Mary Harris Jones

Mary Harris Jones taught school and sewed dresses until yellow fever killed her husband and four children in 1867. Four years later the Great Chicago Fire burned her shop to the ground. She turned to labor organizing, working first with the Knights of Labor and then the United Mine Workers, and by the 1890s had taken the name Mother Jones. She coordinated major strikes, stood with miners' families against owners, and helped co-found the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1903, angry that Pennsylvania's child labor laws went unenforced in the mines and mills, she led a children's march from Ph…