Mary Harris Jones 1830-1930, American labor agitator, called Mother Jones, b. Ireland. Interested in the labor movement for many years, she became active in it after the death of her husband and four children (1867) from yellow fever. She won fame as an effective speaker and by 1880 was a prominent figure in the movement. One of the founders of the Social Democratic party (1898) and the Industrial Workers of the World (1905), she was active in organizing miners, garment workers, and streetcar workers. In 1913, her organizing activities were blamed for violence in West Virginia coal fields and she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. The sentence was commuted, and in 1914 her graphic description of the massacre of 20 people by machine-gun fire during a Ludlow, Colo., miner's strike convinced President Wilson to try to mediate the dispute. A long-time champion of laws to end child labor, she continued as a union organizer and agitator into her nineties. She wrote an autobiography in 1925, which contains some factual inaccuracies.

Bibliography: See biographies by D. Fetherling (1974) and E. J. Gorn (2001).

Mary Harris Jones

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (1830-1930) was an Irish immigrant who devoted her life to improving conditions of the working class. A vagabond agitator, she worked primarily among miners, supporting their strikes and urging them to unionize.

The early years of Mary Harris Jones are obscured by lack of records and her own inconsistencies in reporting her history. She was born in 1830 (some historians argue that 1843 is the accurate date) to Irish parents who migrated to America when she was a child. She graduated from normal school in Toronto, taught in public and parochial schools in Canada and the United States, and practiced the trade of dressmaking in Chicago. She took a teaching job in Memphis, Tennessee, where she met and married George E. Jones, an iron moulder, in 1861. Six years later, she lost her husband and four children to a yellow fever epidemic.

Jones returned to Chicago and dressmaking. Made homeless by the Great Fire of 1871, she began to attend meetings of the Knights of Labor. There she developed her commitment to rectifying inhumane working conditions, and she began a life-long friendship with Terrence V. Powderly, who led the Knights from 1879 to 1893. Jones's particular contribution was to mobilize workers and to publicize their plight, which she did with her forceful personality and her flamboyant and salty oratory. Without a home, she went from town to town, from strike to strike, staying in hotels, in the homes of sympathizers, or in jails. When asked where she lived, she replied, "Wherever there is a fight."

Mother Jones worked on behalf of workers in the railroad, steel, copper, brewing, garment, and textile industries. She was particularly appalled by child labor, and in 1903 she marched with a group of adult and child textile workers from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt's home at Oyster Bay, New York, in a public demonstration against the evils of child labor. But she worked most prominently and persistently among the coal miners of West Virginia and Colorado. At times the United Mine Workers paid her a salary, though she was often at odds with its leadership. The miners themselves adored her and called her "Mother."

Jones's own courage and willingness to risk arrest, jail, and violence served powerfully to inspire the miners. She also exhorted women to support strikes, and she developed the tactic of organizing miners' wives, armed with mops and brooms, to demonstrate and to keep strikebreakers from entering the mines. While she encouraged militance among women in mining families, she held traditional ideas about women. Jones sometimes joined in labor activism with working women, but she did not believe that women should work outside the home. She publicly opposed women's suffrage, in part because its supporters were mostly privileged women and because it would co-opt working-class women and divert them from economic issues. She said, "You don't need the vote to raise hell."

A pragmatic socialist who on occasion supported Democratic candidates, Jones was more interested in immediate reforms than in long-range socialist goals. She helped to found the Social Democratic Party in 1898 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, but she never lived easily in any organization and frequently clashed with leaders and associates. She served in the defense of various radicals, including Western Federation of Miners' leaders Bill Haywood, George Moyer, and George Pettibone; California socialist Tom Mooney; and Mexican rebels who were imprisoned in the United States.

Jones continued to be active past 1920 when, by her count then, she was in her nineties. She spent most of her last decade at the Washington, D.C., home of the Powderlys. On May 1, 1930, the American Federation of Labor staged celebrations of her birth in major cities, which Jones addressed by radio. Though ill, she enjoyed visits by reporters and hundreds of well-wishers. She died on November 30. As she had wished, Mother Jones was buried in the Miners' Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois, near the graves of miners killed in the labor strife at Virden in 1898.

Further Reading

Jones published her autobiography in 1925, but Autobiography of Mother Jones (paper edition, 1969), contains major gaps and inaccuracies. Dale Fetherling, Mother Jones, The Miners' Angel: A Portrait (1974) provides the fullest account of her life; the much briefer Mother Jones, Woman Organizer; and Her Relations with Miners' Wives, Working Women, and the Suffrage Women (1976) examines her life from an interesting angle. The magazine Mother Jonescontinued to publish in the 1980s, retaining some of the activism of its namesake. □

Jones, Mary (“Mother”) (1830–1930), labor activist.Born in Ireland, Mary Harris Jones immigrated to the United States in 1835. She attended school in Toronto, Canada, and later worked as a teacher and a dressmaker in Chicago and Memphis, Tennessee. In 1861, she married an iron molder and labor union member named Jones. Six years later, she lost her spouse and their four children to a yellow fever epidemic. This tragedy forced her back into a life of wage‐earning. By 1871, her resentment of social inequality found an outlet in the Knights of Labor. In 1877, Jones helped to organize striking railroad workers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and by 1880 her career as an agitator was well under way.

A tiny woman dressed in black, with striking blue eyes, Mother Jones became known as “The Angel of the Miners” and was a beloved figure in the mine fields of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Arizona, and Colorado. Her incendiary speeches made her a legend. She was arrested four times in the years before World War I, and in 1912, amid a bitter miners' strike, she was convicted in West Virginia of conspiracy to commit murder. Pardoned by the governor, Mother Jones continued her peripatetic activity among miners and other industrial workers.

Socialists embraced Mother Jones, but she remained politically unaffiliated. A founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, she also worked for the American Federation of Labor, campaigned for the Democratic party, and made her last public appearance in 1924 at the Farmer‐Labor party convention. Although she became a late‐twentieth feminist icon, Jones, like other radical labor activists of her day, viewed woman suffrage as trivial and the women's rights movement as bourgeois. She reserved her compassion, her boundless energy, and her always tart tongue for the working man and his family. She died in Silver Spring, Maryland, soon after her hundredth birthday.
See also Labor Movements; Mining; Radicalism; Socialism; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

Mary Field Parton, ed., The Autobiography of Mother Jones, 1925.
Dale Fetherling , Mother Jones, the Miner's Angel, 1974.
Philip S. Foner, ed., Mother Jones Speaks: Collected Writings and Speeches, 1983.

Ann Schofield