Labor Day

NOT A COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER…RATHER A MOTHER TO ALL MINERS.

The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City. Since then there have been many working heroes…men and women who shaped America’s labor movement. To commemorate the 127th anniversary of Labor Day, we remember one such working hero, Mother Jones.

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones “labored” for and on behalf of American workers, mostly miners, from 1871 until her death in 1930. To some she was known as the Mother of All Agitators, to others the Miner’s Angel.

Mary Harris was born in Cork, Ireland in 1837. During the Great Irish Famine, she immigrated with her family to Canada where she trained to be a dressmaker and teacher. She later moved to Chicago and then Tennessee.

The turning point in Mary Harris’ life was when she lost her dressmaking shop in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, only four years after losing her husband and four children to the yellow fever epidemic while living in Tennessee.

One biographer believes that Mother Jones’s interest in the labor movement really began when she sewed for wealthy Chicago families and observed the blatant economic and social inequities that existed. According to Fetherling, she said: “Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front…. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care.”

She learned a great deal about unions and about the psychology of workingmen from her husband, and took that knowledge and worked it to improve the lives of those who she saw in need of better economic and social conditions.

When Mother Jones died in 1930, she quickly faded from public memory, except in coal mining communities. She was at once exceptional and quite typical–of the militant, pro-union coal miner’s wife who might curse out a mine guard or beat up a strikebreaker but who also cherished her traditional role in the family.

This Labor Day remember those who have worked over the years, and continue to do so, with the intent of improving our working lives.

And, remember…Feed Your Good Dog, so your good dog always wins! visit with us on follow us on

Excerpts from Answers.com with reference to The Reader’s Companion to American History, edited by John A. Garraty and Eric Foner, published by Houghton Mifflin Company and Bibliography: Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (1989); Edward M. Steel, ed., The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones (1988). Author: Priscilla Long Other resources: Mother Jones: The Miners’ Angel Mara Lou Hawse with reference to Dale Fetherling’s Mother Jones the Miners’ Angel: A Portrait