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, replaced by Mother Jones. Just consider the thoroughness of the changes this involved:
Made-Up Age
Women, according to a stereotype, especially actresses or public figures, try to pretend they are younger than their real age. The made-up Mother Jones claimed to be older. Safely in her middle-aged (for that time) 40s, she claimed to be in her 50s. And she kept on adding 10 or more years to her age all the way up to her 80s, which she made out to be her 90s. Despite what should have been a cumulating decrepitude, she displayed a prodigious energy in the union organizing of her late husband. This allowed her to have beers with “my boys“ (as she called the workers), and curse the “goddamned” strike breakers, without being confused with the prostitutes around the coal mines and oil fields where she labored. Other women lied about their age to stay young enough to remain sexually interesting. She lied to escape that. It freed her to mix with all kinds of people without sexual tension or questioning.