Written by Joann Condellone, Vice President of the Friends of the Mother Jones Museum

Mary Harris “Mother Jones'' was born to Roman Catholic parents in Cork, Ireland in 1837. Her family left during the days of the Great Hunger, known as the Potato Famine of the 1850s. They settled first in Canada. Mother Jones came to the United States and taught school for a few years in Monroe, Michigan during a time when immigration numbers were growing dramatically and sweatshop conditions, crowded housing, and the absence of child labor laws made life hard for working families.

After moving to Memphis for a new teaching position, she met and married a skilled laborer and union activist, George Jones, in 1860. They had four children before a yellow fever epidemic raged through the city in 1867. George and all four of their children died in the outbreak. 

Mother Jones moved to Chicago and started a successful dressmaking business in which she made dresses for the wives and daughters of some of the richest men in Chicago. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed her city and her business. Now age 34, she had survived famine, plague, and fire. 

Chicago became the center of progressive labor activity and she was drawn to the labor organizations that worked to aid and advocate for the working poor in the city. She joined the Knights of Labor, the only group that admitted women, and began the transformation from immigrant widow to organizer and labor champion. Much of her life during the next two decades is undocumented. What is known is that she worked to support unemployed workers in Ohio, was in Pittsburgh during the national coal strike, and organized miners’ wives in Arnot, Pennsylvania. In 1900, she was hired by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to work in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

In 1901, she wrote an article as “Mother Jones.” Believing that older women were taken more seriously, she purposely represented herself as an elderly woman who wore long dresses and a decorated hat and wrote, spoke, and fought for child laborers, miners, factory workers, and hungry families. The name Mother Jones would follow her for the rest of her life. 

In 1903, Mother Jones led a 125-mile march of child textile mill workers from Philadelphia to the summer home of President Theodore Roosevelt. The president refused to see them, but the story filled newspapers across the country.

Though she traveled the country and even into Mexico for her work, Mother Jones returned to Illinois many times. In 1917, she supported workers in a streetcar strike in Bloomington. In 1918 she was present when women organized in a wallpaper factory in Joliet. She returned to Chicago several times, including to support workers in the Great Steel Strike of 1919. She began writing her Autobiography of Mother Jones there in 1923.

Despite great personal adversity, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was the champion of working families and child laborers across the country. She had great affection for Illinois, especially for the miners of Macoupin County who struck and then fought in an armed conflict over working conditions in 1898. Though she spent the end of her life living with friends in Washington, DC. and Maryland, she wrote to the UMWA in 1923 to ask to be buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive, which was created to provide a resting place for the miners who died in the 1898 conflict. She died on November 30, 1930, and her funeral brought more than 25,000 working people to the town of 3,000 to say goodbye to Mother Jones. Today her life story and fearless devotion to working children and miners inspire modern labor struggles. Visitors from around the world visit the Mother Jones monument at the Union Miners Cemetery.