This American-born school teacher was a woman who wore courage and empathy. Mary G Haris Jones was a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist. She helped organize major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World.

After her whole family passed away from yellow fever and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she became an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. In 1902, she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. 

 In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.

 She was simply an individualist, one who chose to devote the last 30 years of a long life to the cause of the working class. Her influence on the American labor movement was, however, largely symbolic: the image of a grandmotherly, staidly dressed, slightly built woman unfazed by hostile employers, their hired gunmen, or anti-labor public officials intensified the militancy workers who saw her or who heard of her deeds.

Source: Wikipedia