Mother Jones

Mary Harris was born in Cork, Ireland, and emigrated with her family to North America as a child, eventually working as a teacher and dressmaker before marrying an iron moulder and union man, George Jones, in Memphis. In 1867 a yellow fever epidemic killed her husband and all four of her young children within days of each other, and four years later the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the dressmaking shop she had built to survive. She later said these losses freed her to give the rest of her life to other people's children.

She found her cause in the labour movement, travelling to mining camps and mill towns across the country, often in her sixties and seventies, to organise strikes and rally support with fiery speeches that earned her the nickname Mother Jones. She helped organise coal miners in West Virginia and Colorado, led a march of child mill workers from Pennsylvania to New York in 1903 to publicise child labour, and was present at some of the era's most violent labour disputes, including the aftermath of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre of striking Colorado miners' families.

She was arrested and jailed repeatedly, once at the age of eighty-three, and a US district attorney called her the most dangerous woman in America for her ability to move miners to strike with a single speech.

She continued organising into her nineties and died in 1930, widely believed to have been around 100 years old, though her exact birth year is disputed.