Background
Sara Agnes Mclaughlin Conboy was born on April 03, 1870 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States to Michael and Sara (Mellyn) McLaughlin.
Sara Agnes Mclaughlin Conboy was born on April 03, 1870 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States to Michael and Sara (Mellyn) McLaughlin.
At the age of eleven Conboy went to work in a candy factory to help her widowed mother support her smaller brothers and sisters. There for sixty hours of work a week she received $2. 50. Thence she went into a button factory where wages were slightly higher and work steadier, and, after that, into a carpet mill. As a highly skilled weaver she eventually received eighteen dollars for a sixty-hour week that might, as the law then stood, call for night as well as day work.
She was in the mill when she married Joseph P. Conboy. Within two years she was a widow, working at a loom in a Roxbury mill to support herself and her infant daughter. Shortly thereafter under her leadership the poorly-organized operatives struck for recognition of the United Textile Workers and higher wages. The strike was bitterly fought, but ended in victory for the strikers and Mrs. Conboy was started on what was to win for her international recognition as a labor leader and a proponent of legislation to protect child life and women in industry. Following the strike she became first an organizer of the United Textile Workers and later secretary-treasurer. In the latter capacity most of her time was spent raising money for an organization usually in need of funds. Just how much she raised she herself could not tell, but it is no exaggeration to say that the total was well in excess of $1, 000, 000.
She was a prominent figure for more than twenty years in the conventions of the American Federation of Labor. In it she early gained the confidence of men like Samuel Gompers, John Mitchell, and James Duncan, who depended much upon her judgment. In token of its appreciation of her service, the Federation in 1920 gave her the highest honor ever extended a woman— that of delegate to the British Trades Union Congress—an honor for which heads of the most powerful unions contest year in and year out.
At the beginning of her career as a labor leader Mrs. Conboy was in her early thirties, a trim, upstanding, blue-eved woman, full of energy and enthusiasm. With the years came weight and gray hair, but to the end she was handsome. With the years also came polish and a knowledge of practical economics of which many a university man might be proud. “Aunt Sara, ” as she was affectionately termed by men years older than she, was always essentially feminine, soft-voiced, and smiling. Perhaps it was as a conciliator of warring groups of hard-fisted and harder-headed men that she was of greatest value to organized labor.
Sara Agnes was married to Joseph P. Conboy, a Boston letter carrier.