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:
“O how terrible it must be for a young man—
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living”
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“You see, my dear, it occurred to me that he’d make a delightful coffin follower. That, that expression of melancholy. It’s very interesting, don’t you think so, my love?”
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“The only road to the highest stations in this country is that of the law.”
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