The Autobiography of Mother Jones

The Autobiography of Mother Jones
by Mary Harris Jones
published by Charles Kerr in 1925
copyright lapsed in 1953
CHAPTER I
- EARLY YEARS
I was born in the city of Cork, Ireland, in 1830. My people were poor.
For generations they had fought for Ireland's freedom. Many of my
folks have died in that struggle. My father, Richard Harris, came to
America in 1835, and as soon as he had become an American citizen he
sent for his family. His work as a laborer with railway construction
crews took him to Toronto, Canada. Here I was brought up but always
as the child of an American citizen. Of that citizenship I have ever been
proud.
After finishing the common schools, I attended the Normal school with
the intention of becoming a teacher. Dressmaking too, I learned
proficiently. My first position was teaching in a convent in Monroe,
Michigan. Later, I came to Chicago and opened a dress-making
establishment. I preferred sewing to bossing little children. However, I
went back to teaching again, this time in Memphis, Tennessee. Here I
was married in 1861. My husband was an iron moulder and a member
of the Iron Moulders' Union.
In 1867, a fever epidemic swept Memphis. Its victims were mainly
among the poor and the workers. The rich and the well-to-do fled the
city. Schools and churches were closed. People were not permitted to
enter the house of a yellow fever victim without permits. The poor
could not afford nurses. Across the street from me, ten persons lay dead

from the plague. The dead surrounded us. They were buried at night
quickly and without ceremony. All about my house I could hear
weeping and the cries of delirium. One by one, my four little children
sickened and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for
burial. My husband caught the fever and died. I sat alone through
nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as
stricken as was mine. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of
the wheels of the death cart.
After the union had buried my husband, I got a permit to nurse the
sufferers. This I did until the plague was stamped out.
I returned to Chicago and went again into the dressmaking business
with a partner. We were located on Washington Street near the lake.
We worked for the aristocrats of Chicago, and I had ample opportunity
to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives. Often while
sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificence on the Lake
Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the
poor, shivering wretches, ,jobless and hungry, walking along 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.
Summers, too, from the windows of the rich, I used to watch the
mothers come from the west side slums, lugging babies and little
children, hoping for a breath of cool, fresh air from the lake. At night,
when the tenements were stifling hot, men, women and little children
slept in the parks. But the rich, having donated to the ice fund, had, by
the time it was hot in the city, gone to seaside and mountains.
In October, 1871, the great Chicago fire burned up our establishment
and everything that we had. The fire made thousands homeless. We
stayed all night and the next day without food on the lake front, often
going into the lake to keep cool. Old St. Mary's church at Wabash
Avenue and Peck Court was thrown open to the refugees and there I
camped until I could find a place to go.
Near by in an old, tumbled down, fire scorched building the Knights of

Labor held meetings. The Knights of Labor was the labor organization
of those days. I used to spend my evenings at their meetings, listening
to splendid speakers. Sundays we went out into the woods and held
meetings.
Those were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor. Those were the
days when we had no halls, when there were no high salaried officers,
no feasting with the enemies of labor. Those were the days of the
martyrs and the saints. I became acquainted with the labor movement. I
learned that in 1865, after the close of the Civil War, a group of men
met in Louisville, Kentucky. They came from the North and from the
South; they were the "blues" and the "greys" who a year or two before
had been fighting each other over the question of chattel slavery. They
decided that the time