Known For: Renowned American labor and community organizer
Dates: A.H.: 1245 - 1348
C.E.: 1830 - 1930

Faith: Christianity
Country: United States

About

Mother Jones was born Mary Harris Jones in Cork, Ireland in 1830 to a progressive, Roman Catholic family amidst a time of British domination over Ireland and much Catholic/Protestant conflict. When her grandfather, an Irish Freedom Fighter, was hanged her family was forced to flee to the United States in 1835. Growing up in Toronto Canada, she finished public school at age 17 and taught in a convent school in Michigan for eight months, before moving to Chicago to work as a dressmaker. Then she moved to Memphis, Tennessee to teach again. There she met George E. Jones, iron molder loyal and active member of the Iron Molders’ Union, and they married in 1861. According to Jones’s biographer Dale Fetherling, she learned much about unions and the workingmen’s psychology from her husband.

In 1867 the yellow fever epidemic tragically killed her husband and four young children within one week. When the epidemic had finished, she returned to Chicago to work as a dressmaker for a second time. Yet tragedy followed and in 1871 she lost all her possessions in the Chicago fire. This drastic life change greatly influenced her decision join the labor movement, first attending meetings of the Knights of Labor in a scorched, tumbled-down building. Jones resonated with the ideals, community, and compassion of the Knights of Labor, which armed her with fervor for the industrial wars of the next fifty years. For the next two or three years after the fire she supposedly lived in Chicago and continued working as a seamstress, with no fixed home, but being would return to Chicago while traveling back and forth across the country to various industrial areas. During her travels she lived in the colonies or the shantytowns near the mills. The workers became like family, calling her “Mother.” With masses of immigrant coal and steel workers living in horrifying conditions in this period of industrial revolution, Jones felt compelled to spur necessary class conflict. Always working for or with union people, she had a talent for inciting them into action. During strikes she either organized and helped workers or led educational meetings, notably helping with the 1877 Pittsburgh railway strike. In 1898 she helped establish the Social Democratic Party.

After 1890 she joined the United Mine Workers as an organizer, attending her first United Mine Workers Association convention on January 25, 1901. At that time she had only been on the union payroll for a year, having worked tirelessly up until then as a volunteer. Resigning from the UMWA in 1904, she lectured for several years for the Socialist Party of America throughout the southwest, with a main interest in helping Mexican immigrant revolutionists. One of founders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in 1905 Mother Jones was the only woman among the 27 who signed the organization’s manifesto. She later left on good terms.

In 1911 Jones left the Socialist Party to return to paid organizing with the United Mine Workers, where she was free to set her own agenda. Known for attracting publicity and government attention to workers rights, she most notably led a march of miner’s wives in Pennsylvania in 1902 and the “children’s crusade,” of striking children from the textile mills of Kensington, Pennsylvania, to President Theodore Roosevelt’s residence in Long Island, New York, in 1903. She was involved in the strikes of garment workers and streetcar workers in New York in 1915 and 1916, and in the strike of steel workers in Pittsburgh in 1919. In 1921 at age 91, at the request of the Mexican government, she traveled to Mexico to for the Pan-American Federation of Labor meeting.

In 1922 she left the United Mine Workers due to disagreement, but at age 93 in 1923 she was still working among striking coal miners in West Virginia.

Mother Jones died in 1930, age 101.