Militant motherhood: Labor's Mary Harris “mother” Jones

Abstract

This essay uses industrial labor's Mary Harris “Mother” Jones as a case study to explore the link between labor union agitation and the use of symbolic motherhood by female labor leaders. The essay argues that maternal aims of physical protection, facilitating emotional and cognitive development, and developing group identity were conducive to empowering oppressed coal mining audiences who suffered from fear, low self‐esteem and chronic dependency, and ethnic and geographic barriers. Jones's militant version of motherhood—realized through non‐discursive maternal practices and a “feminine” rhetorical style comprised of warm validation and aggressive confrontation—equipped developmentally immature audiences with skills essential for resistance.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.