![\"Mother](\"http:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Mother_Jones-300x293.jpg\")
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Celebrating Mother Jones is appropriate on Labor Day:<\/p>\n
Teddy Roosevelt once called her \u201cthe most dangerous woman in America\u201d when she was 87 years old. Mary Harris Jones, or \u201cMother Jones,\u201d was born to a tenant farmer in Cork, Ireland, in 1837.<\/p>\n
Her family fled the potato famine when she was just 10, resettling in Toronto. She trained to be a teacher and took a job in Memphis, where on the eve of the Civil War she married a union foundry worker and started a family.<\/p>\n
But in 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept through the city, taking the lives of her husband and all four children.<\/p>\n
A widow at 30, she moved to Chicago and built a successful dressmaking business \u2014 only to lose everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.<\/p>\n
Jones then threw herself into the city\u2019s bustling labor movement, where she worked in obscurity for the next 20 years.<\/p>\n
By the turn of the century, she emerged as a charismatic speaker and one of the country\u2019s leading labor organizers, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).<\/p>\n
She traveled the country to wherever there was labor struggle, sometimes evading company security by wading the riverbed into town, earning her the nickname \u201cThe Miner\u2019s Angel.\u201d<\/p>\n
She used storytelling, the Bible, humor, and even coarse language to reach a crowd. She said: \u201cI asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones also had little patience for hesitation, volunteering to lead a strike \u201cif there were no men present.\u201d<\/p>\n
A passionate critic of child labor, she organized a children\u2019s march from Philadelphia to the home of Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York with banners reading, \u201cWe want to go to school and not the mines!\u201d<\/p>\n
At the age of 88, she published a first-person account of her time in the labor movement called The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).<\/p>\n
She died at the age of 93 and is buried at a miners\u2019 cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cWhatever the fight, don\u2019t be ladylike.\u201d
\n~ The Writer’s Almanac<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Celebrating Mother Jones is appropriate on Labor Day: Teddy Roosevelt once called her \u201cthe most dangerous woman in America\u201d when she was 87 years old. Mary Harris Jones, or \u201cMother Jones,\u201d was born to a tenant farmer in Cork, Ireland, in 1837. Her family fled the potato famine when she was just 10, resettling in … <\/p>\n