- Home
- Mother Jones

Mother Jones
Mary Harris Jones, aka “Mother Jones” (1837–1930), was a US labor activist in the nineteenth century. Born in County Cork, Ireland, Jones immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with her family at age five—prior to the potato famine. She first worked as a teacher in a Michigan Catholic school, then as a...
Mary Harris Jones, aka “Mother Jones” (1837–1930), was a US labor activist in the nineteenth century. Born in County Cork, Ireland, Jones immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with her family at age five—prior to the potato famine.
She first worked as a teacher in a Michigan Catholic school, then as a seamstress in Chicago. She moved to Memphis for another teaching job, and in 1861 married George Jones, a member of the Iron Molders Union. They had four children in six years. In 1867, her entire family died in a yellow fever epidemic and she dressed in black for the rest of her life.
Returning to Chicago, Jones resumed sewing but lost everything she owned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In 1877, she took up the cause of working people. Jones was a speaker and organizer in Pittsburgh during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. She took part in and led hundreds of strikes, including those that led to the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886. Beginning in 1900, she focused on miners, organizing in the coalfields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. For a few years, she was employed by the United Mine Workers, but left when the national leadership disavowed a wildcat strike in Colorado.
After a decade in the West, Jones returned to West Virginia, where, after a violent strike in 1912–1913, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Public appeals on her behalf convinced the governor to commute her twenty-year sentence. Afterward, she returned to Colorado and made a national crusade out of the tragic events during the Ludlow Massacre, including lobbying President Woodrow Wilson. Later, she participated in several industrial strikes on the East Coast between 1915 and 1919 and continued to organize miners well into her nineties.
In 1925, she published her Autobiography of Mother Jones. She is buried near miners in Virden, Illinois.