Mary Harris Jones didn’t begin her public life as a labor leader until she had nothing left of her private life. She lost her husband and four small children in an 1867 epidemic in Memphis, and her Chicago dressmaking shop went up a few years later in the Great Fire. Jones found fellowship and purpose in the Chicago Knights of Labor, and by the 1880s, when she was in her 50s, she was a full-blown agitator. As Mother Jones, she so identified with the coal miners, factory workers and child laborers she championed that she was buried among her “boys” in a miners cemetery in Downstate Mt. Olive.
Cents per dollar of men’s wages earned by 30-year-old women without children: 90. Cents earned by mothers of the same age and education: 70.
Percentage of mothers with infants in the work force in 1998: 59. Percentage in 1976: 31.
Estimated number of children employed by garment sweatshops in the U.S. in 1996: 13,000.
Number of former coal miners who die of black lung each year: 1,500.
