23 Facts About Mother Jones

Mary G Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones from 1897 onwards, was an Irish-born American labor organizer, former schoolteacher, and dressmaker who became a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist.

Mother Jones helped coordinate major strikes, secure bans on child labor, and co-founded the socialist trade union, the Industrial Workers of the World.

Mother Jones was paid eight dollars per month, but the school was described as a "depressing place".

Mother Jones did work for those of the upper class of Chicago in the 1870s and 1880s.

Once the Knights ceased to exist, Mary Mother Jones became involved mainly with the United Mine Workers.

Mother Jones frequently led UMW strikers in picketing and encouraged striking workers to stay on strike when management brought in strike-breakers and militias.

Mother Jones was termed "the most dangerous woman in America" by a West Virginian district attorney, Reese Blizzard, in 1902 at her trial for ignoring an injunction banning meetings by striking miners.

Mother Jones was ideologically separated from many female activists of the pre-Nineteenth Amendment days due to her lack of commitment to female suffrage.

The first reference to her in print as Mother Jones was in 1897.

Mother Jones claimed that the young girls working in the mills were being robbed and demoralized.

In 1903, Mother Jones organized children who were working in mills and mines to participate in her famous "March of the Mill Children" from Kensington, Philadelphia, to the summer house of President Theodore Roosevelt on Long Island.

Martial law in the area was declared and rescinded twice before Mother Jones was arrested on February 13,1913, and brought before a military court.

Mother Jones was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary.

Mother Jones attempted to stop miners from marching into Logan County, West Virginia, in late August 1921.

Mother Jones visited the governor and departed assured he would intervene.

When UMW president Frank Keeney demanded to see the telegram, Mother Jones refused and he denounced her as a 'fake'.

Mother Jones was joined by Keeney and other UMWA officials who were pressuring the miners to go home.

Mother Jones remained a union organizer for the UMW into the 1920s and continued to speak on union affairs almost until she died.

Mother Jones released her own account of her experiences in the labor movement as The Autobiography of Mother Jones.

Apparently Mother Jones did not know or overlooked that Morgan had received about $1 million in campaign donations from industrialists in the 1920 election.

Mother Jones celebrated her self-proclaimed 100th birthday there on May 1,1930, and was filmed making a statement for a newsreel.

Mary Harris Mother Jones died on November 30,1930, at the Burgess farm, then in Silver Spring, Maryland, though now part of Adelphi.

Mother Jones is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside miners who died in the 1898 Battle of Virden.