Mary Harris adopted the persona, the attire and the fiery personality that became known as ‘Mother Jones’. Gerard O’Mahony tells the story of Mary Harris, better known as the Irish/American labour activist Mother Jones. On 1 August 2012 over 500 people gathered at John Redmond Street in the heart of Shandon, Cork, to witness the unveiling of a plaque to a long-forgotten Cork woman. Soon afterwards she became a full-time organiser with the United Mine Workers’ Union of America. She assisted with the march of the unemployed, known as Coxey’s Army, on Washington in 1894. She was in the vicinity of the Haymarket incident in 1886 after which four men, including Albert Parsons and August Spiers, were hanged. So at the early age of just 34 Mary had lost her family and her business.Īfter travelling for a few years, Mary Harris became active in the Knights of Labour in Chicago, which was a hotbed of labour agitation. She then opened a dressmaking business in Chicago, but her home at 174 Jackson Street and her business burned to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial.

One by one, my four little children sickened and died. ‘All about my house I could hear the weeping and the cries of delirium. In a moving passage from her autobiography, first published in 1925, which resonates with the Great Hunger in Cork in 1846–7, she recounts her distress: Tragedy struck the family in the winter of 1867, when George and the four young children died in the yellow fever epidemic that spread through the Bayou Gayoso neighbourhood of Memphis. Having survived the American Civil War, the family settled in Winchester Street and Mary had four children in quick succession from 1862. She later moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she married George Jones, who was very active in the International Iron Moulders’ Union. By 1860 Mary had become a seamstress and a teacher and obtained a teaching post at Monroe, Michigan. The Harris family, eventually consisting of five children, endured the Famine, which ravaged the city, but departed for Canada and by the mid-1850s lived at 210 Bathurst Street in Toronto. (The baptismal font remains in use at the famous ‘North Chapel’ today.) Her parents were Ellen Cotter from Inchigeelagh and Richard Harris from Cork city.

Mary Harris was born in Cork in 1837 and baptised in the North Cathedral on 1 August 1837. Published in 18th–19th - Century History, Features, Issue 4 (July-August 2013), News, Volume 21 Mother Jones, ‘the most dangerous woman in America’

Mother Jones by Elliott J. Gorn