Tough Mothers by Jason Porath

Author:Jason Porath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

This one’s pretty simple—Ida is spinning a globe (who knows where it’ll stop next!), surrounded by people in her life. From right to left, we have:

Her husband!

A woman from a harem, and the sultan who held the harem.

A Batak warrior! They have some pretty crazy outfits.

A Dayak woman!

Ranavalona I, who’s mean muggin’.

Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones)

(1837–1930, UNITED STATES)

The Most Dangerous Mother in America

You don’t understand how bad the strikes were. You can’t—there’s simply no modern comparison that captures the scale. Imagine: hundreds of thousands of people walking off the job and into the street; one-fifth of the entire US labor force striking within a single year; the entire city of Seattle shutting down under a general strike; the army coming after workers by dropping bombs and installing snipers; Appalachian mines turning into war zones between workers and hired mercenaries.

But it happened. It gets censored from history books and scrubbed from holidays meant to commemorate it,* but it happened.

And at the center of it all, blazing from city to city like a general marshaling troops, was the grand dame of the labor movement, the “most dangerous woman in America”: Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones.

She was unassuming, which is what made her effective. She wore clothes that were old-fashioned when her grandmother was a child. She talked constantly of her old age and impending demise. She drank with the boys and told filthy jokes. She was your cool grandmother.

But as soon as you opened your ears, she had you. She’d start with a story, usually with her at some coal mine. There would be a boss, and he’d be the vilest, most ridiculous, awful caricature of a human being ever. They’d argue, he’d bluster, but—and here’s the important part—she’d win. She’d then draw parallels from that story to the conditions wherever she happened to be, always with plenty of humor and profanity. She’d speak with such knowledge, conviction, and maternal care that you could be sure you were next on the chopping block. Then, she’d present the one and only way to survive: together, in the union. She’d cap it off with her oft-repeated battle cry: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living!”

And here’s the thing: she wasn’t wrong! US working conditions were a blighted hellscape. Things we take for granted, like minimum wage, worker’s comp, and the weekend? Didn’t exist. You could die on the job—many did—and few would bat an eye. If you complained, you were out on the street, replaced with someone else. And that was a good-case scenario! In mining towns, where the company owned everything, it was even worse: you had to shop at their stores and pay their markup; you had to weigh your coal with their rigged scales, and accept the reduced pay they’d give you. It was easy for many to accept it as their lot in life, but Mother Jones made the argument that a better world was possible.

Her argument worked.

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