![]() ![]() ![]() While the city'sĮnvisioned an opportunity to spread their message about the evils of capitalism, elected officials and the mercantile elite resolved to maintain order, mobilizing citizen patrols and calling for the intervention of theĪnd the U.S. News of attempts to control boisterous crowds fueled worker protest and sporadic violence.Ĭhicagoans watched and waited as the Great Strike ran its course through Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati. To protest cutbacks in the midst of a period of nationwide economic depression soon spread westward across the country. In Martinsburg, West Virginia, walked off the job to protest a 10 percent wage cut leveled by their employer, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois.In late July of 1877, Chicagoans played their part in the first nationwide uprising of workers. In 1925, she published her Autobiography of Mother Jones. A reflection of her Catholic heritage, she believed that men should be paid well enough so that women could devote themselves to motherhood. Jones argued that suffragists were naïve women who unwittingly acted as duplicitous agents of class warfare.Īlthough Jones organized working class women, she held them in auxiliaries, maintaining that-except when the union called-a woman’s place was in the home. She also considered suffragists unwitting dupes of class warfare. Later, she participated in several industrial strikes on the East Coast between 19 and continued to organize miners well into her nineties.ĭespite her radicalism, Jones did not support women’s suffrage, arguing that “you don’t need a vote to raise hell.” She pointed out that the women of Colorado had the vote and failed to use it to prevent the appalling conditions that led to labor violence. Afterward she returned to Colorado and made a national crusade out of the tragic events during the Ludlow Massacre, even lobbying President Woodrow Wilson. Public appeals on her behalf convinced the governor to commute her twenty-year sentence. After a decade in the West, Jones returned to West Virginia, where, after a violent strike in 1912-1913, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. For a few years, she was employed by the United Mine Workers, but left when the national leadership disavowed a wildcat strike in Colorado. A beloved leader, the workers she organized nicknamed her “Mother Jones.”īeginning in 1900, Jones focused on miners, organizing in the coal fields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. She paused briefly to publish The New Right in 1899 and a two-volume Letter of Love and Labor in 19. She took part in and led hundreds of strikes, including those that led to the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886. Jones first displayed her oratorical and organizing abilities in Pittsburgh during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Jones focused on the rising number of working poor during industrialization, especially as wages shrunk, hours increased, and workers had no insurance for unemployment, healthcare or old age. She found solace at Knights of Labor meetings, and in 1877, took up the cause of working people. Returning to Chicago, Jones resumed sewing but lost everything she owned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In 1867, tragedy struck when her entire family died in a yellow fever epidemic she dressed in black for the rest of her life. ![]() ![]() She moved to Memphis for another teaching job, and in 1861 married George Jones, a member of the Iron Molders Union. She first worked as a teacher in a Michigan Catholic school, then as a seamstress in Chicago. She was so strident that a US attorney once labeled her “the most dangerous woman in America.”īorn circa Augin County Cork, Ireland, Jones immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with her family at age five-prior to the potato famine with its waves of Irish immigrants. The most famous female labor activist of the nineteenth century, Mary Harris Jones- aka “Mother Jones”- was a self-proclaimed “hell-raiser” in the cause of economic justice. ![]()
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