According to Mary Harris herself, she was born on May 1, 1830. But according to other records, she was born on August 1, 1837.

What is certain is that she was born in Cork, Ireland, to a family of Irish freedom fighters that was forced to flee across the Atlantic when she was a child, due to the consequences of their political actions.

Mary grew up in Toronto, Ontario. At age 17, she graduated from a public normal school and moved across the border to Michigan, where she taught at a convent school. When the school year ended, she moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she supported herself by dressmaking before moving on to teach again in Memphis, Tennessee.

Mary met ironworker and Iron Molder Union member George E. Jones in Memphis in 1861. Jones introduced Mary to the life and struggles of industrial workers. The pair married that year and eventually had four children.

By all accounts, the marriage was a happy one. Then a yellow fever epidemic hit Memphis in 1867. George E. Jones and all four children perished.

Mary moved back to Chicago, alone. She took up dressmaking again and soon opened her own shop. Mary sewed elegant garments for the wealthiest Chicagoans, but the view outside her shop window was less than luxurious: "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."

Mary's success burned to ash in The Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She lost everything. Mary became a charter member of the Knights of Labor, an extraordinary organization dedicated to educating and organizing workers. The Knights included women, blacks and immigrants as members -- unheard of in the post-Civil War U.S.

Mary traveled around the country, teaching and organizing. Her roving Chicago dressmaking business was her home base ... though she had no home. In Kansas City, she joined the organizers of an unemployed men's march on Washington, D.C. She supported railway strikers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and black and white coal miners in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1890, Mary became one of the organizers of the United Mine Workers of America. Appreciative miners gave Mary a new name, "Miner's Angel."

Mary also worked extensively with the American Railway Union. During the great Pullman strike of 1894, the union's founder, Eugene V. Debs, served a six-month prison term for his defiance of a court order to refrain from disrupting railroad operations in support of striking Pullman workers. Upon his release, Mary organized a nationwide demonstration to show support.

In June 1897, Mary Harris Jones, the Miner's Angel, was christened "Mother Jones" by enthusiastic railroad workers after giving a rousing speech at their national convention. In 1898, Mary and Eugene V. Debs were among the co-founders of the Social Democratic Party in America.

In 1903, Mother Jones added child labor to her portfolio of causes. She organized a "Children's Crusade." Child workers, bearing signs saying, We Want To Play! and similar slogans, marched from Kensington, Pennsylvania to Oyster Bay, New York. President Theordore Roosevelt refused to acknowledge the protest. But the crusade did the long neglected issue of child labor. Reese Blizzard, District Attorney of West Virginia, called Mother Jones "the most dangerous woman in America."

Mother Jones resigned from the United Mine Workers in 1904 to embark on a lecture tour throughout the American Southwest for the Socialist Party of America. In 1905 she became a charter member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as the "Wobblies." In 1911, Mother Jones left the Socialist Party and returned to the United Mine Workers.

Mr. Blizzard was far from alone in his discomfort over the activities of Mother Jones. In her long mid-life career, she was the most frequently arrested union organizer in America. On February 12, 1913, she led a protest on conditions in the West Virginia coal mines. The protest turned violent. Mother Jones was arrested, and convicted by a military court on the charge of conspiring to commit murder. She received a 20-year sentence. She was 75 years old (or, by her reckoning, 83). Newly elected Governor Henry D. Hatfield pardoned Mother Jones on May 8, 1913. Once again, her actions and legal troubles focused national attention on a long neglected issue. The U.S. Senate formed a committee to investigate working conditions in the coalmines.

She was convicted by a military court of conspiring to commit murder and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Her trial, conviction, and imprisonment created such a furor that the U.S. Senate ordered a committee to investigate conditions in the West Virginia coalfields. However, on May 8, 1913, before the investigation got underway, newly elected governor Hatfield set Mother Jones free.

Mother Jones attended the 1921 Pan-American Federation of Labor convention as a guest of the Mexican government. In that same year, at the age of 84 (or, by her reckoning, 91), she finally established her own home in Silver Spring, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. Her cross-country travels continued.

In 1924, Mother Jones returned to Chicago and her own working roots, supporting striking dressmakers. It was her last labor action. She made her last known public address as guest of honor at a Labor Day celebration in Alliance, Ohio in 1926.

Mother Jones passed away in Silver Spring in November, 1930. She was 93 years old (or, by her reckoning, 100). She was buried in the Union Miners Cemetery at Mount Olive, Illinois.