Mary Jones and the Great Library War of Los Angeles

Mary Letitia Jones (born 29 June 1865)

Born on 29 June 1865, Mary Letitia Jones was the daughter of a minister, William R. Jones, and his wife, Jane, both of whom had immigrated to the United States from Wales. In the 1870 U. S. Census, four-year-old Mary is living with her family in Wisconsin; by the time of the 1880 Census, the family has moved to Nebraska. 

Mary Letitia Jones,
from the collection of the Los Angeles Public Library

Mary Letitia Jones graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1885 and then attended New York State Library School, founded by Melvil Dewey (of Dewey Decimal fame), where she graduated in 1892. 

After finishing her education and carrying with her a recommendation from Dewey himself, she returned to Nebraska, recruited by James H. Canfield, chancellor of the University of Nebraska. She was hired not only to head the library but to help in the planning of a new library building. By 1895, she was head of a staff of 10 and had doubled the size of the library's holdings. (She also converted the library to the Dewey Decimal system.)

After leaving the University of Nebraska, Jones worked at the University of Illinois and the State Library of Iowa, moving to the Los Angeles area by 1899 to join her family--her father had retired to Pasadena. 

She was soon hired by the Los Angeles Public Library, as an assistant librarian, working with city librarian Harriet Child Wadleigh. When Wadleigh retired, Mary Jones became the city's head librarian. As Nicholas Beyelia notes, Jones was "the first Los Angeles City Librarian working for the Los Angeles Public Library who was both a college graduate and a graduate of library school."

Despite Jones's qualifications and career accomplishments, all did not go well--just five years later, she was asked to resign so that the city of Los Angeles could replace her with a man. Jones refused, noting her reasons in a letter delivered to the library's board of directors:

At first it was my inclination immediately to yield to the request relayed upon me by the president. But, upon reflection, I have concluded that it would not be fitting for me to tender my resignation as the head of a department where only women are employed. When such a resignation is tendered solely on the grounds that the best interests of the department demand that its affairs no longer be administered by a woman. Ever since the adoption of the present city charter, the library has been presided over by a woman with a staff of assistants composed exclusively of women.

Since Jones refused to resign, she was fired. Her firing set off the "the Great Library War." (I love this statement that Jones made to the Los Angeles Times, when she was asked about why she had been replaced by a man: “Those directors seem as crazy after a man as though they were a board of old maids.”)

This "war" certainly demonstrates sexism and misogyny--but there is a healthy bit of nepotism and favoritism as well, and of course the usual chicanery, harassment, espionage, and bureaucratic finagling. It engulfed the city, but the war went beyond the city's limits, eventually bringing Susan B. Anthony to town!

Susan B. Anthony, "laying down the law,"
Los Angeles Herald, 13 June 1895

After she was fired, Jones left Los Angeles, at least temporarily. She went next to Berkeley, where she taught at the university for two years, then headed to Bryn Mawr, where she was head of the library for six years. In 1920, she returned to Los Angeles, where she helped to set up the Los Angeles County Library system. During the first world war, she helped to create a library on a local military base, Camp Kearney. Jones remained in Los Angeles after retiring and died, age 80, in 1946. 

I could write much more here--I always tend to write more than I plan to write! But, truth be told, I would be taking information from the incredibly readable, detailed blog of Nicholas Beyelia, who has posted a four-part series. That's where you need to go to read much more of this incredible story! For the first part of Beyelia's account of the Great Library War ("Have You Met Miss Jones?"), click here.

You may also be interested in Susan Orlean's The Library Book, which tells of the 1986 fire in the Los Angeles Public Library that destroyed 400,000 books (and damaged 700,000 more). Orlean also writes about the library's history, including the story of Mary Letitia Jones. 

Back to the Future, Part 12: More Great News on Pay Equity!

Back to the Future, Part 12: More News on Pay Equity (or, More Good News for Women--How Can You Stand All the Winning?)

The Institute for Women's Policy Research has just issued a reassessment of the gender wage gapp. In Still a Man's Labor Market: The Slowly Narrowing Gender Wage Gap, researchers Stephen J. Rose and Heidi I. Hartmann have undertaken a "multiyear analysis" of wage data that "provides a more comprehensive picture of the gender wage gap and presents a more accurate measure of the income women actually bring home to support themselves and their families."

In the "Highlights" section of the report (really, that is just about the worst title imaginable), Rose and Harmann note their findings: 

• Women today earn just 49 cents to the typical men’s dollar, much less than the 80 cents usually reported. . . . Progress [in achieving pay equity] has slowed in the last 15 years relative to the preceding 30 years in the study. 
• The penalties of taking time out of the labor force are high—and increasing. . . . 
• Strengthening women’s labor force attachment is critical to narrowing the gender wage gap. . . . 
• Strengthening enforcement of equal employment opportunity policies and Title IX in education is also crucial to narrowing the gender wage gap further. . . . 

So, yay! Did you see the great news! Instead of, on average, women earning 80 cents for every dollar made by men, in actuality, they earn less than half of what men do!

Rose and Hartmann outline what makes this report distinctive, emphasizing its more comprehensive analysis:

In 2017, the most recent year for which year-round earnings data are available for full-time workers, the gender earnings gap was 20 percent; that is, women earned 20 percent less than men. . . . This figure is based on the ratio of women’s to men’s median earnings for full-time, year-round work and is derived from the annual Census Bureau report on income and poverty that is released every fall using data from the Current Population Survey. . . . This commonly used annual figure, however, understates the problem, especially for women workers, since it leaves so many of them out of the picture. The authors’ 2004 report, which pioneered the analysis of the earnings gap over 15-year periods, found an earnings gap of 62 percent for all women compared with all men (of prime working age) in the period studied, meaning that women made just 38 percent of what men made. . . . The current analysis updates and revises the analysis from the authors’ 2004 report and finds that a wide disparity exists between all workers and the smaller group of workers who work full-time, year-round. Although the earnings gap across the most recent 15 years for those who generally work full-time, year-round in this study is similar to the more commonly used one-year numbers from the same years (23 percent), the earnings gap across all 15 years for all women and men with some earnings is very different, a gender earnings gap of 51 percent (meaning that women earn only 49 percent of what men do across a 15-year period). Among women workers in this study, 43 percent had at least one year with no earnings, while only 23 percent of men did, indicating that being out of work for a year is still a common experience for women but unusual for men. (p. 1)

And, of course, "The long-term gender earnings gap has narrowed since 1968, but it has by no means disappeared." 

This year just keeps on getting better! And we still have a month to go!

For more on issues of pay equity and the gender wage gap, click on the label "pay equity," below. And for more in this Back to the Future series, click on the label below.

Update, 19 December 2018: In yet more depressing news on this front, the World Economic Forum has just published its annual Global Gender Gap Report (2018). I've posted about this report before, in 2017 and in 2016, and you can read those comments by following the links here (for 2017) and here (for 2016).

I don't have the heart for a separate post today, although I will note that this "gender gap" report goes beyond pay equity to examine the gender gap in four areas: economic participation and opportunity; educational attainment; health and survival; and political participation.

You can find the Global Rankings on pp. 10-11. The US ranks 51st in the 149 countries listed. Here's happy conclusion:

. . . if current rates were to be maintained in the future, the overall global gender gap will close in 61 years in Western Europe, 70 years in South Asia, 74 years in Latin America and the Caribbean, 135 years in Sub-Saharan Africa, 124 years in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 153 years in the Middle East and North Africa, 171 years in East Asia and the Pacific, and 165 years in North America. 

Read it and weep.

Labor Organizer "Mother Jones": "Pray for the Dead and Fight Like Hell for the Living"

Mary Harris Jones, "Mother Jones," Labor Organizer and Activist (baptized 1 August 1837)

Union membership is at an all-time low in the United States--today just 10.7% of American workers belong to unions, compared to 50 years ago, when nearly a third of American workers were union members. 

 Ewan McGaughey, 'Do corporations increase inequality?' (2015)

So today's post is about Mary Harris Jones, schoolteacher, dressmaker, community organizer, union activist, and all-around ass-kicker. 

Mary Harris Jones,
"Mother Jones"

Born in Cork County, Ireland, Mary Harris was baptized on 1 August 1837--her exact date of birth is not known, but the Cork [Ireland] Mother Jones Commemorative Committee celebrated the 175th anniversary of her birth in 2012. 

(Some sources suggest Mary Harris was born in 1830, with the Encyclopedia Britannica offering a precise date, 1 May 1830. If you've been reading this blog, you know how shabbily the EB treats women, so it's amazing they have an entry on Mary Harris Jones at all, no matter what they decide about her date of birth.)

Mary Harris migrated to Canada with her family at some point during the Great Famine (1840-49) though, again, dates are not certain, with some sources suggesting that her arrival in Canada was during the 1850s. Once there, Mary Harris could get an education, which she did at the Toronto Normal School. 

Mary Harris worked as a teacher, moving to the United States in 1859, when she began teaching in a convent in Michigan. But Harris found the convent "a depressing place" and moved to Chicago, where she worked as a dressmaker, and then to Memphis, where she again taught. 

In 1861 in Memphis she married George Jones, an ironworker and member of the National Iron Moulders Union. After her marriage, she again turned to dressmaking, setting up her own shop, and she gave birth to four children.

But in the yellow-fever epidemic of 1867, Mary Harris Jones lost her husband and her children--three boys and a girl, all under the age of five. As Jones later recalled, “the rich and the well-to-do fled the city" while the poor died: “One by one my four little children sickened and died. . . I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could.”

Jones returned to Chicago, opening another dressmaking shop, sewing clothing for the wealthy of the city. But during the Great Fire of 1871, she once again lost everything. At this moment of great loss, Jones discovered the Knights of Labor, the first great union organization in the United States, founded in 1869. 

Mary Harris Jones transformed herself into "Mother Jones"--and dedicated herself to the labor movement. She traveled throughout the country, organizing strikes, giving speeches, railing against injustice. When asked about her home, she replied, "Wherever there was a fight." 

(It may be that Jones herself first suggested she was born in 1830--she was small, just five feet tall, and chose to dress all in black. She may have been exaggerating her age in order to amplify her role as the fierce, white-haired mother-figure, "Mother Jones.")

She spent the next fifty years fighting. As Sarah K. Horseley notes in her biographical essay on Mother Jones: "From the late 1870s through the early 1920s, Jones participated in hundreds of strikes across the country. Living by the philosophy, 'wherever there is a fight,' she supported workers in the railroad, steel, copper, brewing, textile, and mining industries."

Mother Jones in Seattle, 30 May 1914

In 1902, Mother Jones was called "the most dangerous woman in America" at her West Virginia trial for violating an injunction that banned striking miners from meeting to organize. According to District Attorney Reese Blizzard, "She [Jones] comes into a state where peace and prosperity reign ... crooks her finger [and] twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out." 

Jones's actions spanned decades and movements:

In addition to organizing laborers in the western US, Mother Jones helped found the Social Democratic Party (1898) and the Industrial Workers of the World (1905) and published articles in the International Socialist Review. . . . 

. . . Jones often demanded that the government address social injustice. She organized children textile workers to march on President Roosevelt’s home in 1903. Four years later she secured a Congressional inquiry into the fate of Mexican revolutionists imprisoned in America. In 1914, the Colorado militia massacred twenty women and children in a miners’ tent colony in Ludlow, Colorado. Jones persuaded President Wilson to insist that the owners and workers arrive at a truce.

Jones was not a participant in the suffrage movement--which she regarded as a movement of well-to-do women, giving them something to do, and distracting from the serious economic issues faced by working women: “the plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity.” 

As for Jones, she fought with and for working women, organizing miners' wives to block strikebreakers, supporting young female mill workers who were demanding better wages, and agitating to change child labor laws. But Mother Jones believed that women should be wives and mothers rather than workers--and thus fought for better wages for men, arguing that "working men deserved a wage that would allow women to stay home to care for their kids."

As for issues of race, she built labor movements that "bridged racial and ethnic divisions," condemning white supremacists in union organizations, working on behalf of African-American miners, and arguing that Mexican and Italian immigrants should be included in unions. As the Mother Jones Museum notes in its essay "Who Was Mother Jones?":

When an African-American woman, impressed with Mother Jones [sic] commitment to their cause, suggested she would kiss Jones’ skirt hem in gratitude, Jones replied, “Not in the dust, sister, to me, but here on my breast, heart to heart.”

For her political actions, Jones was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned more than once--at age 82, she was sentenced to twenty years, though she was released from prison after serving 85 days. 

She slowed down after 1920, but Mother Jones never quit. In fact, she was back in court in 1924, accused of libel, slander, and sedition, she made an appearance at a dressmakers strike in Chicago in the same year, and she published her autobiography in 1925.

Mary Harris Jones--Mother Jones--died on 30 November 1930. She may have been a hundred years old--or perhaps "just" 93. She was buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois. 

Whether you approve of her politics or not, you have to admire this spirit: "I'm not a lady, I'm a hellraiser." 

I've linked (above) to Eliott J. Gorn's 2002 biography, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America.  For a shorter read, you may like the entry on Mary Harris Jones from the Gale Encyclopedia of U. S. Economic History, available here.