Mother Jones

The most dangerous woman in America, according to one West Virginia prosecutor, was a small grey-haired grandmother from the north side of Cork. Mary Harris was baptised in the North Cathedral in the summer of 1837 and grew up in the lanes under Shandon. Sixty years later, as Mother Jones, she was leading coal miners out on strike, marching mill children to the door of a president, and being thrown into jail in her eighties by governors who could not think what else to do with her.

Out of Shandon

Her people were poor Catholics with a house near the cathedral, and like half of Cork they left in the hungry years after the Famine. The family went to Canada first and then to the United States. Mary trained as a teacher and a dressmaker, married an iron moulder called George Jones in Memphis, and had four children with him. In 1867 yellow fever went through the city and took all five of them in a matter of weeks. She nursed them, buried them, and moved to Chicago to open a dress shop. In 1871 the Great Fire burned it to the ground. By her mid thirties she had lost everything that pins a person to one place, and she spent the next sixty years refusing to be pinned anywhere.

The most dangerous woman in America

She gave the rest of her life to the labour movement. She had no office and no fixed address. Ask her where she lived and she would say, wherever there is a fight. She went from coalfield to coalfield, West Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, wherever miners were out, and she organised their wives and children when the men were locked up or shot at. In 1903 she gathered a crowd of child mill workers from Philadelphia, some of them missing fingers to the machines, and marched them a hundred miles to President Roosevelt's front gate on Long Island so the country could see their hands.

She built the character on purpose. She dressed in black lace like everyone's grandmother, spoke plainly, swore like a docker, and used the gap between how she looked and what came out of her mouth as a weapon. Mine owners and governors found her impossible to dismiss and impossible to shut up. She was arrested and jailed more than once, well into her eighties, and walked straight back to the picket line each time. Her power came from the mining families who trusted her, and from a fearlessness that never ran out. She had buried her own children. She spent the rest of her life fighting for other people's.

The Cork connection

She helped found the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 and was still organising in her nineties. She also lied about her age, knocking her birth back to 1830 so that her hundredth birthday would land on May Day, the workers' holiday, which tells you most of what you need to know about her. She died in 1930 and was buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Illinois, among the men she had fought for. Cork has claimed her back. A festival in her name fills the Shandon streets every summer, there is a plaque near the cathedral where she was baptised, and the American magazine that still carries her name keeps the title in print.

On the walk

Cork's emigrant story runs the length of our walk, from the Famine quays to the harbour road. We tell Mother Jones's story as part of it: the girl from under Shandon who left in the hungry years and became the most dangerous woman in America.