Mother Jones: The "Miners' Angel" - Part I
The frail-looking elderly woman smoothed her black dress and touched the lace at her throat and wrists. Her snow-white hair was gathered into a knot at the nape of her neck, and a hat, trimmed with lavender ribbons to lend a touch of color, shaded her finely wrinkled face. She was small - only about five feet tall - but she exuded energy and enthusiasm. As she waited to speak, her bright blue eyes scanned the people grouped beyond the platform. Her kindly expression never altered as her voice broke over the audience: "I'm a not a humanitarian, she exclaimed. I'm a hell-raiser."
And she was. She was Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, and her size and grandmotherly appearance belied her fiery nature. On stage, she became a dynamic speaker, projecting wide variations in emotion, perhaps striding about in "a towering rage." She could bring her audience to the verge of tears or have them clapping and laughing. She was a good story teller, and "she excelled in invective, pathos, and humor ranging from irony to ridicule." When Jones spoke, everyone sat up and listened. "No matter what impossible ideas she brought up, she made the miners think she and they together could do anything."
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn called her "the greatest woman agitator of our times," and she was denounced in the U.S. Senate as the grandmother of all agitators. Mother Jones was proud of that title and said she hoped to live to be the great grandmother of agitators.
Jones, born in Cork, Ireland, on May 1, 1830, came from a long line of agitators. As child, she watched British soldiers march through the streets, the heads of Irishmen stuck on their bayonets. Her father's father, an Irish freedom fighter, was hanged; her father was forced to flee to America with his family in 1835.
Jones grew up in Toronto, Ontario, and attended the public schools. She graduated from normal school at seventeen and taught in a convent school in Michigan for eight months. Then, she moved to Chicago to work as a dressmaker. "I preferred sewing to bossing little children," she said. She moved to Memphis, Tennessee, again to teach school. There, in 1861, she met and married George E. Jones, an ironmolder who was "a staunch member" of the Iron Molders' Union.
Jones's biographer, Dale Fetherling, claims that Mother Jones learned a great deal about unions and about the psychology of workingmen from her husband. Later, when much of her work was with women, she tried to pass on to them what she had learned: "That is, the wife must care for what the husband cares for if he is to remain resolute."
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