| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elliott J. Gorn. Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America. New York: Hill and Wang. 2001. Pp. xiii, 408. $27.00.

Nearly seventy years after her death, Mary Harris (Mother) Jones remains the best known female figure in American labor history. With her name gracing the cover of a muckraking liberal magazine and her admonition to "pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living" still cited as a labor credo, Mother Jones retains a small but visible place in public memory. Recognizing his subject's iconic status, Elliott J. Gorn observes that he is "dealing with two people, a person, a persona, and the relationship between the two" (p. 8). "The single greatest clue about the life of Mary Jones was her desire to become someone else" (p. 8), he notes, and structures this perceptive biography around explaining how Mother Jones transformed herself from an obscure Irish immigrant into "the most dangerous woman in America." 1

Fleeing deprivation in Ireland, Mary Harris and her family came to Canada in the early 1850s. Employed first as a teacher and later as a dressmaker, she found her way to America just prior to the Civil War. The event that defined her life occurred in 1867 when her husband, George Jones, and four children died in the yellow fever epidemic that struck Memphis, Tennessee. Gorn speculates that this tragedy, and her exposure to the harshness of working-class life, made Jones susceptible to the radical political critiques offered by the Knights of Labor, the Populist movement, and the Socialist Party. By embracing a series of new identities—union activist, traveling ambassador for social justice, "mother" to her "boys" engaged in struggle—she was able to honor the memory of her iron molder husband, pay homage to her parents' exile from Ireland, and reclaim her lost maternal role. . . .

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