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Mary Harris was born on May 1, 1830 in Cork, Ireland. She was the daughter of Richard Harris a tenant farmer. In 1835, Mary’s family left Ireland. Mary attended public schools in Toronto, Ontario and graduated from normal school when she was seventeen. After graduation she worked as a schoolteacher and dressmaker. In 1861, she married George Jones, an ironworker and union member. Mary and George had a son and three daughters. In 1867, while living in Memphis, Tennessee, Mary’s husband and three children died of yellow fever.
After the death of her family, Jones moved to Chicago and worked as a dressmaker for the wealthy families of the city. While working for the rich families, she became concerned about the social and economic inequities that were prominent. She said, “Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front…The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care.”
In October of 1871, her house and dressmaking shop were destroyed by a fire. While assisting with the fire relief effort, she attended a meeting of the Knights of Labor. She became friends with the Knights Labor leader, Terence Powderly. She became involved with union work and was known as “Mother” by all the workers she met. Participation in union activities was dangerous. In July 1877, Jones participated in the railroad workers’ strike in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Twenty strikers were killed when state militia fired on them.
In 1890, Jones became an organizer for the United Mine Workers (UMW). She was in her sixties at this time. She was arrested many times for her organizing activities. In order to learn more about the child labor factories and general working conditions she worked in a rope factory and cotton mill. She wrote for the socialist paper “Appeal to Reason,” and assisted in founding the socialist party, the Social Democratic Party.
In 1900, Jones led a 14-mile march of miners’ wives in Panther Creek Valley, Pennsylvania. She was able to encourage the miners to strike and as a result of her efforts, the mine owners agreed to a wage increase for the workers. During this time, 100,000 new members joined the UMW.
In 1905, Jones along with Western Federation of Miners (WFM) leaders, founded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW grew rapidly and included miners, farm workers, factory workers and lumberjacks.
Jones often delivered fiery, radical speeches and was arrested many times. In 1913, she was convicted for conspiracy to commit murder and received a 20-year sentence. West Virginia governor, Henry Hatfield, commuted her term after she had been in custody for 85 days.
Mother Jones continued to fight in the labor movement well into her eighties. She was arrested in Colorado at the age of 83. The public was incensed and called for her release. After her release, she continued her fight for the rights of workers. She travelled around the country speaking to strikers and political organizations. In January 1921, when she was ninety-one years old, she attended the Pan-American Federation of Labor meeting in Mexico.
On May 1, 1930, she celebrated her 100th birthday and observances were held around the United States. Mother Jones died on November 20, 1930 in Silver Spring. Her funeral service was held at the union miners’ cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois and was attended by thousands of miners. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried next to four miners who were killed in Virden, Illinois during a coal-strike riot in 1889. Mother Jones’ biographer Dale Fetherling says, “she was born less than 50 years after the end of the American Revolution. Yet, she died on the eve of the New Deal. She was alive when Andrew Jackson was president, and she sometimes quoted from speeches she heard Lincoln make. As an adult she knew the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. She rode in automobiles, and she saw the railroads link the oceans. She saw and was seen in films and came to know the everyday use of the telephone, the electric light, and the radio. She watched unions grow from secret groups of hunted men to what she feared was a complacent part of the established order…It may have been a good time to live in America. But it also was a time in which one needed to fight very hard to survive. That she did.”
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