Soon after, Agnes was selected to be a delegate to the Women's Trade Union League's national convention in New York City. As a result of her work there, She won a scholarship to attend the league's school. Carl Sandburg interviewed her and wrote about "the Illinois miner's daughter who had quit teaching school to train as a labor organizer."
Early in 1916, when she completed her studies. Agnes's first assignment was to address the District 12 (Illinois) convention of the United Mine workers of America and seek support for the league's work. She told her audience what the UMW had meant to her family and to her. Because she wanted recognition for the women of the coalfields, she asked them to remember Mother Jones's role in the miners' struggles. She talked of women's stake in "the struggle for a better world" and shared her vision "of a time when 'these women will be fighting with us and standing with us with as strong and firm a spirit of unionism as that of any band of union men on earth.'" To accomplish that, she wanted the support of organized labor.
Her mother had died when Agnes was ten years old, but her mother's experiences and reminiscences, as well as her own experiences growing up, colored Agnes's outlook and influenced her actions. Before her death, Agnes's mother saw the advent of the United Mine Workers, and "she cherished this union as something sacred."
(To be continued)
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