Mother Jones

Mary Harris Jones was born in Ireland in either 1830 or 1837 (records vary) and came to the United States as a young woman. She met and married George Jones, who, along with their four children, died of yellow fever in 1867. Jones moved to Chicago, Illinois , and lost everything she owned four years later in the Great Chicago Fire.

Jones needed to support herself so she joined the Knights of Labor , a labor union, and worked on its behalf to gain acceptance in the public and grow its numbers. Her time was spent rallying support and speaking out on behalf of the working class. In 1905, she helped found a labor union called Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies. Jones became an organizer of labor strikes throughout America but had a particular fondness for miners and their cause. Of all the workers, miners experienced by far the worst (and most dangerous) working conditions and the lowest wages; Jones made it her personal mission to help them achieve better lives.

Jones worked not only with miners but also with their wives and children. She would organize mining families to participate in demonstrations and protests on behalf of the miners. Women and children carrying mops and brooms marched at the mines, preventing strikebreakers from crossing the miners’ picket lines into the mine shafts. Jones earned the nickname “Mother” when she began calling the miners her “boys.”

Mother Jones embraced socialism (an economic system in which the government owns and operates business and production as well as controls the distribution of wealth) and worked closely with American Railway Union leader Eugene Debs (1855–1926). An enthusiastic public speaker, she was known for organizing public events to get the media focused on striking workers. Her tireless efforts on behalf of working men and women took her to the coal mines of Pennsylvania , where she encouraged miners to join the union.

Opponents of Jones called her the most dangerous woman in America; her physical courage was known throughout the nation. She joined in protests, many of which resulted in her arrest. Jones spent time in more jails throughout the country than any other labor activist in history.

Surprisingly, Jones did not support the women's suffrage movement (the right to vote). She believed that a focus on winning the vote would take away much-needed attention on the economic situation of working-class women. Jones discussed this in her autobiography, The Autobiography of Mother Jones. In it, she wrote, “You don’t need a vote to raise hell, you need convictions and a voice.”

Mother Jones died in 1930 at the age of ninety-three or one hundred. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. Thousands of miners and their families attended her funeral. Her name lives on as the title of a political magazine that supports socialism. Jones is remembered as the “Grandmother of All Agitators.”