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Mother Jones: Ireland To North America To Ireland, Elliot Gorn

History: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although we don't hear her name so often anymore, Mother Jones was one of the great figures of the early twentieth century. She and her family were refugees from the Famine, and I want to argue here that her early life in Ireland, Canada, and the United States molded her, made her the great crusader for social justice and tribune of the working class that she became as an old woman. "Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose," Kris Kristofferson has written, words that well describe the life of Mother Jones.