Mother Jones—a dressmaker who became an indomitable labor organizer after losing her husband and four children in the yellow fever epidemic in 1867. Mother Jones famously led the “Children’s Crusade” of child workers, many of whom had been maimed while working in coal mines and mills. Chanting “We want to go to school and not the mines,” the children marched from Philadelphia to the doorstep of President Theodore Roosevelt’s estate in Oyster Bay, New York. Mother Jones’s ceaseless activism caused one West Virginian DA to call her “the most dangerous woman in America.”
