Teaching Years

It is an understatement to say that teaching in Lawrence at that time represented a challenge. The rapidly growing textile manufacturing space created between 1906 and 1909 made it necessary to recruit 10,000 new workers. In addition to the Irish, English, German, French and Italians already engaged in the mills, mill owners expanded their search to include eastern Europeans from numerous nations and even from the Middle East.

From 1890 to 1915, the city’s population more than doubled, from 44,000 to 90,000. The children in the schools would have exhibited far more needs than conventional learning. They spoke many different languages; most were impoverished; and they would attend school sporadically, in some cases because they had to work in the mills.

They needed even more than a teacher, and they got it in O’Connor. By the time of the Lawrence Strike of 1912, O’Connor would have acquired substantial first hand knowledge of the lives of the newcomer families. This is reflected in the 1915 thesis she prepared documenting their condition and what is necessary to relieve it.
Cartoon found in Ms. O'Connor's diary.
Alice O'Connor's view of children going to work and not to high school.
The thesis, drawing on information about living and working conditions found in the newspapers, the Lawrence Survey, City and State reports, other immigration researchers, her own observations, and the Strike hearings, was evidently part of her process to develop expertise in social work.

Strikes, Strikers and Immigrants

At a time when patriotic zeal was paramount, and immigrants were often regarded with hostility and distrust, O'Connor wrote with sympathy, citing external conditions that were responsible for immigrant poverty. The work was ambitious, embracing the full range of social, cultural and economic variables. Though certainly progressive, she assumed some of the stereotypes about immigrant groups common at that time. As she herself wrote nearly 40 years later, “One thing I have learned, through the years, is NOT to generalize a social trait from an individual instance..." She was sympathetic with the strikers, but not with some of the tactics or with strike organizers associated with the IWW.

Social Worker and Lawyer

O'Connor was hired, in 1918, as Supervisor of Social Work by the Massachusetts Department of Education's Immigration and Naturalization Division to advise and advocate for newly arrived immigrants, particularly women.
Map of ethnic areas in Lawrence found in Miss O'Connor's Diary.
Her work was based in Boston, but there was also an office in Lawrence. While she continued with the social work, regularly going to the pier to meet the ships coming in, she began to study law at Portia Law School, which had been established for women in 1908. The school was the precursor to the New England School of Law. She received her LLB degree in 1926, using it not for private practice, but to advocate for immigrants and push for more just laws. She later became Director of the Division.

O'Connor's Continued Influence

Still later, she became director of the International Institute in Boston, remaining in that position until 1958. She traveled extensively around the country, promoting fair changes in immigration policy to ensure justice for newcomers. Cardinal Cushing bestowed on her an honorary doctoral degree at Boston College, where she had also taught.

She did not end her commitment to the well-being of immigrants after retirement. Her diaries indicate that she continued to meet with like-minded people and with people she had served over the years. When she died in 1968, she was still Director of the National Organization of American Immigration, Citizenship Conference.

For more information about Miss O'Connor,to study her diaries, look at photographs, please contact the Lawrence History Center at research@lawrencehistory.org