Mother Jones Talk led by Tammy Pike

Following the deaths of her family from yellow fever in 1867 and the destruction of her dressmaker business in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, Mary G. Harris Jones became a labor leader, organizer and activist.

She led a national movement to better the lives of hard-working people by securing bans on child labor and co-founding the radical Industrial Workers of the World. By 1902, she was labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” because of her successes in organizing protest marches by men, women and even children. Jones assumed the persona of “Mother Jones” by wearing outdated black dresses, referring to the male workers she helped as “her boys,” and claiming to be older than her 60 years.

Tammy Pike is a senior instructor of History at USC Upstate. She graduated from the University of South Carolina Upstate with a B.A. in History and earned a Master's Degree in History from the University of South Carolina. Her fields of interest include Nazi Germany, Eugenics, Oral History and Women's History.

She has taught various courses at USC Upstate including World History, Gender, Disability, and Eugenics: US and Germany, Nazi Germany, Women in Europe since 1789, Women in the U.S. Since 1865, Women and World War II and Unruly Women in the US.

Many of her courses include an experimental component such as service-learning, community engagement and/or civic engagement projects. Her Women in World War II, Women in the U.S. since 1865 and Unruly Women courses all produced separate digital archives, or LibGuides, created by the students. Oral history projects and the digitization of documents related to women in the U.S., particularly the Upstate of South Carolina, have become a major component of her pedagogical contribution to archives such as the Piedmont Historical Preservation Society and USC Upstate. She is the Internship Coordinator for History at Upstate, and she usually oversees between two and eight interns each semester in the Upstate community, actively contributing to history.

Free admission. This event is a discussion, not an in-character performance.