Mother Jones: “The Most Dangerous Woman in America”
She may not have looked threatening, but Mary G. Harris – known as “Mother Jones” – was such an indomitable activist that a US attorney once labeled her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Today, the political magazine Mother Jones is named in her honor as a symbol of passionate activism.
Early life
Born in Cork, Ireland in 1830, Mary Harris immigrated to Canada as a child, studied and moved to Maine as a schoolteacher, and later taught in a Michigan convent. She then moved to Chicago to work as a dressmaker, before relocating to Tennessee and marrying George Jones, an Iron Molders Union member. Tragically, her husband and four children all died from yellow fever during the 1867 epidemic, inspiring her to wear black for the rest of her life.
After her family’s death, Jones returned to Chicago as a seamstress to wealthy families, where she noted: “I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front. … My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care.” When the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 left her homeless, this sensitivity to class inequality motivated her to travel and take up the causes of working people. In 1877, she applied her oratorical and organizing abilities during the Great Railroad Strike in Pittsburgh. To Jones, industrialization was increasing the number of working poor, diminishing wages, increasing working hours, and leaving workers uninsured, without healthcare or old age benefits. At that point, the labor movement acquired one of its greatest assets. Thereafter, when asked her address, she frequently replied: “Wherever there was a fight.”
Activism
Jones came to be a key radical labor figure and union agitator for miners. She led hundreds of strikes throughout the 1880s and 1890s, including the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Her activism in the unemployed movement can be compared to the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, encouraging militant direct action. In 1897, she joined the United Mine Workers strike to obtain a living wage in various coal fields and remained a strategic part of union activism. In 1905, she co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World, representing 43 labor groups. The IWW opposed the American Federation of Labor, which embraced capitalism and excluded unskilled workers.
Mother Jones Marker at City Hall (Philadelphia, PA). Photo: takomabibelot (Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 DEED license, via flickr)
Jones believed ordinary miners should direct their economic destiny and that the public, not corporations, should own coal and natural resources. She argued that so-called “unskilled workers,” mostly immigrants and African Americans, should be the base of a new activism that placed women and children at the center of the coal field struggles, effectively making it a “family-based movement.” Jones helped create the Social Democratic Party in 1898, and miners in the coal fields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania ordained her their “Mother Jones.”
To combat child labor, in 1903 Jones led a children’s march from Pennsylvania to New York to protest abusive child labor, attracting the attention of President Roosevelt. By 1910, she was the most well-known American figure supporting Mexican labor revolutionaries, who opposed the Diaz dictatorship and his US corporate and political backers. When she traveled to Mexico, workers threw flowers and hailed their “Madre Juanita.”
Our present civilization is one of brute force. We hope to make it a civilization of justice and love.”
– Mother Jones
Persistence
At the age of 82, Jones was sentenced to 20 years for her part in a West Virginia strike that turned violent. However, her supporters rallied and convinced the governor to grant her a pardon. Undeterred, she returned to organizing workers.
Even at age 84, Jones was again activated by a mass slaughter perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. The Ludlow Massacre was organized by the state’s National Guard and private “guards” employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. With business and government support, thugs attacked a tent colony of striking coal miners’ families, killing 21 miners, their wives, and children.
Legacy
When age finally slowed her travels, in 1925 she published the account of her life, the Autobiography of Mother Jones. One of her last public appearances was at her 100th birthday celebration on May 1, 1930, now International Labor Day in many countries. She died on November 30, 1930, and was buried among her supporters in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. Recognized again in 2012, Mother Jones was honored with the Cork Mother Jones Festival, celebrating her life in the city of her birth.
The Mother Jones Museum website remembers her legacy as follows: “… her life opens a window to understanding how ordinary people responded and rebelled against growing inequality in the late 19th and early 20th century.” Mother Jones went from teaching school to teaching social awareness, with true courage.
