National Park Service to enhance the site with additional funding.

“Linking this site with the National Park System will attract New Yorkers and Americans to this wonderful site and showcase all that Troy has to offer,” Clinton has said.

“When the Kate Mullany project is fully completed, the rich and vibrant history of the American labor movement will be displayed in a wonderful location. And when people come to study this movement at the Kate Mullany site, they will know that the voices of the men, and especially the women, who led the American labor movement, have been preserved forever.”

Indeed, for all that Kate Mullany did, not many people outside of the labor movement know about her. There is no entry about her, for example, in the otherwise excellent and authoritative Encyclopedia of the Irish in America.

So, who is Kate Mullany? She was born in Ireland at the height of the Famine in 1845, and came to the U.S. at the age of 19.

According to an excellent biography on the Public Employees Federation web site (www.pef.org), Mullany’s father had died young, so she lived with her mother Bridget, three sisters and a brother. Because Bridget herself was ill, Kate became the family’s breadwinner, while the other sisters stayed home to look after the house.

Kate and thousands of other immigrant girls labored 14 hours every day in Troy’s many laundries, “washing with soap; bleaching with chloride of soda; adding dilute of sulfuric acid to bleach the collars; washing the collar once again with suds; boiling; rubbing and rinsing; bluing and rolling; starching with both thin and thick starch; drying; and ironing,” as the PEF historian describes the process.

“They only earned three to four dollars a week and if they damaged any shirt or collar, their wages would be reduced.”

Mullany eventually formed the all-female Collar Laundry Union, which is believed to be the first women’s labor union in the U.S.

Promptly, Mullany led 300 women on a strike demanding higher wages and better working conditions, which the laundry owners granted, grasping how important and dangerous the womens’ work was.

Not long afterward, Mullany was recognized as an effective labor leader on the national level. She rubbed shoulders with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the top advocates for womens’ rights of the day.

Mullany died August 17, 1906, and was buried at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Troy.

What’s next for Mullany’s now-historic home? The American Labor Studies Center (which is headquartered at the house) plans to acquire nearby property to open Kate Mullany Park, which will be dedicated to women in the labor movement.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)