Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America.

• Author: Capozzola, Christopher

Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliott J. Gorn Hill and Wang, 2001. 394 pages. $27.00.

She was an unlikely candidate to become America's most famous radical labor organizer. In 1867, Mary Harris Jones was a thirty-year-old former schoolteacher, married with four children, living in a rundown Irish Catholic neighborhood in Memphis. That summer, everything changed when her husband and all of her children died in a devastating yellow fever epidemic. Sometime later, she started going to union meetings. By the end of the century, she had transformed herself into one of the most compelling figures in American history. Still dressed in the black frock of mourning, now graced with gray hair, she added a few years to her age, referred to striking workers as her "children," and started calling herself Mother Jones. Then she really started raising hell. In a country premised on the inalienable right to reinvent yourself, hers was one of the most remarkable acts of them all.

In Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, the first thorough biography of this remarkable character, historian Elliott Gorn recovers the life of a woman who transformed herself and remade America's labor movement along the way. Gorn attempts to give us the real story of Mary Jones, the working class union organizer and backroom politician, at the same time that he recreates Mother Jones, the legend. He succeeds on both counts.

Born in Ireland in 1837, young Mary Harris witnessed the Irish potato famine, a spectacle of human suffering compounded by heartless indifference. In the famine's wake, she emigrated with her family to Canada, where she had a lace-curtain, Irish striver's upbringing in Toronto. In an age when working class women could read little and write less, she attended college and worked as a teacher.

In 1860, she married George Jones, who was active in Memphis's emerging labor movement, and they had four children in quick succession. Even quicker, yellow fever carried them away, while Mary Jones tended the sick in the city's Irish slums. Never again would she have a family of her own.

The nineteenth century widow had little financial support, but she was relieved of the obligations that family imposed. "Tragedy freed her for a life of commitment," Gorn notes.

From Memphis in 1867 to her emergence on the national stage as "Mother Jones" in 1901, she is barely visible in the historical record.

Gorn gives it his best, sorting facts from...