In July 1903, a seventy-three-year-old woman led a column of child labourers on a three-week march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York. The march covered more than one hundred miles in summer heat. The marchers included children as young as eight who worked in the textile mills of Pennsylvania, many of them missing fingers, all of them underpaid and overworked.
The woman at the head of the column was Mary Harris, born in Cork in 1837, emigrant, widow, dressmaker, union organiser. She had buried her husband and four children in a Memphis yellow fever epidemic in 1867. She had lost her dress shop and everything in it in the great Chicago fire of 1871. She had nothing left to protect, which made her extraordinarily dangerous to the people she opposed.
She called herself Mother Jones. She told the mine operators and mill owners who faced her across tables and courtrooms and picket lines that she was not their equal, she was their superior, because she had earned the right to speak through suffering that they would never know.
Roosevelt never received the marchers. He sent a secretary. Mother Jones gave the column the dignity of finishing the march anyway.
She continued working for labour rights until her nineties. She died in 1930 at the age of ninety-three, having spent sixty years being arrested, imprisoned, threatened, and ignored by men who assumed she would eventually stop.
She did not stop.
