Mother Jones Collection Mother Jones Collection
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photographs documenting the life of labor organizer Mary Harris
"Mother" Jones (1843?-1930), drawn from the Mother Jones, Terence
Powderly and John Mitchell collections of The Catholic University of
America Archives.
She was the "Miners Angel;" she was the "most dangerous woman
in America." She was an "impious Joan of Arc;" she was a "secular nun."… Mary Harris was born in County Cork in Ireland, probably in
1836. She came to Toronto in the early 1840's, attended public school
and normal school, and in the early years of her adult life taught in
Catholic schools in Monroe, Michigan and Memphis, Tennessee. In Memphis
she married George Jones, and official of the Moulders' Union, but
George and their children perished a few years later in a Yellow Fever
epidemic. Sometime in the 1870s she drifted into organizing and radical
politics and over the next sixty years she seemed to find her way to
every dramatic event in the history of the radical politics and labor
in America. …Her work in behalf of the miners was the central effort of
her career and would win her the most fame. One of her first great
triumphs was in the coalfields of West Virginia organizing miners
during the great anthracite coal strike of 1902. …Many of her letters
reveal the drama, danger and heartache of those [industrial war]
battles. … ----From the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library proposal, written by Timothy J. Meagher
TITLE: Mother Jones Collection Background images used with the kind permission of The Anthracite Museum Complex, Bureau of Historic Sites & Museums, Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission, MG 369. Special thanks to Mr. Chester Kulesa and Ms. Diane Reed. Send questions and comments to:
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