Mary Harris Jones
Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (August 1, 1830 – November 30, 1930) was an Irish-American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She then helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World.
Jones worked as a teacher and dressmaker, but after her husband and four children all died of yellow fever and her workshop was destroyed in a fire in 1871, she began working as an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. She was a very effective speaker, punctuating her speeches with stories, audience participation, humor and dramatic stunts. From 1897 (when she was 60) she was known as Mother Jones and in 1902 she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, upset about the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a Children's March from Philadelphia to the home of then president Theodore Roosevelt in New York.
The magazine Mother Jones, established in 1970, is named after her.
Read more about Mary Harris Jones: Background, Formative Years, Losses and Becoming An Activist, Children's Crusade, Later Years, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the words mary, harris and/or jones:
“Miss Mary Emerson is here,—the youngest person in Concord, though about eighty,—and the most apprehensive of a genuine thought; earnest to know of your inner life; most stimulating society; and exceedly witty withal. She says they called her old when she was young, and she has never grown any older. I wish you could see her.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Mr. Brownlow: The law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.
Bumble: If that’s what the law supposes, sir, then the law’s an ass. And if that’s the eye of the law, sir, then the law’s a bachelor.”
—Vernon Harris (c. 1910)
“Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit!”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)