Mother Jones: Raising Cain and Consciousness

by Simon Cordery

A life touched by tragedy and deprivation--childhood in her native Ireland ending with the potato famine, immigration to Canada and then to the United States, marriage followed by the deaths of her husband and four children from yellow fever, and the destruction of her dressmaking business in the great Chicago fire of 1871--forged the stalwart labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones into a force to be reckoned with.

Radicalized in a brutal era of repeated violence against hard-working men and women, Mother Jones crisscrossed the country to demand higher wages and safer working conditions. Her activism in support of American workers began after the age of sixty. The grandmotherly persona she projected won the hearts, and her stirring rhetoric the minds, of working people. She made herself into a national symbol of resistance to tyranny. Sometimes exaggerating her own experiences, she fought for justice in mines, factories, and workshops across the nation. For her troubles she was condemned as "the most dangerous woman in America."

At her death in 1930 at the age of ninety-three, thousands paid tribute at a Washington, D.C., memorial service, and again at her burial in the only union-owned cemetery in America in the small mining town of Mount Olive, Illinois. As noted in The New York Times, the Rev. W. R. McGuire, who conducted her burial, said, "Wealthy coal operators and capitalists throughout the United States are breathing a sigh of relief while toil-worn men and women are weeping tears of bitter grief."

The courage of Mother Jones is notorious and admired to this day. Cordery effectively recounts her story in this accessible biography, bringing to life an amazing woman and explaining the dramatic times through which she lived and to which she contributed so much.

Genres: History

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2010

Reviews

[Mitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although this is the newest book on Mother Jones, and thus takes advantage of all the research to come before it, the book reads like a first draft. The author clearly did his homework and has a lot of good information to share, and a good story to tell, there's quite a few things that a good edit would have fixed.

One is musings over how Mother Jones would have felt about X, Y, or Z. Without documentation, the author is only relying on stereotypes of women to infer how Jones dealt with the loss of her children or the motives that led her to become "Mother." Some speculation can be insightful in areas we don't understand, but in this book it was excessive and not always clearly noted as speculation.

Another is the repetitiveness here. Most chapters begin by repeating the same paragraphs that closed the chapter before. The author's theories (useful) are repeated both before, after and during events.

I've got to give this a low rating because of the writing/editing, but I don't doubt the factual information in this book. The author's contribution to the study of Mother Jones is a scouring of newspaper reports surrounding events of her life. Cordery does a good job of weighing the truthfulness of reports with their bias and effect on public perception. With this he's able to draft a human portrait of a woman who portrays herself as a mythical figure.

[Kris · Rating 1 out of 5]

I stopped reading this at page 43 because the level of pure speculation and conjecture just became too great. The author attributes beliefs, behavior, and actions to Mother Jones that in no way can be made with such conviction, and his understanding of labor history is weak. This is just irresponsible scholarship.

[Shauna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A biography of a unique labor leader - for labor relations class.

[Yvonne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A helpful resource for anyone looking to learn more about Mother Jones and/or the history of the labor movement and the American Left. Although he tends toward hyperbole at times, it's a good, short read.