How Did Mother Jones Fight For Children's Rights

Have you ever wanted to stand up for what you believed in? These three individuals did. Mother Jones fought for children’s rights, Cesar Chavez fought for worker’s rights, and Barack Obama fought for LGBTQ+ rights. Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez, and Barack Obama all fought for human rights for everyone to be equal and called attention to others to support their cause. Mother Jones fought for children’s rights by leading children who work in horrible conditions on a march to the president to let everyone see how horrible their lives were with those conditions. She realized how awful these conditions were when she saw the children, “Nationwide, eighty thousand children worked in the textile industry. In the South, Mother Jones had seen how dangerous
Their shoulders were rounded from long hours spent hunched over the workbenches. Even worse, she saw “some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckles”—victims of mill accidents” (Josephson). When Mother Jones saw what was happening to these kids, she wanted to take action immediately. She scheduled a long march and brought children along to show everyone what poor conditions they were working in. Mother Jones tried to keep the children’s hopes up, but many were withering. For example, “By now, many of the children were growing weak. More returned home. Some adults on the march grumbled that Mother Jones just wanted people to notice her. They complained to reporters that Mother Jones often stayed in hotels while the marchers camped in hot, soggy tents filled with whining mosquitoes. Sometimes Mother Jones did stay in hotels, because she went ahead of the marchers to arrange for lodging and food in upcoming towns and to get publicity for the march” (Josephson). As Mother Jones sometimes stayed in hotels, she did try and help to keep everyone together, but to her dismay, many left the march. Eventually, “Though she had not met with the president, Mother Jones had drawn the
Cesar was well aware of what was happening because, “At age 11, his family lost their farm during the Great Depression and became migrant farm workers. Throughout his youth and into adulthood, Cesar traveled the migrant streams throughout California laboring in the fields, orchards and vineyards, where he was exposed to the hardships and injustices of farm worker life” (Cesar Chavez Foundation). Cesar wanted to help workers have more rights because he was a worker himself; Cesar had experienced what those conditions are and he wanted to change them. According to the Cesar Chavez Foundation, “The coming years would bring much more adversity: Strikes and boycotts, marches and fasts, victories and defeats”. Throughout all of these things happening, Cesar wanted to change lives for the better, so he never gave up and did what he believed was right. Finally, he was able to make a contract, “The first union contracts requiring rest periods, toilets in the fields, clean drinking water, hand washing facilities, banning discrimination in employment and sexual harassment of women workers, requiring protective clothing against pesticide exposure, prohibiting pesticide spraying while workers are in the fields and outlawing DDT and other dangerous pesticides…” With this contract, workers got better rights and a huge improvement in the workplace, all thanks to Cesar