A portrait of Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, namesake of this magazine. Bettmann/Getty Once upon a time there was a person with the unnoticeable name of Mary Harris, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1837, who lived a private life of suffering and failure. Her parents, fleeing Ireland’s Great Hunger, brought her as a teenager to Canada, where she briefly attended a Toronto teachers’ school, before she went to Monroe, Michigan, where she briefly taught school in a convent.
A skilled seamstress from a girl, she left Monroe for Chicago, where she opened a dress shop. But she moved on yet again, to Memphis, where in 1861 she married George Jones, an organizer of his fellow iron foundry workers, to whom she quickly bore four children. Then her worst tragedy hit, the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1867, which wiped out all five members of her family.
Back in Chicago, she reopened her dress shop, to have it destroyed by the Chicago Fire of 1871. Disaster had crowded on disaster throughout her entire blighted life, leaving no record of having done a single thing memorable. Then, mysteriously, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, an entirely new person appeared.
The previous one had been private and passive. The new one would be public and expansive. This woman would have a remarkable (but made-up) age and name and garb and task.
She would be exactly (and by plan) the opposite of what went before—the most amazing work of self-reinvention on record. Mary Harris was erased, replace.