Who was Mother Jones?

[Donkees]

Excerpt:

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was a fearless fighter for workers’ rights. When she was mocked as the “grandmother of all agitators,” in the U.S. Senate, Mother Jones replied that she would someday like to be called “the great-grandmother of all agitators.” She helped to shape a spirit of civil disobedience in the cause of justice. Mother Jones deeply believed that a workers movement would replace “this moneyed civilization with a higher and grander civilization for the ages to come.”

Mary Harris’ early life was shaped by struggles that she viewed as part of a system of class injustice. She was born in 1837 in Cork, Ireland, enduring the Great Hunger where she witnessed starved corpses carted off while food was taken to the ports of the River Lee to be exported. Harris emigrated to Canada and then the U.S., earning a living as a teacher and seamstress, then moved to Memphis where she married union iron molder George Jones and started a family. But when yellow fever struck the city, “the rich and the well-to-do fled the city”, while workers like her husband perished from it. “One by one my four little children sickened and died. . . I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could.” Jones then moved to Chicago, where she sewed for the wealthy until the Great Fire of 1871 made her homeless.

Jones emerged from these struggles indomitable, inspired by the birth of a new labor and socialist movement that contested these injustices. When asked to state her address, Jones often replied that her home was “wherever there was a fight.” From the 1890s through the 1920s she was on the road, and played a role in many strikes and demonstrations. Many commentators and newspapers called her a “folk hero” and “most well-known woman” in the United States. On this website, we are building a map that shows the breadth of her involvement.

Jones emerged as an activist as part of the unemployed movement of the 1890s, which in style was similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement–occupation and encouragement of militant direct action. This movement became connected to the new industrial unions of the era, the American Railway Union organized by Eugene Debs, and the United Mine Workers Union, which launched major strikes in mid-1894. While the armies and the strikes were bitterly crushed and ridiculed, they helped to shape Jones and others to create a movement that mobilized communities of struggle.

http://www.motherjonesmuseum.org/information/who-was-mother-jones/