NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Before Mother Jones was a news magazine, she was a teacher, a dressmaker, a union leader, a strike organizer, an occasional Socialist, and a self-proclaimed “hell-raiser.”
She also was a pro-life Catholic, baptized Mary Harris on August 1, 1837, who believed women belonged at home with their children and that the suffrage movement was foolishness itself. “You don’t need the vote to raise hell,” she once proclaimed.
A native of Ireland, Harris immigrated to Canada as a teenager. She then moved south to teach at a Catholic school in Michigan and eventually settled in Memphis as the bride of Mr. George E. Jones. Life for Mrs. Jones was nothing but ordinary until 1867, when yellow fever killed her husband and four children. After that, she moved to Chicago and opened a dress shop, only to lose it in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
From that point forward, Jones devoted her life to improving the working conditions of America’s laborers. Urging people to “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living,” she led strikes and planned marches that championed eight-hour work days, the end of child labor, fair pay for workers, and safer mines and factories.
Standing barely 5 feet tall and always dressed in widow’s black, Jones grew old fighting unjust labor practices. By the time she was 60, the country knew her as Mother Jones, a persona Jones carefully cultivated, knowing it worked in her favor.
But those who opposed her weren’t fooled. As a West Virginia prosecutor once said of Jones in court, “There sits the most dangerous woman in America…She comes into a state where peace and prosperity reign…crooks her finger [and] twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out.”
Jones continued raising hell until 1930, when at the age of 93, shortly after receiving Last Rites, she passed away.
