Mary Harris “Mother” Jones

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-172
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Knights Of Labor ◽  
Working People

Born in Cork, Ireland, and reared in Toronto, Canada, Mary Harris trained as a dressmaker and teacher before she moved in 1861 to Memphis, Tennessee, where she met and married George Jones, an iron molder and member of the International Iron Molders Union. After the death of her husband and their four children in a yellow fever epidemic in 1867, she worked as a dressmaker in Chicago. There she became interested in the plight of the working class and began attending Knights of Labor meetings. After 1877, she devoted her life to improving the lot of working people, earning a reputation as a skilled and passionate orator....

Working-Class Fictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Exciting Wave

This chapter explores why working-class fictions flourished in the period from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s and the distinctive contributions that they made to the post-war British and Irish novel. These writers of working-class fiction were celebrated for their bold, socially realistic, and often candid depictions of the lives and desires of ordinary working people. Their works were seen to herald a new and exciting wave of gritty social realism. The narrative focus on the individual signalled a shift in the history of working-class writing away from the plot staples of strikes and the industrial community, striking a chord with a post-war reading public keen to see ordinary lives represented in books in a complex and realistic manner. The cultural significance of such novels was enhanced as they were adapted in quick succession for a mass cinema audience by a group of radical film-makers.

Sustaining Labor Politics in Hard Times: Race, Labor, and Coalition Building in Racine, Wisconsin

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-63
Author(s):  
Naomi R Williams
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Local Elections ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
Working People ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract This article explores the shifting politics of the Racine, Wisconsin, working-class community from World War II to the 1980s. It looks at the ways Black workers’ activism influenced local politics and how their efforts played out in the 1970s and 1980s. Case studies show how an expansive view of the boundaries of the Racine labor community led to cross-sector labor solidarity and labor-community coalitions that expanded economic citizenship rights for more working people in the city. The broad-based working-class vision pursued by the Racine labor community influenced local elections, housing and education, increased the number of workers with the power of unions behind them, and improved Racine's economic and social conditions. By the 1980s, Racine's labor community included not only industrial workers but also members of welfare and immigrants’ rights groups, parents of inner-city students, social workers and other white-collar public employees, and local and state politicians willing to support a class-based agenda in the political arena. Worker activists’ ability to maintain and adapt their notion of a broad-based labor community into the late twentieth century shows how this community and others like it responded to the upheaval of the 1960s social movements by creating a broad and relatively successful concept of worker solidarity that also incorporated racial justice.

Transition in Social Foundations for Collective Action

1980 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-451
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Social Foundations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working People ◽  
Different Populations ◽  
Traditional Communities

During the 1820s and early 1830s, two largely different populations of working people lived alongside each other in the region surrounding Manchester. Today, they represent, in an important and clear contrast, the social foundations which have supported distinctive directions of popular protest and collective action. The theory of working-class radicalism, as developed by Marx and others, has tended to confound the two. The necessary radicalism and fundamental opposition to the growth of capitalist industry of more traditional communities of craft workers was wedded to the concentrated numbers of new industrial workers and the clarity of their exploitation by capitalists. This marriage took place in theory, but not in concrete social movements. The working class emerged as a foundation for basically reformist collective actions, while the radical and reactionary populist craftsmen lost the war of the industrial revolution.

scholarly journals Styles of Life, the “Labour Aristocracy” and Class Relations in Later Nineteenth Century Edinburgh

1973 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Q. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
Levels Of Analysis ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Working People ◽  
Relative Earnings

The idea of a “labour aristocracy” pervades writing about the British working class of the second half, and especially the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This emphasis is, in my view, correct: the behaviour and consciousness of working people cannot be explained without some such concept of divisions within the working class. But this proposition has too often been allowed to conclude, rather than to commence the enquiry. The fragmentation of the manual working class into different strata and sub-cultures may take several forms, and is bound to have local and industrial variations. In approaching the problem it is necessary to draw a clear distinction between differences in the class situation of various groups of workers, and the formation of separate working class strata – a cultural and political process. Three main levels of analysis are relevant to this problem: the stratification within the working class, in terms of class situations (relative earnings, security, prospects and opportunities, position of subordination or autonomy in the workplace, and so on); the extent to which various strata of manual workers were distinguished by the cultivation of particular styles of life, and by commitment to particular sets of norms and values; and the consequences of these for institutions embodying the interest of manual workers as a class (unions, parties, etc.) and for the patterning of conflict and consensus in the society.

Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
The United States ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Attitudes Toward Death ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
Working People ◽  
Grave Markers ◽  
People’S Attitudes

The post-Civil War Industrial Age brought fundamental changes to the economy and its workers, forcing Americans to reassess the meaning of life and death. This illuminating study of working-class rituals of dying and the politics of death explores how Americans struggled to understand the broader forces transforming their worlds. The book investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of death and dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, the book portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf ◽  
Ken Fones-Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Labor Activists ◽  
Working People ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Taking Action

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the role of religion and faith in the life of working people. In many studies, religion served as an impediment to workers' understanding their class interests. Religion either divided workers of different faiths, served as a tool for the upwardly mobile, or provided a numbing fatalism that prevented working people from taking action against their exploiters. In other studies, the stimulus provided by Herbert Gutman weighed heavily. He was drawn to the examples he uncovered of a Christian spirit infusing the rhetoric and writings of labor activists and offering a postmillennial justification for working-class solidarity. Neither group of scholars tried to grapple systematically with the messiness of spiritual convictions and how those convictions interacted with lived experiences to shape the consciousness and actions of average working people.

scholarly journals Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation

1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret R. Somers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of

The nineteenth-century English working class bears a most peculiar burden and embodies a most peculiar paradox. Like Auden’s academic warriors who spar with “smiles and Christian names,” historians, economists, and sociologists have pushed and prodded early nineteenth-century English working people into procrustean political positions to support or disconfirm Marx’s predictions of revolutionary class conflict erupting from the contradictions of capitalism. A Manichaean concern locks the debate into an impasse. Were early nineteenth-century workers revolutionary or reformist? Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. Yet, surely it is the history of English working peoples that has suffered from this burden of praising or burying Marxism through competing interpretations of their early stories?

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