Mother Jones and the Women's March of McAdoo

In the fall of nineteen hundred, labor organizer Mary Harris Jones, known everywhere as Mother Jones, gathered women in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania and marched them out of McAdoo toward the neighboring mining towns, with accounts of the crowd ranging from dozens to two thousand. Their husbands and sons were on strike, demanding higher wages and union recognition from the mine operators. The women carried brooms and pots, banging them to wake strikebreakers and urge them to walk off the job. Many did.

The march helped deepen pressure on the operators, but their concessions fell short of union demands. That unresolved tension exploded two years later into the great anthracite coal strike of nineteen oh two, a five-month stoppage that eventually brought federal arbitration under President Theodore Roosevelt. Mother Jones, then in her sixties, remained at the center of it all, her voice one of the sharpest in American labor history.