Synopses & Reviews
This biography details the legacy of the most extraordinary woman labor agitator in American history.
The life of Mother Jones “is an epic, and it is the shame of American writers that it has never been told,” George West wrote in the Nation in July 1922. “She is a great woman,” he added, “unsung because of our tradition of cheap gentility.” The truth of Wests lament has endured until now.
Mother Jones lived a century. Born in 1830, widowed in 1867 in Memphis, and suffering the loss of her husband and four children from yellow fever she moved to Chicago, where her business as a seamstress was destroyed by the great fire of 1871. Thus tempered by adversity, she came to have a lively sympathy for the downtrodden laboring classes, and she devoted the rest of her life to seeking the betterment of the workingman—especially the coal miner.
In the course of her career as a labor agitator, Mother Jones took part in some of the most momentous battles in American labor history: The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, and the “Debs Rebellion” of 1894. Her last big effort took place during the 1919 steel strike, as she neared her ninetieth year.
For half a century Mother Jones was an impious Joan of Arc, an industrial Carrie Nation, who took up the workingmans cause without question and fought his battles without compromise. Dale Fetherlings big and important biography for the first time gives her full story, with eloquence and sympathetic understanding.
Review
[Dale Fetherlings] “tribute to the indomitable old Irish biddy, who never weighed more than 100 pounds, is thoroughly documented, eloquent and moving.”—Jack Conroy, Chicago Sun-Times
Review
“A human portrait in historical perspective emerges from these pages, as fine a story as anyone who lived an active life for a century could claim, and it is highly recommended to all readers of biography, labor history, and Illinois history.”
—John H. Keister, Pennsylvania History.
Review
“This book tells all that can be found out about the old woman whom hundreds of thousands of miners called mother and a district attorney called ‘the most dangerous woman in America.”—Fred Thompson, Industrial Worker
“Dale Fetherling… has written a scholarly portrait which is also a labor of love,… In this first attempt ever to ‘distill her legacy, he concludes that ‘she may have been the most spectacular woman the country has produced, and she was certainly the most loved and dramatic female in the nations labor movement.” —History
About the Author
Dale Fetherling is a working journalist, formerly with the Minneapolis Tribune and presently with the Los Angeles Times. He received his B.A. degree from West Virginia University and his M.S. degree from Northwestern University. A native of West Virginia, where Mother Jones remains an active legend, he became curious, intrigued, and finally immersed in the life of this extraordinary woman.