Mother Jones worked tirelessly for economic justice. Her opponents called her the “most dangerous woman in America,” for her success in organizing miners and their families against wealthy mine owners.
Born in 1830, her family fled the devastation of the Irish Potato Famine and emigrated to America. Jones worked as a teacher and a dress maker, but after her husband and four children four children all died of yellow fever in 1867, and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she began working as a union organizer.
An example of campaigns she organized was the Children’s March of 1903. To protest child labor in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York. Powerful and effective campaigns like this made her the hated enemy of the greedy robber barons of her time.
Mother Jones combined dynamic speaking skills and radical organizing methods to mobilize thousands of working-class families.
She said of herself, “I am not a humanitarian, I am a hell-raiser.”
Her most famous saying, which is still said at workers’ funerals the world over, was, “Don’t mourn, organize!” We much to working class heroes like Mother Jones.