Mother Jones

America's fiercest labour agitator was a Cork woman. Mary Harris was born in the city in 1837 and baptised in the North Cathedral, and she grew up to be called the most dangerous woman in America. As Mother Jones she organised coal miners, led maimed children to the gate of a president, and frightened the richest men in the United States, all of it begun in the lanes below Shandon.

Out of Shandon

She was born into a poor Catholic family near Shandon and baptised at the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne in 1837. The family left Ireland in the hungry years, like so many from Cork, and made their way to Canada and then the United States. She trained as a teacher and a dressmaker. Then disaster struck twice. Yellow fever took her husband and all four of her children in Memphis in 1867, and the Great Chicago Fire burned out her dress shop in 1871. She had lost everything that ties a person to one place.

The most dangerous woman in America

What she did with that loss was extraordinary. She gave the rest of her long life to the labour movement, travelling from coalfield to coalfield wherever workers were on strike. She kept no office and no fixed home; she went where the fight was. A prosecutor called her the most dangerous woman in America, and she wore the title like a medal. In 1903 she led a march of child mill-workers, some of them missing fingers to the machines, from Pennsylvania to the home of President Roosevelt, to hold their broken hands up to the country.

She made herself a character to do it. She dressed in black like everyone's grandmother, spoke plainly and swore freely, and used the gap between how she looked and what she said as a weapon. Mine owners and governors found her impossible to dismiss and impossible to stop. She was jailed more than once, well into her eighties, and walked back to the picket line each time. Her power came from the miners' families who trusted her, the children she stood up for, and a fearlessness that never seemed to run out. She had buried her own husband and children, and she gave the rest of her life to other people's.

The Cork connection

She helped found the Industrial Workers of the World and kept organising into her nineties, claiming to be older than she was so her birthday would fall on a workers' holiday. She died in 1930 and was buried among the miners she had fought for. Cork has reclaimed her. A festival in her name fills the Shandon streets where she was born, a plaque marks the ground near her birthplace, and the radical magazine that still carries her name keeps the title alive.

On the walk

Cork's emigrant story runs the length of our walk, from the Famine quays to the harbour. We tell Mother Jones's story as part of it: the girl from Shandon who left in the hungry years and came back a legend.