| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America. By Elliott J. Gorn. (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001. xiv, 408 pp. $27.00, ISBN 0-8090-7093-6.)

Ill, failing of mind, and bereft of personal memorabilia, Mary Harris Jones dictated the story of her life to a youthful journalist in 1922. The autobiography of Mother Jones has been debunked many times; she lied about her age, claimed to have been in places she had not, and said she was instrumental in events, such as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, she was not. A strength of Elliott J. Gorn's well-written biography is that he nonetheless takes the autobiography seriously as a chronicle of what Jones described as "the days of the martyrs and the saints." Gorn tells us that little is known about Mary Harris Jones the person but that her self-created iconography of Mother Jones had an enormous impact on the workers to whom she devoted herself in the second half of her life. 1

Mary Harris was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1834. In his careful reconstruction of her Irish heritage, Gorn speculates that Catholicism was secularized and embedded in Mother Jones's persona as a madonna of the working class. Her family migrated to Toronto during the Irish famine years, and her father was a skilled railroad worker. Mary Harris attended convent school, learned the dressmaking trade, and took teacher training at the Toronto Normal School. She left Toronto in 1860 for a teaching position and never returned, even though one of her brothers became a priest and dean of the diocese there. . . .

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