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Born May 1, 1830

County Cork, Ireland

Died November 30, 1930

Silver Spring, Maryland

Irish-born American labor organizer

"I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression.… My address is like my shoes: it travels with me.… I abide where there is a fight against wrong."

Once a teacher and dressmaker, Mary Harris Jones, otherwise known as Mother Jones, became a legendary labor organizer and champion of workers' rights. At a time when women were denied a role in politics, Jones played an active part in helping to correct the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, a period marked by the widespread replacement of manual labor by machines that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century.

In the U.S. Senate, she was denounced as the "grandmother...