page_title: Mother Jones
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Mother Jones / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Workers' Memorial Day poster Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living. - Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
context_page_description: Mary G. Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones from 1897 onwards, was an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist. She helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World.
  After Jones' husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867, and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she became an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. In 1902, she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.
context_section_description: According to labor historian Melvin Dubofsky:
  Indeed her renown as a radical rests on a shaky historical foundation. A woman who publicly accused UMW officials of selling out their followers to the capitalist class, she negotiated amicably with John D Rockefeller. Jr., in the aftermath of the 1914 Ludlow massacre....Famous for enlisting workers' wives in the labor struggle, she opposed women's suffrage and insisted that woman's place was in the home....She was simply and essentially an individualist, one who chose to devote the last 30 years of a long life to the cause of the working-class. Her influence on the American labor movement was, however, largely symbolic: the image of a grandmotherly, staidly dressed, slightly built woman unfazed by hostile employers, their hired gunmen, or anti-labor public officials intensified the militancy workers who saw her or who heard of her deeds.
  Jones uttered words still invoked by union supporters more than a century later: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." Already known as "the miners' angel" when she was denounced on the floor of the United States Senate as the "grandmother of all agitators", she replied, "I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators."
  During the bitter 1989–90 Pittston Coal strike in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky, the wives and daughters of striking coal miners, inspired by the still-surviving tales of Jones's legendary work among an earlier generation of the region's coal miners, dubbed themselves the "Daughters of Mother Jones". They played a crucial role on the picket lines and in presenting the miners' case to the press and public.
  Mother Jones magazine was established in the 1970s and quickly became "the largest selling radical magazine of the decade." 
  Mary Harris "Mother" Jones Elementary School in Adelphi, Maryland.
  Students at Wheeling Jesuit University, Wheeling, West Virginia can apply to reside in Mother Jones House, an off-campus service house. Residents perform at least ten hours of community service each week and participate in community dinners and events.
  In 1984, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
  To coincide with International Women's Day on 8 March 2010 a proposal from Councillor Ted Tynan for a plaque to be erected in Mary Harris Jones's native Cork City was passed by the Cork City Council. Members of the Cork Mother Jones Commemorative Committee unveiled the plaque on 1 August 2012 to mark the 175th anniversary of her birth. The Cork Mother Jones Festival was held in the Shandon area of the city, close to her birthplace, with numerous guest speakers. The festival now takes place annually around the anniversary and has led to growing awareness of Mother Jones's legacy and links between admirers in Ireland and the US.  A new documentary, Mother  Jones and her children, has been produced by Cork-based Frameworks Films  and premiered at the Cork festival in 2014.
  The imprisonment of "Mother" Jones is commemorated by the State of West Virginia through a Historic Highway marker. The marker was made by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. The marker reads, "PRATT.  First settled in the early 1780s and incorporated in 1905.  Important site in 1912-13 Paint-Cabin Creek Strike.  Labor organizer 'Mother Jones' spent her 84th birthday imprisoned here.  Pratt Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1984, recognizes the town's important residential architecture from early plantation to Victorian Styles."  The marker is located in the town of Pratt, right off of West Virginia 61.
  In 2019, Mother Jones was inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame.
caption: United States Department of Labor poster, 2010
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