Sara Agnes McLaughlin Conboy

Sara Agnes McLaughlin Conboy (born April 3, 1870, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Jan. 7, 1928, Brooklyn, N.Y.) was a labour leader, one of the first women to achieve a position of influence in the highest levels of American organized labour.

Sara McLaughlin went to work in a candy factory at age 11. Over the next several years she worked in a button factory and then in various carpet mills, becoming a skilled weaver. She also married Joseph P. Conboy, who died two years after their marriage. Her success in leading the employees of the Roxbury mill where she worked in a strike for higher wages and union recognition thrust her into a position of prominence in labour circles. She became an organizer for the United Textile Workers of America. She proved a highly effective fund-raiser and lobbyist on behalf of legislation protecting women and children in factories.

Conboy was the only woman at a conference on labour called by President Woodrow Wilson in 1918, and in 1920 her colleagues gave her the unique honour of representing the American Federation of Labor at the conference of the British Trades Union Congress in Portsmouth, England. She was known as “Aunt Sara” to thousands of the men and women for whom and with whom she worked.