January 16, 2004 Remembering Mother Jones: A Working Class Hero (1837-1930)

Late last fall I wrote about women getting the vote and eventually playing a more significant role in politics. I also mentioned how women fought and won battles for recognition in the professions and elsewhere. Today I want to profile a woman who at 5 foot tall, with gray hair and simple dress looked like grandma but was one of the best known union organizers in North America a century ago when women did not do that kind of thing.

Mary Harris came to Toronto with her Irish tenant farmer and political activist father in 1838 when she was a baby. Her family lived on Bathurst Street and Mary went to Toronto Normal School and became a teacher in 1858. Her brother became a well-known priest. Mary married George Jones, an ironworker and union activist, and had four children. The moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1867 where yellow fever killed her husband and four children all under five.

Covers of some of the books on Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones 1837-1930).and the cover of the magazine named in her honour (bottom right)

Mary moved to Chicago and taught school before setting up a dressmaking shop. It burned in the famous Chicago fire in 1871. She wouldn't have known the concept of feminism or much about the fight for women's rights like the early Canadian women who like her focused on the rights of children. Mary went back to the radical working class roots of her father and husband and became active in the union movement as an organizer. There were millions of men, women and children working in the mines, factories and lumber camps working long hours in terrible conditions.

Mary began to make speeches, recruit union members, form women's auxiliaries and to fight child labour abuses. When the United Mine Workers Union was formed in 1890 she became one of its officials. People began to call her "Mother" Jones.

The Globe and Mail in a recent article recognized the centennial of her 1904 work in the mines strike in Colorado and her later work. Things slowly began to change, and she was in the thick of it as 2 million "slaves" as she called the workers began to get more of a financial share of the benefits of their work, and better working conditions. Between 1870 and 1944 some 50,000 coal miners, many of them children, lost their lives.

In Mother Jones' speeches according to author Ralph Chapin "she prayed and cursed and pleaded, raising her clenched and trembling hands asking heaven to bear witness…The miners loved it and laughed, cheered, hooted and even cried as she spoke to them."

In one of her many activities she helped form the radical labour organization the Industrial Workers of the World known as the Wobblies in 1905. On another occasion men employed by the mine-owners shot some strikers and a company guard was shot. At age 78 Jones was accused of complicity and was sentenced to 20 years in prison until she was found not guilty and released. On another occasion she spent 9 weeks in jail and at age 83 was deported only to return and be jailed again.

At one point the Governor of West Virginia called her "the most dangerous woman in America" while union people called her their "angel". In 1925 Mother Jones published her autobiography. When she died in 1930 20,000 people attended her funeral in the United Mine Workers Union Cemetery. In 1936 a huge monument was established in the cemetery with 50,000 people in attendance.

In the 1970's Mother Jones became a radical and feminist hero again and her autobiography was reprinted. Several books have been written about her. In 1976 the "best known left wing radical magazine in the United States" was started and called Mother Jones and continues in active circulation today. (www.MotherJones.com) 

For more information on the fascinating life of Mother Jones check your local library, the Internet and for books check out www.Amazon.ca or www.chapters.indigo.ca