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1891 - Mother Jones

A freelance organizer and agitator for half a century, Mother Jones devoted most of her energies to miners’ struggles. In 1891, at the age of 61, Mary Harris Jones, an Irish immigrant widow, ventured into her first coal diggers’ strike, in Norton, Virginia. Like other early industrial disputes, this one involved a contest over control of space. The coal operators in southwestern Virginia sought to abrogate rights of free speech and free association by denying the UMW any place to meet. As on other occasions in company towns or community settings in which employers held such power, the union found a way to exercise its civil liberties by meeting on territory outside the mine owners' control.

Unable to afford land and a hall, the miners’ organization lay claim to public space. As Mother Jones did on other occasions, she addressed large gatherings of miners on state property alongside the road that passed through Norton. Her actions exemplified her courage and defiance of corporate autocracy. They show her tendency to challenge unorganized workers to make a display of their solidarity by literally standing up in public for the union. In contrast, 12 years later when Jones made a foray into the West Virginia coalfields, threats necessitated stealth. She held meetings “in the woods at night, [and] in abandoned mines.” Reliance on such tactics offers insight into the precarious status of poor, overmatched labor organizations.

Mother Jones mobilized women to act collectively in strikes and organizing campaigns. A clever manipulator of the gender conventions of her time, Jones knew the narrow limits on capitalist repressive violence whenever women participated in the conflict. Accordingly, she instigated audacious challenges to public authority and private power on picket lines. In the Arnot strike of 1899-1900, she contrived a plan to disperse strikebreakers: “I told the men to stay home with the children for a change and let the women attend to the scabs.”

Rather than command the operation herself, Jones encouraged one miner’s wife to take the lead and others to help force a confrontation at the entrance to the Drip Mouth Mine: "Take that dishpan you have with you and your hammer, and when the scabs and the mules come up, begin to hammer and howl. Then all of you hammer and howl and be ready to chase the scabs with your mops and brooms." This strategy proved effective; the pot-banging commotion frightened the mine mules, and the replacement workers bolted from the mine. The traditional symbols of domesticity and the status of homemakers served well in class combat.

Jones found other ways to destabilize gender roles. For example, she showed neither respect for the traditional superstition that women brought disaster if allowed inside a mine nor regard for ladylike propriety with language. John Brophy recalled his initial encounter with her at the turn of the century: “She came into the mine one day and talked to us in our workplace in the vernacular of the mines. How she got in I don’t know, probably just walked in and defied anyone to stop her.” Brophy remembered her as someone who "would take a drink with the boys and spoke their idiom, including some pretty rough language when she was talking about the bosses".

Upon her death in 1930, Mother Jones was buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. She had selected this site, the only union cemetery in the U.S. at that time, because it was the place of interment of four victims of the Virden Massacre of October 12, 1898, a pivotal event in the unionization of the southern Illinois coal region. For half a century afterward, thousands of miners converged on Mount Olive on the anniversary of the massacre to honor the sacrifices that had founded their organization. At the memorial activities in 1936, a sizable granite monument was dedicated to Jones, honoring her self-sacrifice and undying dedication to her fellows. It embodied the mutual ethos of extractive workers who knew that they depended on co-workers not only for survival but consolation.