Born in Boston on September 8, 1859, Mary Kimball was educated privately in her native city and in Europe. In January 1880 she married William B. Kehew, a Boston merchant. In 1886 she joined the nine-year-old Women╒s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, an early and somewhat tentative association of philanthropically minded women of position working to alleviate the condition of the growing population of working women in Boston. Becoming a director of the Union in 1890 and succeeding Abby Morton Diaz as president in January 1892, she moved forcefully to make the Union a more organized and effective social tool. To the employment guidance, legal aid, and similar services of the Union were soon added full courses of instruction in dressmaking in 1895, housekeeping in 1897, and salesmanship in 1905. In 1905 a research department was organized to conduct thorough and scientific sociological studies of working and living conditions of Boston women and to help formulate legislative proposals in the areas of hours and wages regulation, factory inspection, and consumer protection. In 1910 an appointment bureau was formed to help place the rapidly growing numbers of college women in suitable employments.
Alongside and complementary to Kehew╒s work with the Union was her deep involvement in fostering the growth of labor unions among women. In 1892 she invited to Boston Mary Kenney (O╒Sullivan) an organizer for the American Federation of Labor from Chicago, to help her form the Union for Industrial Progress, under whose auspices unions were organized among women bookbinders and laundry workers by 1896, tobacco workers in 1899, and needle-trade workers in 1901.
At the organizing convention of the National Women╒s Trade Union League in Boston in 1903 Kehew was elected first president, with Jane Addams as vice-president. Among her other activities were involvement in the founding in 1902 of Simmons College, which took over some of the educational work of the Educational and Industrial Union, and the founding of the Denison House settlement, of the Public School Association, of the Massachusetts Association for Promoting the Interests of the Blind in 1903 (growing out of a committee within the Union, and in 1906 taken over by the state of Massachusetts), of the Loan and Aid Society for the Blind, of Woolson House, a settlement for blind women, and of The Outlook for the Blind, a magazine. She was also active in the Milk and Baby Hygiene Association, the Civil Service Reform Association, the State Commission for Industrial Education, and other groups. Despite her avoidance of personal publicity, her energy and executive ability, together with a talent for working with people of all classes, placed her at the center of reform and progressive activity in Boston. She remained president of the Union until 1913 and was acting president and chairman of the board from 1914 until her death in Boston on February 13, 1918.
