Mother Jones

American labor leader

Also known as: Mary Harris, Mary Harris Jones

Written by

Levens Herbert

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

Mother Jones (born July 1837, Cork, Ireland—died November 30, 1930, Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S.) was a labor organizer in the United States who became widely known as a fiery agitator for the union rights of coal miners and other workers.

Early years

In her autobiography, published five years before she died, Mother Jones said she had been born in 1830, and she celebrated her 100th birthday on May 1, 1930. However, North Cathedral baptismal records in Cork, Ireland, and an 1861 Canadian census suggest that she was born in late July 1837. Historians speculate that she fabricated her birth date so it would fall on International Worker’s Day, reinforcing her standing as a labor activist.

Born Mary Harris, she grew up in Cork County, Ireland, and then moved with her family to Canada during the Great Famine (1845–49). In 1857 she enrolled in the Normal School in Toronto. Although she didn’t graduate, her schooling was sufficient for her to be hired as a teacher in Monroe, Michigan, in 1860, when she was 23. Following her time in Monroe, she moved to Chicago to work as a dressmaker. She then landed another teaching job, this time in Memphis, Tennessee, where she married iron molder George Jones in 1861. They had four children. By 1867 a yellow fever epidemic had taken hold in Memphis, and Mother Jones lost her husband and all her children.

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Back to Chicago

Eventually Jones returned to Chicago, where she began working as a seamstress again. Near the four-year anniversary of her family’s passing, in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire wreaked devastation on the city, and Jones lost all her possessions. She turned to the Knights of Labor for assistance, attracted by their campaign for improved working conditions.

Labor organizing

By 1890 Jones had become a highly visible figure in the American labor movement, and it was about this time that she earned the nickname “mother,” from striking miners in Virginia. She traveled across the country, both organizing for the United Mine Workers and orating on her own. She supported strikes and galvanized public support for labor with her slogan “Join the union, boys.”

Jones was also an active proponent of legislation to prohibit child labor. In 1903 she organized the March of the Mill Children, for which she gathered hundreds of protesters, including children, to march from Philadelphia to U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s vacation home in Long Island, New York, to warn against the harms of child labor. The protest took about 20 days, and afterward, she continued on with three of the children to meet with Roosevelt. (The president refused to see the group and said he had no power to help them.) Additionally, she was one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in 1898 and of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905.

Her autobiography, Autobiography of Mother Jones, was published in 1925.

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