Its victims were mainly among the poor and the workers. In 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept Memphis. My husband was an iron moulder and a staunch member of the Iron Moulders’ Union. However, I went back to teaching again, this time in Memphis, Tennessee. I preferred sewing to bossing little children. Later, I came to Chicago and opened a dressmaking establishment.
My first position was teaching in a convent in Monroe, Michigan. Of that citizenship I have ever been proud.Īfter finishing the common schools, I attended the Normal school with the intention of becoming a teacher. Here I was brought up but always as the child of an American citizen. His work as a laborer with railway construction crews took him to Toronto, Canada. My father, Richard Harris, came to America in 1835, and as soon as he had become an American citizen he sent for his family.
Many of my folks have died in that struggle. For generations they had fought for Ireland’s freedom. I WAS born in the city of Cork, Ireland, in 1830. She was instrumental in the formation of the United Mine Workers union (UMW) in 1890 and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905.Īn important addition to feminist literature, the Autobiography of Mother Jones is also "a great piece of working-class literature…probably the most readable book in the whole field of American labor history." - Clarence Darrow.
She played a significant role in organizing mining strikes in West Virginia and Colorado, as well as the Pittsburgh steel strike of 1919. Widowed at the age of 30 when her husband and four young children died during a yellow fever epidemic, Mother Jones spoke out tirelessly and effectively for the rights of workers and unionists. Among the most stirring works of labor history ever written, this autobiography of Mother Jones (née Mary Harris) chronicles the life of a woman who was considered a saint by many, and by others, "the most dangerous woman in America." A forceful and picturesque figure in the American labor movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mother Jones was a born crusader.
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