MOTHER JONES (1837 – 1930)
"Whatever the fight, don't be ladylike."These are the words of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called "the most dangerous woman in America" - when she was 87 years old.
Mary Harris Jones, or "Mother Jones", was born May 1, 1837, to tenant farmers Richard Harris and Ellen Cotter Harris in Cork, Ireland. . Fleeing the horrors of the potato famine, her family resettled in Toronto when she was just 10 years old. She trained to be a seamstress and a teacher. Her training as a teacher led first to a position in a convent in Monroe, Michigan, then in Chicago and finally in Memphis Tennessee, where, on the eve of the Civil War, she married George E. Jones, a union foundry worker and started a family.
But in 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept through the city, taking the lives of her husband and all four children. A widow at 30, she moved back to Chicago and built a successful dressmaking business — only to lose everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Jones then threw herself into the city's bustling labor movement, where she worked in obscurity for the next 20 years. By the turn of the century, she emerged as a charismatic speaker and one of the country's leading labor organizers, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
She traveled the country to wherever there was labor struggle, sometimes evading company security by wading the riverbed into town, earning her the nickname "The Miner's Angel." She used storytelling, the Bible, humor, and even coarse language to reach a crowd. She said: "I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said, if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator." Jones also had little patience for hesitation, volunteering to lead a strike "if there were no men present."
By the age of 60 Jones had created the persona of Mother Jones. She claimed to be older than she was and began wearing outdated, black dresses. She referred to the male workers for whom she advocated as “her boys”.
A passionate critic of child labor, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York with banners reading, "We want to go to school and not the mines!" At the age of 88, she published a first-person account of her time in the labor movement called The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).
She died in Silver Springs, Maryland, on November 30,1930, at the age of 93 and is buried in a miners' cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois.
MOTHER JONES, the magazine, was first published in 1976. It was, of course, named after Mary Harris Jones, also known as Mother Jones, the Irish-American trade union activist, socialist advocate, and avid opponent of child labor.
For more about Mother Jones go to to www.motherjones.com/about You can read a more extensive biography of this remarkable woman.
