Audiobook · read by volunteers
Autobiography of Mother Jones
Mary Harris Jones (1837–1930)
Read by Scott Henkel, Elizabeth McAndrew, Heather Lambert, Carl Manchester, Caitlin Kelly, Sandra in Wales, United Kingdom, Denny Sayers (d. 2015), Maddie, Kathy · 27 chapters · 5 h 39
About the book
A prosecutor once called her the most dangerous woman in America, and the mine owners would have agreed. Mary Harris Jones, known to thousands of workers simply as Mother Jones, spent most of her long life travelling from strike to strike, organising coal miners, textile workers and children in the mills. In her own words she describes her early years, the great fire and the Haymarket tragedy in Chicago, strikes in Virginia and elsewhere, and her many arrests. She was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World and active in the United Mine Workers and the Socialist Party. The tone is blunt, defiant and sometimes humorous. Nine LibriVox volunteers, among them Scott Henkel and Elizabeth McAndrew, share the reading of twenty-seven chapters over about five and three-quarter hours, bringing a vivid voice from American labour history.
Introduction
Mary Harris Jones (1837-1930) was a legendary labour organiser, born in Ireland and later active across the United States. She was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, whose members were called Wobblies, and she was also active in the United Mine Workers and the Socialist Party of America. Her Autobiography was published in 1925, when she was in her late eighties.
The book is a personal account, not a neutral history. It gives her version of strikes, confrontations and campaigns, and it should be read with that in mind, since memory and a strong purpose shape the story. Even so, it is a vivid and valuable record of the conditions of workers in mining towns and industrial cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter titles, such as The Early Years, The Haymarket Tragedy and A Strike in Virginia, give a sense of her route.
The recording has 27 chapters and lasts about 5.7 hours. It is read by nine LibriVox volunteers.
Why listen today? The conflicts she describes, over wages, safety, child labour and the right to organise, shaped modern working life, and her voice, direct and combative, is one of the most memorable in American autobiography. It is a useful companion to the study of labour history. The book also works as a collection of portraits: miners' families, mill children, politicians and employers all pass through the pages in sharp outline. Heard in the voices of several volunteers, the chapters become a chorus, which seems fitting for a woman whose whole life was spent speaking for others and rousing crowds.
Public domain
Mary Harris Jones died in 1930: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text