The most famous female labor activist of the nineteenth century, Mary Harris Jones—aka “Mother Jones”—was a self-proclaimed “hell-raiser” in the cause of economic justice. She was so strident that a US attorney once labeled her “the most dangerous woman in America.”
Born circa August 1, 1837 in County Cork, Ireland, Jones immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with her family at age five—prior to the potato famine with its waves of Irish immigrants.
She first worked as a teacher in a Michigan Catholic school, then as a seamstress in Chicago. She moved to Memphis for another teaching job, and in 1861 married George Jones, a member of the Iron Molders Union. They had four children in six years. In 1867, tragedy struck when her entire family died in a yellow fever epidemic; she dressed in black for the rest of her life.
Returning to Chicago, Jones resumed sewing but lost everything she owned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She found solace at Knights of Labor meetings, and in 1877, took up the cause of working people. Jones focused on the rising number of working poor during industrialization, especially as wages shrunk, hours increased, and workers had no insurance for unemployment, healthcare or old age.
Jones first displayed her oratorical and organizing abilities in Pittsburgh during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. She took part in and led hundreds of strikes, including those that led to the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886. She paused briefly to publish The New Right in 1899 and a two-volume Letter of Love and Labor in 1900 and 1901. A beloved leader, the workers she organized nicknamed her “Mother Jones.”
Beginning in 1900, Jones focused on miners, organizing in the coal fields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. For a few years, she was employed by the United Mine Workers, but left when the national leadership disavowed a wildcat strike in Colorado. After a decade in the West, Jones returned to West Virginia, where, after a violent strike in 1912-1913, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Public appeals on her behalf convinced the governor to commute her twenty-year sentence. Afterward she returned to Colorado and made a national crusade out of the tragic events during the Ludlow Massacre, even lobbying President Woodrow Wilson. Later, she participated in several industrial strikes on the East Coast between 1915 and 1919 and continued to organize miners well into her nineties.
Despite her radicalism, Jones did not support women’s suffrage, arguing that “you don’t need a vote to raise hell.” She pointed out that the women of Colorado had the vote and failed to use it to prevent the appalling conditions that led to labor violence. She also considered suffragists unwitting dupes of class warfare. Jones argued that suffragists were naïve women who unwittingly acted as duplicitous agents of class warfare.
Although Jones organized working class women, she held them in auxiliaries, maintaining that—except when the union called—a woman’s place was in the home. A reflection of her Catholic heritage, she believed that men should be paid well enough so that women could devote themselves to motherhood.
In 1925, she published her Autobiography of Mother Jones. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois.
"I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."
Mother Jones
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played a bunch of fallout London (kinda long)
it was fun to go full on soy point at the things being in the video game that I have grown up around. but first of all, I don't like how much of the content is focused on lewisham, grenwhich, and canary warf. east london cockney geezer is just overdone, and most the VAs while clearly being british are not cockneys because only guys like my dad who are nearly 70 and were born in Southwark have that accent or their parents moved to Essex post war to get out of slum ridden bombed out London for new towns, so it's so fucking forced it sounds bad. theatmosphere is way too 'oi bruv wo u sayin m8', marmite, tea and crumpets, what Americans online think britain is, without really going deep on actually weird shit in british culture worthy of pastiche. where's my gammon mob in Millwall worshiping being the worst at football? genuine divine reverence for the monarch? intra european phrenology? there's not enough actual reflection on this like 'white picket fence dystopia due to culture' American fallout has. Britain is fucking weird! we all know this!
I also was kinda sad they talk about the pistols in Camden these kinda 80s anarchists, larping knights in Richmond (ik you can find them elsewhere, but not their main base), and stuff like the science/natural history museums and London zoo are all outside the perview of the map. I can see what they're going for in a dense map that focuses on this one slice of London, I mean it's one of the worlds major cities you can hardly have the entire thing with every landmark on 1 map and not have it all squished to shit. it's already very squished with a 10 minute walk from Canary Warf to Trafalgar Sqaure. it's expansive, there's a lot to do, but at the same time being a local I see so much that's missing. tube stations and tube lines for instance, really could have been a lot more, they don't even link up or anything! found like 1 Shik character, a few black characters, but they really don't show the seer volume of ethnic diversity in London, it really is mostly flat nosed geezers down the local. mass immigration to London sarted in the 50s and 60s, this is a core part of near post war culture to London.
quest design is pretty flat. it's generic fallout 4 go to X place and get me this thing where you have to fight 10 raiders to get it, or just flat out go kill these 10 raiders. there are a couple bangers in there like the British museum. had fun assaulting Tower bridge and the Tower of London with my lee enfield, but it goes to show that this is still mostly the fallout 4 gameplay loop of mostly just go shoot guys, and this is a mid tier sooter at best. not gone crazy with the main quest, but I've put a good few hours into it, it as not captured me as much as just exploring bombed out London has. they may have brought back dialouge trees, but most responses either advance the conversation along the lines it was going, or just end it, there's not exactly role playing and choices in any of this.
difficulty curve is insane. guns are not rare, but ammo is, and enemies are a fucking bullet sponge. you start off with a 10% debuff to health and 10% decrease to damage dealt, but even once you sort that out you still die to a pack of 3 random foxes. I am not playing on survival either this is normal. you get a knife early on that does do a lot of damage, but to sorta lock players into a melee build early game and then have you get 1 tapped if you're hit? you dont get regular access to some kind of settlement to store your junk and upgrade weapons until a while into the game, so you are stuck with what you have even with all the junk and perks to make better gear accessable. kinda shitty design that seems an over correction for fallout 4 giving you a minigun and power armour 10 minutes into the game.
it's a free mod with a lot of passion, years worth of work that is something worth being proud of in many respects. when I got to key locations I had no doubt yep that is Trafalgar Square, or Tower bridge, the modeling on these assets is good, as are the clothes on Beefeaters and so on. but, kind of a bit flat? I'll push through until I get to Westminster and see how that goes, there's no doubt some weird british monarchy shit going on.
I'm hoping very hard that the Queen is, for no clear reason, a Deathclaw.