Sweeney (Frances) is born in Boston.

The daughter of James and Frances Sweeney, Frances Sweeney grows up in Brighton, graduates from Mount St. Joseph Academy, and works initially for an advertising agency. She becomes executive secretary of the American Irish Defense Association and begins to publish a newsletter, the Boston City Reporter, in 1942.* After suffering a heart attack on Beacon Street in Brookline in April 1944, Sweeney dies in Allston on June 19, 1944, and is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden. I.F. Stone subsequently writes, “She burned with some of the hottest and most inextinguishable passion for social justice that we have ever seen.”