Agnes was a small, black-haired woman who often dressed in a brown street suit and carried "a bulging briefcase" that also served as a purse. Her hair was bobbed; her brown eyes were sharp and challenging; and she stood "proudly erect." Her son wrote that "she has stick-to-it-iveness; is a talker . . . has tried hard to educate herself; not envious or jealous . . . angry at the poverty of the poor; loathes hypocrisy. Social and economic reform is important to her."
In 1908, at age sixteen, Agnes obtained a teaching certificate; a year later began her teaching career. While she taught school, she was involved in the local labor movement, organizing miners' wives. Occasionally someone referred to her as another Mother Jones."
In 1914, when she was twenty-two, Agnes left teaching and began to write about the lives of the working people. The massacre at Ludlow, Colorado, that year served as a catalyst for her idealism. Years later, in 1932, at a convention of the Women's Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners' Association, Agnes referred to that event: "I was a good teacher. I didn't know any better. I taught my pupils the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States. . . . And then one morning I read in the paper of the battle at Ludlow where women and children were shot by soldiers and burned to death. Liberty and justice for all! Think of it. I vowed I would never again teach the children to say the pledge of allegiance to the flag."
Agnes knew she must find a different kind of work. Her opportunity came that spring. One day, in the United Mine Workers Journal, she saw a headline: "School for Women Organizers." The National Women's Trade Union League of America was opening a training program in Chicago, a "School for Active Workers in the Labor Movement." It was the first residential workers' education program in the United States. Students would take courses at the University of Chicago for four months and then would work for eight months in the field, under supervision.
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