Yesterday was the birthday of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called "the
most dangerous woman in America" when she was 87 years old. Mary Harris Jones, or "Mother
Jones" was born to a tenant farmer in Cork, Ireland,
in 1837. Her family fled the potato famine when she was just 10, resettling in
Toronto. She trained to be a teacher and took a job in Memphis, where on the
eve of the Civil War she married a union foundry worker and started a family.
But in 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept through the city, taking the lives
of her husband and all four children. A widow at 30, she moved to Chicago and
built a successful dressmaking business — only to lose everything in the Great
Chicago Fire of 1871. Jones then threw herself into the city's bustling labor
movement, where she worked in obscurity for the next 20 years. By the turn of
the century, she emerged as a charismatic speaker and one of the country's
leading labor organizers, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW).
She
traveled the country to wherever there was labor struggle, sometimes evading
company security by wading the riverbed into town, earning her the nickname
"The Miner's Angel." She used storytelling, the Bible, humor, and
even coarse language to reach a crowd. She said: "I asked a man in prison
once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I
said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator."
Jones also had little patience for hesitation, volunteering to lead a strike
"if there were no men present." A passionate critic of child labor,
she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of Theodore
Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York with banners reading, "We want to go to
school and not the mines!" At the age of 88, she published a first-person
account of her time in the labor movement called The Autobiography of Mother
Jones (1925). She died at the age of 93 and is buried at a
miners' cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois.
She said:
"Whatever the fight, don't be ladylike."
Today is the birthday of Maria
Mitchell, the first acknowledged female astronomer, born in
1818 on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts. Although the American
essayist Hannah Crocker explained that same year in her Observations on the Real Rights of
Women that it was then a woman's "province to soothe the
turbulent passions of men ... to shine in the domestic circle" and that
"it would be improper, and physically very incorrect, for the female
character to claim the statesman's birth or ascend the rostrum to gain the loud
applause of men," Maria Mitchell's Quaker parents believed that girls
should have the same access to education and the same chance to aspire to high
goals as boys, and they raised all 10 of their children as equals.
Maria's
early interest in science and the stars came from her father, a dedicated
amateur astronomer who shared with all his children what he saw as physical
evidence of God in the natural world, although Maria was the only child
interested enough to learn the mathematics of astronomy. She would later say,
in a quote recorded in NASA's profile of her, that we should "not look at
the stars as bright spots only [but] try to take in the vastness of the
universe," because "every formula which expresses a law of nature is
a hymn of praise to God."
By age 12,
Maria was assisting her father with his astronomical observations and data, and
just five years later opened and ran her own school for girls, training them in
the sciences and math. In 1838, she became the librarian of the Nantucket
Atheneum and began spending her evenings in an observatory her father had built
atop the town's bank.
On October
1, 1848, a crisp, clear autumn evening, Maria focused her father's telescope on
a distant star. The light was faint and blurry, and Maria suddenly realized she
was looking not at a star, but a comet; she recorded its coordinates, and when
she saw the next night that the fuzzy light had moved, she was sure. Maria
shared her discovery with her father, who wrote to the Harvard Observatory, who
in turn passed her name on to the king of Denmark, who had pledged a gold medal
to the first person to discover a comet so distant that it could only be seen
through a telescope. Maria was awarded the medal the following year, and the
comet became known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet."
Mitchell's
list of firsts is impressive: She'd made the first American comet sighting; in
1848, she was the first woman appointed to the American Association for the
Advancement of Science; in 1853, she became the first woman to earn an advanced
degree; and in 1865, she became the first woman appointed to the faculty of the
newly founded Vassar Female College as their astronomy professor and the head
of their observatory, making her the first female astronomy professor in
American history.
Mitchell
also became a devoted anti-slavery activist and suffragette, with friends such
as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and helped found the American
Association for the Advancement of Women. In her Life, Letters, and Journals,
Maria declares that, "no woman should say, 'I am but a woman!' But a
woman! What more can you ask to be? Born a woman — born with the average brain
of humanity — born with more than the average heart — if you are mortal, what
higher destiny could you have? No matter where you are nor what you are, you
are a power."
Both from The Writer's Almanac
Takk for alt,
Al
