Mother Jones

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones became the most famous labor organizer in America by turning grandmotherly appearance into a weapon. An Irish immigrant who lost her husband and four children to yellow fever and her dress shop to the Great Chicago Fire, she remade herself as a tireless agitator for working people, especially coal miners.

For decades she traveled the country wherever workers were on strike, rallying miners and their families with fiery speeches and a gift for theater. Dressed in black like everyone's grandmother, she dared authorities to arrest a harmless old woman — and made headlines when they did.

In 1903 she led the "March of the Mill Children," a procession of child laborers from Pennsylvania toward President Theodore Roosevelt's home, dramatizing the brutal conditions children faced in mills and mines and pushing child-labor reform into the national conversation.

A prosecutor reportedly called her "the most dangerous woman in America" for her ability to move workers to action. Active into her nineties, Mother Jones became a folk hero of the labor movement and an enduring symbol of its human cost and courage.