Kate Kennedy, Irish Famine Refugee and American Feminist

Famine refugee Kate Kennedy, one of the most politically effective women in nineteenth-century America, is also one of the most obscured. Born in Meath in 1827, Kennedy suffered greatly through the first years of the Great Hunger and in 1849, she fled with her family to the United States. Kennedy worked within a Californian public school system that not only discriminated on account of sex but also segregated on account of race and ethnicity. Through political activism and written polemics, she agitated for change. Over the years, Kennedy compelled California to enact a statute promising women equal pay for equal work, ran for statewide office, and secured tenure for teachers. She gave vocal and financial support to the socioeconomic movement founded by Henry George and penned essays in which she confronted the racialized lines drawn by the dominant populace even as she espoused populist ideas. This chapter aims to set the record straight.