By Sr. Joan Chittister

Mary Jones was born in Cork, Ireland in 1830. She worked as a seamstress and schoolteacher, bore four children, emigrated to the United States when Victorianism was in its heyday and, at an early age, lost her husband and all her children to smallpox. She was one of thousands of strong and long suffering women who lived in poverty and survived it. In her long, black dress and broad-brimmed hat, she was the prototype of every turn-of-the-century grandmother in the United States. Except that she wasn’t. Underneath the patina of propriety and modest seemliness beat the heart of the lion of Judah who knew injustice and decried it, who knew the story of Exodus and believed it.

The Glided Age

She was a struggling contemporary of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockfeller. She lived during the period of the rise of the railroads, the invention of the telegraph, the production of the automatic revolvers, the passage of the US Gag Law. The Law was aimed at suppressing the growing debate on slavery and the specter of day labor – the practice of hiring people by the day or sometimes only by the hour work a week, the exploitation of child labor, the sweatshops, the slum housing projects, the lockout of laborers who protested the inhuman working conditions, the blacklisting or universal rejection of laborers who dared to complain, a court systems for industry rather than the work force that produced the products – all these gave painful birth to the US labor movement. The “Glided Age” they called it, the age in which things looked beautiful on the surface. And Mary Harris Jones was in the midst of it all.

Holy Gadfly

The day-laborer Mary Jones became a founding member of the Knights of Labor, a utopian organization that welcomed blacks, immigrants and women into its ranks but that, having turned violent in the Haymarket Square Incident, lost public credibility and effectiveness. But Mary Jones was not discouraged. Committed to the God-given quality of the task, she waded into mining towns to establish the United Mine Workers. She organized ‘mop and broom brigades’ of the miners’ wives. They beat up pans to scare coal-hauling mules away in order to disrupt production at the mines. She organized a ‘children strike’ around the motto: We want time to play. She became an all-around holy gadfly. The miners called the staunch old lady Mother Jones, a title she valued far more than Madam.

Unlikely Moses

With a kind of prophetic passion, she spent sixty years of her life organizing for the labor union movement and compared it to the flight of Jews from Egypt. What Moses did, she figured, was simply to organize the Jews to confront their Egyptian slave masters. And she one industrial site after another by refusing to quit. “Fight like hell till you get to heaven,” she counseled people, and she gave them a fair idea of how it was be done as well. Mother Jones was seventy-two years old when a federal representative called her ‘the most dangerous woman in America.” She burned all her life with the fire of justice and signed everyone she touched with it.

Rising Against Oppression

She was an unlikely Moses in an unlikely desert, and today we have need of the likes of Mother Jones again. We need ordinary people like her uncommonly common folk teachers, government employers, wives and mother s, construction workers. Citizen who refuse to accept the fact that the government has money to burn on faulty roads, brand new cars for government officials and armaments but has not a penny to spend on squatters areas, street children, higher education for the poor. “Government interference” they call it when it is designed to provide programs for average people. “Investment incentives” they call it when it is designed to provide unconscionable profits” they call it when it is designed to exploit the cheap labor of Third World countries like the Philippines with never cent of taxes paid to the people for development of their own country in return. Indeed, Mother Jones needs to rise again in all of us.

Ugly System Changed

The problem is, of course, that we so easily abstract ourselves from the ranks of the heroic and the brave. They constitute, we assume, a specie beyond dailiness, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the realms of the normal. We admire them, but we seldom see them in the mirror of our lives. And that’s where Mother Jones comes in: old, female, grandmotherly widowed, childless, and financially destitute; she is the phantom and symbol of all our powerless lives. The difference between Mother Jones and most of the rest of humankind is that Mother Jones looked at the world through the eyes of God and announced what she saw: exploitation, corruption and injustice. Then, piece by little piece, she did something to change it: a mining town here, a meeting there. What was was not good enough for her. And thanks to her, a rich and massive system was forced to change.

Mother Jones is model of perseverance. By the time she died at the age of one hundred she had spent the greater part of her life speaking out for the needs of others.