Mayor Dondero as a Young Woman

For St. Patrick’s Day in Women’s History Month, who better to feature than the unstoppable Mary Ellen Carey Dondero? At her passing in 1960, a local newspaper proclaimed, “No other person in modern times did more to shape the pattern of politics in Portsmouth.”

There have been many tributes to Mayor Dondero over the decades including a school named in her honor. There are numerous photographs of her in the Portsmouth Athenaeum archives. But here, in a rare family portrait, we see the future politician, likely in her early 20s around 1915, three decades before her rise to fame.

Mary’s parents were South-Enders descended from Irish immigrants. Her father died in a tragic and mysterious accident at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard when Mary was very young. Biographer Denise Wheeler (Portsmouth Women, History Press, 2013) tells us her mother took in laundry to support the family. Mary would skip grade school to pick up clothes and sheets in a horse-drawn cart for her mother to wash.

Not long before this photo was taken Mary wed Charles Dondero, the son of a downtown storekeeper. The couple lived above Dondero’s Fruit and Ice Cream on Congress Street where they raised four daughters. A community volunteer during World War I, Mary was named “Miss Portsmouth” in 1918.

Portsmouth politics was a men’s club with spittoons on the floor until Mary Dondero broke through. Although she never graduated from eighth grade, by 1940 she was the first woman on the Portsmouth City Council as World War II loomed. An Irish woman married to an Italian, Dondero represented the heart and soul of the city’s immigrant population.

When her husband died in 1944, and with her daughters grown, Mary began her grassroots political campaign in earnest. By 1945, as World War II ended, she was Portsmouth’s feisty new mayor. Portsmouth Herald editor and historian Ray Brighton described Mary as having “all the ruthlessness as any of the tough male politicians around town.”

A woman of unquestioned honesty and compassion, Mayor Dondero was opposed to the “city manager” form of local government becoming popular at the time. And yet, when she discovered opponents of the plan were playing fast and loose when counting ballots, she exposed their corrupt actions. As a result, the city manager system won the day in 1947, thereby ending the “strong mayor” era in Portsmouth.

Mary Dondero was the first of an ongoing tradition of female mayors in Portsmouth and across the country. For those new to city politics, her daughter Helen “Eileen” Dondero Foley (1918-2016) holds the record as the longest-serving mayor in Portsmouth history. Eileen was mayor from 1968-1969, 1970-1971,1984-1985, 1988-1989, 1990-1991, 1992-1993, 1994-1995 and 1996-1997. The mother-daughter mayors are now enshrined in the history of New Hampshire’s only seaport.

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.