After Jones's husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867 and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she became an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union.

[1] In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.

[6] In Canada (and later in the United States), the Harris family were victims of discrimination due to their immigrant status as well as their Catholic faith and Irish heritage.

Mary did not graduate from the Toronto Normal School, but she was able to undergo enough training to take a teaching position at a convent in Monroe, Michigan, on August 31, 1859 at the age of 23.

[7] After tiring of her assumed profession, she moved first to Chicago and then to Memphis, where in 1861 she married George E. Jones, a member and organizer of the National Union of Iron Moulders,[8] which later became the International Molders and Foundry Workers Union of North America, which represented workers who specialized in building and repairing steam engines, mills, and other manufactured goods.

The Haymarket Affair of 1886 and the fear of anarchism and social change incited by union organizations resulted in the demise of the Knights of Labor when an unknown person threw a bomb into an altercation between the Chicago police and workers on strike.

She was termed "the most dangerous woman in America" by a West Virginian district attorney, Reese Blizzard, in 1902 at her trial for ignoring an injunction banning meetings by striking miners.

"She comes into a state where peace and prosperity reign... crooks her finger, [and] twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out.

John Mitchell, the president of the UMWA, brought Mother Jones to northeastern Pennsylvania in the months of February and September to encourage unity among striking workers.

To do so, she encouraged the wives of the workers to organize into a group that would wield brooms, beat on tin pans, and shout "join the union!"

To enforce worker solidarity, Jones traveled to the silk mills in New Jersey and returned to Pennsylvania to report that the conditions she observed there were much better.

Although she agreed to a settlement that sent the young girls back to the mills, she continued to fight child labor for the rest of her life.

[19] In 1903, Jones organized children who were working in mills and mines to participate in her famous "March of the Mill Children", a 125-mile trek from Kensington, Philadelphia, to the summer house (and Summer White House) of President Theodore Roosevelt on Long Island (in Oyster Bay, New York).

[26] Though the president refused to meet with the marchers, the incident brought the issue of child labor to the forefront of the public agenda.

Once again she was arrested, serving time in prison and inside the San Rafael Hospital, and was escorted from the state in the months prior to the Ludlow Massacre.

[28] Mother Jones attempted to stop miners from marching into Logan County, West Virginia, in late August 1921.

In her hand, she claimed to have a telegram from President Warren Harding offering to work to end the private police in West Virginia if they returned home.

[30] Although Mother Jones organized for decades on behalf of the UMWA in West Virginia and even denounced the state as 'medieval', the chapter of the same name in her autobiography, she mostly praises Governor Ephraim F. Morgan for defending the First Amendment freedom of the weekly labor publication The Federationist to publish.

[32] Mary Harris Jones died on November 30, 1930, at the Burgess farm, then in Silver Spring, Maryland, now part of Adelphi.

"[40] On October 11, 1936, also known as Miners' Day, an estimated 50,000 people arrived at Mother Jones's grave to see the new gravestone and memorial.

"[citation needed] The farm where she died began to advertise itself as the "Mother Jones Rest Home" in 1932, before being sold to a Baptist church in 1956.

And I long to see the day when labor will have the destination of the nation in her own hands, and she will stand a united force, and show the world what workers can do.