![]() ![]() In 1903, to dramatize the need to abolish child labor, she led a caravan of striking children from the textile mills of Kennsington, Pennsylvania, to President Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Long Island, New York. If arrested and imprisoned, she told them to sing as loudly as they could so the townspeople would be happy to have them released. In 1907, in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, she urged strikers’ wives to stand at the picket line with their children. She continued to use this tactic in other strikes throughout the years. ![]() In 1902, she told striking miners in Arnot, Pennsylvania, to “stay home with the children for a change and let the women attend to the scabs.” She then led a march of the miners’ wives from mine to mine, driving away strikebreakers with brooms and mops. But as many of the organizers spent their days organizing the men, Mother Jones also organized the women and children. She traveled to West Virginia, Alabama and Colorado, the hardest areas to organize. She spoke with an explosive intensity to her mostly male audience that inspired them to raise their own voices in the workplace by demanding the wages and working conditions they justly deserved.īy 1890, she joined the coal miners’ fight, becoming an organizer for the newly formed United Mine Workers of America. When she spoke, she was charismatic, energetic and passionate – bringing her audience to tears, applause and laughter. It was during her years with the Knights of Labor when people, including Mother Jones, realized she was a better agitator than an organizer. It was the loss of her children, many have argued, that caused Mother Jones to adopt the destitute and tyrannized as her own kin. She joined the organization after several tragedies took place in her life: the loss of her husband and four children during a yellow fever epidemic in 1867 and the loss of her business and property during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. ![]() Mother Jones began her career in the labor movement as an organizer for the Knights of Labor. To her admirers se was labor’s Joan of Arc or the Miner’s Angel to her enemies, she was, as President Theodore Roosevelt called her, the “most dangerous women in America.” Standing no more than five feet tall, clad in a black dress with just a touch of lace at her throat and wrists, Mother Jones was an iconic view of a grandmother.īut with a life that spanned the presidencies between Andrew Jackson and Herbert Hoover, Mother Jones focused her grandmotherly warmth on the workers in the minefields and her scorn on the bosses who exploited them. Mother Jones: The Miner’s Angel and Labor’s Hell-RaiserĪmong the gravesites in the old Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, there stands a monument dedicated to and elderly woman, Mary “Mother” Jones. ![]()
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