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Mother Jones , perhaps the most significant and relevant political voice for the working class to ever emerge from within the U.S., spent her formative years in Toronto where she trained to be a teacher.
Born Mary Harris near Cork, Ireland, she was the daughter of a Catholic tenant farmer. During the 1830s, her grandfather was hanged for agitating against the local British landlords and the rents that forced tenant farmers to live in permanent and crushing poverty.
In 1835 her father, Richard Harris, fled to the U.S., accused of agitating against Ireland's British colonial government. He brought his family to Toronto in 1841, where he found work on the newly formed Grand Trunk Railway of Canada.
Mary Harris graduated from Toronto Normal School in 1859, but Toronto public schools did not hire Catholic teachers. Armed with a certificate affirming her good moral character from a priest at St. Michael's Cathedral, Mary left Toronto for good in 1860, to teach at a convent in Michigan.
Throughout her 40 years in the labour movement, Mother Jones was a strong advocate for laws to end child labour. Denounced in the U.S. Senate as the grandmother of all agitators, she said she was proud of that title and hoped to live to be the great grandmother of agitators.
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