In honor of InternationalWomenDay2020, we're sharing some of our favorite stories about women who changed the game. Up first:
In 1902, the “most dangerous woman in America” was a five-foot-tall, silver-haired woman in her 60s. Labor organizer and anti-capitalist firebrand Mary Harris Jones—known as “Mother” Jones—was a grandmotherly woman who dressed in black with a froth of lace at her throat and a jaunty bonnet on her head.
Jones organizes a diverse group of miners and their families in Colorado, 1913. Via MotherJonesMuseum.org. Alone again, she moved back to Chicago, where she and a partner opened a dressmaking business. Sewing for the city’s wealthy elite, Mary Jones “had ample opportunity to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives,” she wrote. From the windows of their mansions, she watched “poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry” as they walked along the city’s frozen lakefront, while her employers “seemed neither to notice nor to care.”But tragedy seemed to follow Jones wherever she went.
Her “boys” were mostly white men. While Mother Jones welcomed black miners to the fight against “scab” labor hired by management to replace striking workers, she was not, in the words of biographer Elliott Gorn, “immune to bigotry.” She sometimes used language that would today be considered racist, and worried about the “importation” of immigrant strikebreakers.
Mother Jones with children and adults beginning their"Children's Crusade," 1903. Photo via New York World-Telegram & Sun, photograph retrieved from the Library of Congress, [LC-DIG-DS-07713]None of this was remotely what an elderly widow was supposed to be doing with her life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Surprisingly, she did not believe in giving women the vote. “I am not a suffragist,” she told The New York Times in 1913. “In no sense of the word am I in sympathy with woman’s suffrage.” Sounding very much like the “do as I say, not as I do” anti-ERA crusader Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s, Mother Jones thought women were “out of place in political work.” There was already “a great responsibility” upon their shoulders, she said, “that of rearing rising generations.
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