Jones, "Mother" Mary Harris

JONES, “MOTHER” MARY HARRIS (1836–1930). A union organizer and sometime socialist associated primarily with the United Mine Workers of America, “Mother” Mary Harris Jones was an impassioned and highly effective organizer. A white-haired, matronly figure, she gained prominence during the anthracite strike of 1900, attracting national attention during several other strikes, including the Paint and Cabin Creek strike (West Virginia, 1913) and the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike (1913–1914). Her physical courage and flamboyant style became legendary as she waded creeks, defied mine guards, and went to prison in the miners’ cause.

Mary G. Harris was born in Cork, Ireland, most likely in 1836 or 1837. Fleeing from the Irish famine, at age seven she came with her family, first to Canada and then to the United States. As a young woman she taught school and worked as a seamstress, eventually marrying George Jones, a member of the iron moulders’ union. He and their four children died in the Memphis yellow fever epidemic of 1867. In 1871 her dressmaking shop burned down in the Chicago Fire. Thereafter she became involved with the Knights of Labor, and later with the anti-Chinese agitation that thoroughly infected the labor movement of the 1880s. In the early 1890s she began organizing coal miners, and by 1902 a West Virginia district attorney called her “then most dangerous woman in America,” a descriptive that stuck.

Although chiefly associated with coal miners, Mother Jones worked with other groups as well. In 1903 she organized a widely publicized march of textile mill children to demonstrate the evils of child labor. She supported various socialist causes, including her one-woman campaign in 1910 for the release of Mexican revolutionaries jailed in American prisons.

Politically, Mother Jones moved in the mid-1890s from populism to socialism, and in 1916 from socialism to support of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. She held strongly anti-capitalist views and continued to organize for the United Mine Workers into the 1920s. Despite her own non-conventional lifestyle, the “miner’s angel,” as she to be known, held fervently traditional views on the roles of women. She died on 30 November 1930 and was buried in the miners’ cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. Mary Harris Jones lived on in a much-quoted adage: “Pray for the dead, but raise hell for the living.”

Featherling, Dale. Mother Jones: The Miners’ Angel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

Gorn, Elliott J. Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.

Jones, Mary Harris. Autobiography of Mother Jones. Edited by Mary Field Parton. Reprint. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1972; revised/annotated edition, 1990.

Long, Priscilla. Mother Jones, Woman Organizer, and Her Relations with Miners’ Wives, Working Women, and the Suffrage Movement. Boston: Red Sun Press, 1976.

Steel, Edward M., ed. The Correspondence of Mother Jones. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985.

Steel, Edward M., ed. The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1988.

Mother Jones Museum (on-line). Website. https://www.motherjonesmuseum.org