An army of strong mining women makes a wonderfully spectacular picture.
-Mother Jones
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Tuesday February 9, 1915
From the Boston Globe: Lucy Huffaker's Interview with Mother Jones
In Sunday's edition of the
Boston Globe we find a long interview conducted by Lucy Huffaker with Mother Jones wherein Mother expresses her views on the roles of woman and motherhood. Now, those of us who know Mother Jones are in no way surprised by her very traditional views on the subject. Others, however, express not only surprise, but also dismay.
First let us say that, as a woman who has known the unending grief of losing her entire family (a husband and four little children) within a month's time, it is unlikely that Mother will ever forget the joys of a home full of children, and a father returning to them from a hard day at work. Can we blame her, then, for not understanding why women of wealth would hire others to raise their own children?
Where we disagree strongly with Mother is on the subject of Rockefeller's mother being to blame for his lack of care or concern for those who labor to make him rich. Why would Mother expect the wife of a capitalist to impart any other views to her son than the views which serve her own class interests? To do otherwise would make her a traitor to her own class, and a "bad mother" by the standards of that class.
We would point out that, even though Mother believes that a woman's place in the home, she most definitely does not believe that a woman in the home should be some sweet, quiet, lady-like creature, cringing meekly at her husband's feet.
In her many years fighting beside the men and woman of the coal camps, she has always urged the women to stand up and fight right alongside their men. During times of terror when the guns of the capitalists' hired thugs were turned upon them and their families, Mother Jones urged the women to:
Fight like hell until you go to heaven.
Remembering the battles in the Pennsylvania coalfields, she described the women there marching as an grand army from McAdoo to Coaldale, banging on pots and pans:
It was necessary to win the strike in that district that the Coaldale miners be organized.
I went to a nearby mining town that was thoroughly organized and asked the women if they would help me get the Coaldale men out. This was in McAddo. I told them to leave their men at home to take care of the family. I asked them to put on their kitchen clothes and bring mops and brooms with them and a couple of tin pans. We marched over the mountains fifteen miles, beating on the tin pans as if they were cymbals. At three o'clock in the morning we met the Crack Thirteen of the militia, patrolling the roads to Coaldale. The colonel of the regiment said "Halt! Move back!"
I said, "Colonel, the working men of America will not halt nor will they ever go back. The working man is going forward!"
"I'll charge bayonets," said he.
"On whom?'
"On your people."
"We are not enemies," said I. "We are just a band of working women whose brothers and husbands are in a battle for bread. We want our brothers in Coaldale to join us in our fight. We are here on the mountain road for our children's sake, for the nation's sake. We are not going to hurt anyone and surely you would not hurt us."
They kept us there till daybreak and when they saw the army of women in kitchen aprons, with dishpans and mops, they laughed and let us pass. An army of strong mining women makes a wonderfully spectacular picture.
Well, when the miners in the Coaldale camp started to go to work they were met by the McAdoo women who were beating on their pans and shouting, "Join the union! Join the union!"
They joined, every last man of them, and we got so enthusiastic that we organized the street car men who promised to haul no scabs for the coal companies. As there were no other groups to organize we marched over the mountains home, beating on our pans and singing patriotic songs.
We suspect that the views of Mother Jones regarding women and motherhood are shared by most of the women in the coal camps of America. Most of them care for the children at home while the men are working in the mines. Yet, there they are, ready to fight beside the men whenever they are needed, a community of men and women united in
Freedom's Cause.
MOTHER JONES' PHILOSOPHY.
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It's All Woman's Fault, She Says, For No Man Is Better or Worse
Than His Mother Makes Him-All the Matter With
Young Rockefeller Is That His Mother
Didn't Bring Him Up Right.
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Whoever named Mother Jones did a good piece of work, says Lucy Huffaker in the New York Tribune.
For this old woman, storm center wherever there is a strike on, is just that-a mother. There are two things in which she believes with all her mind and heart. Those two things are mothers and homes.
It is just one of the ironies of life that she has no children and that so far as having a home goes-"My home is wherever my people are in trouble. My house is wherever that old bag of mine is."
Probably you've always thought of Mother Jone simply as an active old woman, whose whole interest in life is in helping the cause of labor. Well, she is that with something added to it.
I discovered this week what that something is. It is the real mother heart. Her bigness is that which is bred from the maternal instinct-and her limitations come from that same source. Therein she is true to type.
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Woman the Mother.
"What do we need?" She repeated the question after me, when she had welcomed me to her room in the hotel, had insisted that I make myself comfortable with a pillow from the bed tucked in at my back, and, these motherly administrations attended to, we had spoken of the hearings of the Commission on Industrial Relations and the things which may result therefrom. "We need a different economic adjustment."
"How are we going to get that?"
I'll tell you how we could get it. If the women of the country did what they should do we'd have things different all right.
"So You're not as scornful of women as you've been said to be? You're not antifeminist?"
"Say, what does that word mean?" She shot back at me. Her laugh died away, however, as she said seriously:
I believe in women and what they can do. they can be good mothers and make good homes. When they've done that, when they've brought up their children to be kind and generous and noble, we'll have a real civilization-not this rotten thing which passes for it now.
"That sounds like Solomon, Mother Jones."
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"It's All Woman's Fault."
Well, I don't see any reason for not holding to that idea about a child brought up in the way it should go just because it was said centuries ago, do you? And it is true. If the mothers of America brought up their children as they should be brought up, we'd have a country worth living in.
But do they? Most of 'em don't. They go to church and to clubs and to missionary societies and to the social settlements and to the temperance societies and all those silly, get-nowhere things.
And all the time they have the chance to do something real in their homes in training their children.
If homes were what they should be there'd be no need for social settlements, which are lickspittle institutions anyway. And let me tell you another thing-there'd be no need of temperance societies if all women who pretend to cook really did it.
A stomach which has good food in it doesn't need booze. But most women don't know much about cooking. The rich woman is 'way above it, the well-to-do woman leaves it to her servant and the working woman hasn't been taught. It is a wonder to me that everybody in the world isn't dyspeptic.
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Where Else Is Woman's Place.
"So you think that woman's place is in the home?"
"Where else would it be?" Which question, asked in a tone of surprise rather than aggression, answered my question beyond peradventure of doubt as to where Mother Jones stands as regards the work of women.
But she would not let it rest there, but went on to amplify her belief.
Women want to get out into industry? Shucks! That is my answer when any one talks about the great desire of women to sit in factories or stand behind counters or run machines.
Of course, as conditions are now women have to get out of their homes and work. But if the husband made enough money to support the family, do you think the wife would want to go away from her home and her children to work?
"But you know, Mother Jones, the feminists believe that a wife should be economically independent of her husband."
Well, I as much as told you I didn't know what a "feminist" was. And now I'll tell you I don't know what this "economic independence" nonsense means, either. A woman is entitled to her husband's money.
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Most Women Parasites.
"So you don't think a woman who is supported by her husband should be called a parasite?"
Indeed I do sometimes. Most women are parasites now. But, I tell you, any woman who makes a good home and bears and rears good children is not a parasite. She is doing the real work of the world. I tell you again, it all depends on the women.
"But after all, most of industry is controlled by men. Aren't they responsible for bad conditions for the workers?"
Yes, but who brought up those men? Some mother. It's their fault.
Take this young Rockefeller, who has been testifying before the commission. He's a nice young chap-I really think he is. The trouble is he doesn't know anything about conditions. His mother didn't bring him up right-that is all that is the matter with him.
He has had money always. He has gone to the best schools. He's got a good brain. You can see that. But he should have been taught something about the working man and his needs.
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No Worse Than His Mother.
"How can Mrs. Rockefeller and other women know these things which they must teach their sons?"
I know 'em, don't I? You know 'em, don't you? Well, that is the answer. And yet I'm willing to say that it is hard for a rich woman who has been protected all her life from seeing the seamy things of life to know about conditions. Still, most people have eyesight, and so from the papers they can get something. Of course, there are women who know things.
A man is never more rotten than his mother. And he is never any better than she is. And who is it who always does things in the crucial times? Why, the women. All down the stairway of time they stand. What you know of history must have taught you that.
That is how I know that it is up to the women now to do things. They must learn how matters stand. But women have been hypnotized by things of no importance until they're all muddled up in their minds.
They don't need to vote what can it do for them? What has it done for them where they have had it?
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Christ Organized Unions.
The church has a lot to answer for in keeping women from doing the things they should do. This church-what has it done, what does it do for the people who were Christ's own and for whose sake He worked and died?
Christ never built a church and never told anybody else to build one. What he did was to organize unions. He went up and down talking to the workingmen and helping them to organize and stand against the capitalists of that day.
It wasn't until nearly three hundred years after Christ died that a church was built. Just think about that for a while.
And year by year they keep adding a lot of no-account things to the churches-all kinds of foreign and home missionary societies and temperance leagues and things like that. And never a thing done for the people who were Christ's own?
What the workingman needs is organization. And there is another thing I want to say about women. They haven't learned the meaning of solidarity yet-most of them haven't.
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Women Won't Stay Organized.
"Is it harder to organize women than men?"
[She answered quickly:]
It is harder to keep them organized...So much depends on the women always. And I've seen 'em by the hundreds act like heroines. When there is a strike on it is hard for the men to hold out if their women folks are whining around and urging 'em to go back to the mines or the mills, isn't it? I wish you could see some of the women I've seen in strikes. They had empty stomachs, but they had full hearts. Maybe some of 'em were what you'd call ignorant. Probably they couldn't all of 'em read and write even.
But I wouldn't call a woman ignorant who knew life like that and who had the courage to face things when she was hungry and cold, would you?
Just then the clock struck. Mother Jones jumped up, and going to the closet took down her hat.
"I completely forgot about breakfast," she said.
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Well Named "Mother."
I was all contrition. I apologized for having called on her at such an unseemly hour, but pointed out that with her spending all her days at the hearing it was the only time I could see her.
And then it developed that her excitement when she saw the time was because she thought I had had no breakfast. I assured her that I had had. But that was not enough.
So when we were seated at the little table in the little restaurant where she goes for her meals, she ordered a cup of coffee and rolls for me. I demurred. Did it do any good? It did not. As I said, Mother Jones is well named.
When that breakfast came to the table she acted with all the tyranny of a kind mother. She watched me to make sure that I ate every crumb of the rolls and drank every drop of the coffee.
It availed me nothing to say that I was never hungry in the morning. Because when I did say that she insisted that I eat a baked apple.
"You must eat good, big meals or you won't work hard," she said reprovingly to me, and I felt just as I did when I was a little girl and my mother would not let me go to school or out to play unless I ate my breakfast.
"But won't we be late to the hearing?" I asked between sips of my coffee.
We don't need to be there right on the dot. There's a seat saved for me. That's something that didn't use to happen to me. Why, they treat me like an aristocrat now, don't they-like one of the privileged classes which I'm against. That is a joke on me, I guess.
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System, Not Individual.
"But do you know, Mother Jones," I said, "I don't believe you are against them when you know them. Why you are even saying kind words about 'that young Rockefeller fellow,' as you call him-after what you saw and felt at Ludlow."
Don't you understand my dear, that it is the system, not the individual, that I'm fighting? It is the system which has spoiled the individuals-not the other way around.
I was trying to slip unnoticed into my coat, so we could go. But just then Mother Jones' eye fell upon my plate.
"We'll not go until you've finished your breakfast," she said, with a tone in which mildness and firmness found a strange blending.
And I finished that breakfast which I didn't want. Otherwise we never wold have go the that hearing.
[photograph added]
SOURCES
The Autobiography of Mother Jones
-ed by Mary Field Parton
Charles H Kerr Pub, 1990
Pittston Strike Commemorative Edition
The Boston Daily Globe
(Boston, Massachusetts)
-Feb 7, 1915
(Source also for image of text.)
http://www.newspapers.com/...
IMAGES
Mother Jones, New York Tribune, Jan 29, 1915
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/...
Mother Jones, Boston Globe, Jan 30, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/...
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I Am A Union Woman-Deborah Holland
I am a Union Woman
As brave as I can be.
I do not like the bosses
And the bosses don't like me.
-Aunt Molly Jackson
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