Women from Ireland

"Get it straight, I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."

"I don't care about political parties. I went down to the Greenback parties, to the Populist party, in fact I went through them all. I found some of the parties most powerful weapons, but money interest prostitutes them all. Nowhere have you elected a man in this last election that represents your interests. I do not care what political party you put in power because we are of the economical power. We have the power to do and we will do it! They are not going to fool us there. It was not the political party that gained the eight hour day for the railroad man."

"Look at this watch of mine. Two hands there, nice looking, but let me take the hands out and it will be no good. It would be useless to, and your two hands are like unto the hands of the watch. You are the tool that move the nation. The Salvation Army, the Y.M.C.A. we build their institutions, pay for them, feed the people and everything. We are going to change that. The page is turned. The world is a moving magnet; a new civilization is coming; the pendulum is swimming as it has never swung before. It behooves to do our duty."

"The old condition is passing away. The new dawn of another civilized nation is breaking into the lives of the human race."

"If you ever saw a policeman with a club in his hand, I want to ask you, did you ever see that policeman club a millionaire? But it is "Get out of here, damn you, go on to jail, damn you," if it is a working man."

"No matter what your fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies."

"If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I would shout, 'Freedom for the working class!'"

"Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. It's an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!"

"And why were these things done? Because a group of men had demanded an eight hour day, a check weighman and the abolition of the scrip system that kept them in serfdom to the mighty coal barons. That was all. Just that miners had refused to labor under these conditions. Just because miners wanted a better chance for their children, more of the sunlight, more freedom. And for this they suffered one whole year and for this they died."

"When I get to the otherside, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!"

"I could have settled it in twenty-four hours… I would make the operators listen to the grievances of their workers. I would take the $650,000 spent for the militia during this strike and spend it on schools and playgrounds and libraries that West Virginia might have a more highly developed citizenry, physically and intellectually. You would then have fewer little children in the mines and factories; fewer later in jails and penitentiaries; fewer men and women submitting to conditions that are brutalizing and un-American."

"I refer to the United States, the union of all the states. I ask then, if in union there is strength for our nation, would there not be for labor! What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union. What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow."

"The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win."

"Organized labor should organize its women along industrial lines. Politics is only the servant of industry. The plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity."

"I knew it was useless to tell the governor about conditions as I found them. I knew he would be neither interested nor would he care. It wasn’t election time."

"I do not believe that iron bars and brutal treatment have ever been cures for crime. And certainly I feel that in our great enlightened country, there is no reason for going back to middle ages and their form of torture for the criminal."

"Human flesh, warm and soft and capable of being wounded, went naked up against steel; steel that is cold as old stars, and harder than death and incapable of pain. Bayonets and guns and steel rails and battleships, bombs and bullets are made of steel. And only babies are made of flesh. More babies grow up and work in steel, to hurl themselves against the bayonets, to know the tempered resistance of steel."

"Christ himself would agitate against them. He would agitate against the plutocrats and hypocrites who tell workers to go down on their knees and get right with God. Christ, the carpenter’s son, would tell them to stand up on their feet and fight for righteousness and justice on earth."

"In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, in spite of labor’s own lack of understanding of its needs, the cause of the worker continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to read and to think. Slowly, his standard of living rises to include some of the good and beautiful things of the world. Slowly the cause of his children becomes the cause of all. His boy is taken from the breaker, his girl from the mill. Slowly those who create wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands."

"The Greatest woman agitator of our time was Mother Jones. Arrested, deported, held in custody by the militia, hunted and threatened by police and gunmen-she carried on fearlessly for 60 years. I first saw her in the summer of 1908, speaking at a Bronx open-air meeting. She was giving the "city folks" hell. Why weren't we helping the miners of the West? Why weren't we backing up the Mexican people against Diaz? We were "white-livered rabbits who never put our feet on Mother Earth," she said. Her description of the bullpen, where the miners were herded by federal troops during a Western miners' strike, and of the bloodshed and suffering was so vivid that, being slightly dizzy from standing so long, I fainted. She stopped in the middle of a fiery appeal. "Get the poor child some water!" she said, and went on with her speech. I was terribly embarrassed."

"The next winter I saw Mother Jones again in Chicago at a meeting in Hull House of the Rudewitz Committee, to which I was a delegate from Local 85, IWW. I heard her hot angry defiant words against the deportation of a young Jewish worker on the vile pretext of "ritual murder." (Jane Addams and others saved him from certain death by their spirited defense). Mother Jones was dressed in an old-fashioned black silk basque, with lace around her neck, a long full skirt and a little bonnet, trimmed with flowers. She never changed her style of dress throughout her lifetime. She may sound like Whistler's Mother but this old lady was neither calm nor still, breathing fearless agitation wherever she went... She was put out of hotels. Families who housed her in company towns were dispossessed. She spoke in open fields when halls were closed. She waded through Kelly Creek, West Virginia, to organize miners on the other side. Tried for violating an injunction, she called the judge a "scab" and proved it to him. She organized "women's armies" to chase scabs-with mops, brooms and dishpans. "God! It's the old mother with her wild women!" the bosses would groan. In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, when a group of women pickets with babies were arrested and sentenced to 30 days, she advised them: "Sing to the babies all night long!" The women sang their way out of jail in a few days to the relief of the sleepless town. She was asked at Congressional hearing: "Where is your home?" and she answered: "Sometimes I'm in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota. My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong. In 1903 she led a group of child workers from the textile mills in the Kensington district of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to confront President Theodore Roosevelt with proof of child labor. In Colorado, after the Ludlow massacre in 1914, she led a protest parade up to the governor's office. In West Virginia, time after time, she led delegations to see various governors and "gave them hell," as she said...When she was a very old lady, she warned the rank and file against leaders who put their own interests ahead of labor. Until her death she stoutly affirmed her one great faith: "The future is in labor's strong, rough hands!"... She inspired me a great deal when I first heard her in New York and Chicago in those early days, though I confess I was afraid of her sharp tongue. But when I reminded her of the meeting in the Bronx and told her I had lost my baby, she was very sympathetic and kind. Her harshness was for bosses, scabs and crooked labor leaders."

"The UMWA had a number of big personalities and tough-talking bruisers at its disposal, but one of its most effective agitators was an old Irish woman in a black dress who prowled the picket lines and struck fear into the hearts of the corporate elite. This "John Brown (abolitionist) in petticoats" was a militant socialist who breathed class war like a dragon and doted on her members as if they were her own children. The woman who would become Mother Jones lived an entire life's worth of pain, struggle, and tragedy before she found her calling: organizing the working class, lifting up the unheard, and unseating those who would gladly earn their money by grinding the poor's bones to dust. A dressmaker by trade, left widowed with four deceased children in the 1871 yellow fever epidemic, Jones reinvented herself as a labor organizer and self-proclaimed hell-raiser...She grew famous for her signature billowing black dress, replete with lace collar, a severe white bun, and a pair of tiny eyeglasses perched on her fierce countenance. A century before Johnny Cash donned his all-black getup to symbolize his allegiance with the poor and downtrodden, Jones reached for widow's weeds to illustrate her status as the grandmother of a movement. She cultivated a matriarchal, sometimes impish image, fondly referring to grizzled miners and favored politicians alike as "my boys" and crusading against child labor. Only some of that came naturally; the rest was a theatrical flourish, cooked up to emphasize Harris's age and gravitas and add to her stature as the one and only Mother Jones, the bane of the coal bosses and a fighter to the core...Unlike many labor figures of her day, Jones did not discriminate against women or Black workers (though her single-minded focus on building working-class power at all costs left some of her views shortsighted at best, in particular her silence as the American labor movement went on the offensive against Chinese immigrant workers). During labor clashes, her greatest weapon was the womenfolk. She was known for actively encouraging women and families to get involved in strikes and organizing wives into "mop and bucket" battalions to fight alongside their husbands on the picket lines and hold down the home front."

"At the time [1903], 18 percent of American workers were under the age of sixteen, and as Jones herself once said, "The American people were born in strikes, and now in the closing days of the nineteenth century, even the children must strike for justice.""

"hailed in labor circles as "the miner's angel""

"I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones"

"In these tours of the Ohio minefields I often met Mother Jones. Our paths had crossed many times before, especially in the early 1900's in the Pennsylvania mining fields, and we were good friends. Mother Jones became interested in the labor movement after the death of her husband, who had been a soldier in the Civil War. She herself was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1830. She was an instinctive fighter against the capitalist class and spent her time organizing the miners into the U.M.W.A...In later years Mother Jones came under the wrong influences, and was sometimes made use of to play a reactionary role. She always retained great prestige among the miners, who would do almost anything she asked. I can remember time after time when a caucus in the A. F. of L. prepared to make a demonstration of strength against Gompers, she would come in at the last moment and say, "Stick to your old Sammy, boys, stick to your old Sammy!" and they would vote for him again. But just the same Mother Jones was an historical figure, a fine woman and a fine courageous fighter. I met this remarkable woman many more times, since a great deal of my work in the Socialist Party was spent among the miners, and we often held meetings together. Mother Jones died in December, 1930, at the age of 100. The last major strike in which she participated was the great steel strike of 1919, but she was in touch with things and spoke at meetings until 1923, when she was in her nineties. After that she went to stay with a Socialist family who took care of her until the end."

"Mother Jones came to Washington and told a Congressional committee about the terror in the West Virginia coal regions. I pictured her, and wrote that it was not easy to portray that "benign and yet so belligerent" face. When she was held captive by the West Virginia authorities she said to them: "You can stand me up against that wall and riddle me with bullets, but you can't make me surrender.""

"Mother Jones had a delightfully extensive profane vocabulary and did not hesitate to use it in conversation...Whenever Mother Jones came to New York she would let me know. She was moving toward the century mark, but she still had fire in her eye. For hours at a time I would talk with her in her room in the old Union Square Hotel. With a pail of beer on the table, she liked to tell me all about "my boys" (the miners), her experiences in jails, and what happened during strikes."

"In her seventies (and I guess this was one of the reasons she was called Mother, because she was old enough to be the mother of almost everybody who was working), she was organizing miners in West Virginia, and then Colorado. She was so colorful and so dramatic, and she looked like a schoolteacher, wearing her bonnet over her white hair. She was a fiery speaker. She did very dramatic things, like bringing the children of striking miners in Pennsylvania on a march to New York, to Theodore Roosevelt's house, to demand an end to child labor. They were carrying signs saying WE WANT TIME TO PLAY…She was jailed many times. Nothing daunted her. She was brought into courts and she would defy the judge. She inspired miners and other workers all over the country."

"The planets revolved in circles because it was in their nature to do so, just as laudanum sends to sleep because it possesses a virtus dormitiva."

"Is it not reasonable to think that by far the greater part is solid and dark, and that this immense globe is encompassed with a thin covering of that resplendent substance from which the sun would seem to derive the whole of his vivifying heat and energy?"

"Thus, not merely what it can do, but the rate at which it can do it, has to be considered in estimating the value of photography as an ally in astronomy."

"Comets encountering these precincts must be perplexed to decide between the two potentates claiming their allegiance, and perhaps on occasions pay their court to each in turns, throwing out tails, as they do so, in all sorts of anomalous and contradictory directions."

"Such terms as tycoon, media baron, captain of industry, industrial magnate, financial speculator, or boss were dropped in favour of entrepreneur, now seen as the benign improver of society and the kind of person we could all aspire to being."

"Neoliberalism, despite the claim by its adherents that it was simply an economic theory, was from its beginnings a class project articulated on behalf of the interests of capital."

"I absolutely love it, it's not for everybody, but it's certainly for me and it's something I never envisioned myself doing, my life took a completely different direction, I was planning on staying in education forever."

"England is known to provide so freely for the education of the poor of every other class without distinction of creed. Why should the deaf and dumb be the exception? Why should not a privilege be granted to the speechless poor which is so liberally bestowed on all others?"

"Any measure calculated to encourage virtue and subdue vice must be the wisest and best policy of a nation. In new countries there is a dignity in labour and a self-supporting woman is alike respected and respectable. Why should the door of hope be closed on those poor women, and why refuse them the means of attaining that independence in other countries which they are debarred from in this?"

"Charlotte Stoker's account of 'The Cholera Horror' in a letter to Bram Stoker (c. 1873)"

"But my mental health, it turns out, is my responsibility. I probably don't need to tell you that, but I did need to tell myself. And once I realised that, I wondered why I would ever leave it in the hands of strangers to decide my value."

"I wrote it quickly, over the course of a year. Or you could say it took me 40 years to write it."

"We stood for military discipline and surgical precision in everything that we did, and if you slipped from those standards, you were gone – and somebody else would be waiting to take your job. Kitchen life was testosterone-fuelled, with dozens of chefs jostling for Gordon’s attention."

"It wasn’t for everyone, but I knew it was for me, because I wanted to be the best, and I refused to let anything distract me from that aim. Gordon was, and still is, a brilliant mentor. He was always fair, even if he was very blunt about it – he just wanted perfection."

"This woman is relentless, and in that pursuit of perfection, the exciting thing about Clare’s demeanour is that she carries no passengers – she has a drive that cannot be bought or taught. But more than this, she has an understanding of finesse and style like few others; she cooks with attitude and personality, and that’s rarer than you’d think."

"I loved raising the bar every single day, pushing my team to get better and better with each challenge. Clare was one of the very few chefs who not only met that bar but soared right past it and came back asking for more. It was her hunger that set her apart"

"I’ll never forget the first time I ate at Core, lt was an emotional night. We’d brought some good friends with us, but I couldn’t focus on entertaining them – all I had in my mind was the journey Clare had been on, which I could follow through her food."

"The flavours were rounded, the seasoning was on point and her dishes were so distinct and original. She has a near-unique ability to turn an idea into a plate of food without distorting her original vision, which is where I think her genius lies ( Lieutenant Gordon Ramsay of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay)"

"As the rich get richer, the rest of us will be left in increasingly precarious situations."

"Speaking about pain is not the same as dismantling the power structures that create that pain."

"In our desire to see our own beauty acknowledged, we forget that the beauty regime is an oppressive construct designed to keep women in a state of heightened insecurity."

"I remain curious as to what exactly it is that we are expected to be doing with our time? What is more profound or simply enjoyable than this type of activity? What is life for, if not physical intimacy and communion with our bredrin? If, at the end of the exchange, we look better than we did before, issa win."

"Alas! how truly did he tell her, that the love of ornament creeps slowly, but surely, into the female heart;—that the girl who twines the lily in her tresses, and looks at herself in the clear stream, will soon wish that the lily was fadeless, and the stream a mirror."

"Beauty depends more upon the movement of the face than upon the form of the features when at rest. Thus a countenance habitually under the influence of amiable feelings acquires a beauty of the highest order, from the frequency with which such feelings are the originating causes of the movement or expressions which stamp their character upon it."

"You see, my good friend, how much we are the creatures of situation and circumstance, and with what pliant servility the mind resigns itself to the impressions of the senses, or the illusions of the imagination."

"Race and temperament go for so much in influencing opinion!"

"Vulgarity is setting store by "the things which are seen.""

"Architecture is the printing-press of all ages, and gives a history of the state of the society in which it was erected; from the cromlech of the Druids to those toyshops of royal bad taste."

"It is quite deplorable to see how many rational creatures (or, at least, who are thought so) mistake suffering for sanctity, and think a sad face and a gloomy habit of mind, propitious offerings to that deity, whose works are all light, and lustre, and harmony, and loveliness."

"The playful kitten, with its pretty little tigerish gambles, is infinitely more amusing than half the people one is obliged to live with in the world."

"The influence of woman was, is, and ever will be exercised, directly or indirectly, in good or in evil! It is a part of the scheme of nature. Give her then the lights she is capable of receiving; educate her (whatever her station) for taking her part in society. Her ignorance has often made her interference fatal: her knowledge, never."

"Your letters are always to me fresher than flowers, without their fading so soon."

"Initially it was myself and Pierre building web prototypes and games. We tried to make video games for CBT for 9 months, things like interactive fiction prototypes for dynamics of engagement. They all had so much dialogue it made sense for us to move to chatbots. Pamela Fox stepped in as our head of engineering and helped rebuild the stack."

"My background is in clinical psychology research and I reached out to the best in the field. We all agree that our work doesn’t scale. Athena Robinson, a former Stanford psychiatry professor just joined as our Chief Clinical Officer. Other than that, some of my other colleagues or friends have joined too — people who really care about mental health issues. It makes for a really great workplace — this idea is bigger than any of us. When you look at the data and what people share, it’s so personal and you don’t even hear things like this in human therapy."

"At the end, we always ask: How are you feeling, better, the same, or worse? We look at the failed transcripts and try to troubleshoot on what went wrong — we try to minimize people feeling worse. It’s hard to figure out what we can do for those feeling the same. When you get it wrong people are not shy about telling you — when a button doesn’t cover everything users want to say, users will tell you."

"We also use standard search metrics, like precision and recall. For example, to detect people in crisis, we prefer recall search methods over precision as we want to be overinclusive and to identify anyone who could have a problem so we can refer them to human counselors or a help hotline."

"We learn all the time and have learned to keep track of our learning. If you have two buttons, they should represent genuinely different pathways. If there is no natural response or utterance, we use an emoji as an easy button filler. We’ve learned a lot about images. We used to have a black and white image of a bomb and we found it was triggering for certain people, so we had to remove it. Generally I like the black and white images. Many people really dislike minions. There’s a lot due to personal taste here — some people are into videos, others aren’t into it. We have veered away from videos, but we may make some to help teach people difficult techniques. When people are upset, they can only process a little — so our language and scripts have to be really short. We find it easier to have many chat bubbles with 1 or 2 lines — we try to keep it lean and bouncy. There’s almost a rhythm to it — there are a few flows where we can capture help."

"Some users want to be served something else. We always issue an invitation to engage in a conversation. There’s no assumption people want help. Some people just want to chat, they don’t want help. So we try not to explicitly ask people what they are looking for. There really isn’t a lot of open chat away from buttons in Woebot. People may want a past video or lesson."

"The only strategy that we’ve done is press — that has been reasonably successful. Interestingly, we got far more conversations as a result of blog article reviews than mainstream press. Bloggers just seem to find us. The tongue and cheek name helped and launching with data and the study helped. Some of the other mental health bots are less than useful and possibly dangerous — so having actual data from a study was important."

"The first is to just ask people if they want to converse. I’m not sure if we’ve nailed the invitation. Some of our push navigations were like “beep boop” — we are trying to understand the re-triggering schedule. [Note: Checking in to see what someone’s mental health is is a great reason to re-engage — Woebot naturally does this.]"

"It was a nice to have a paywall at first to get validation that people would pay for it. We had a decent conversion rate, but I wanted to gather data. Direct to consumer will be the longer term model. People were emailing us saying this is less expensive than our therapist; they were the ones who valued us the most. Convenience was a huge value proposition."

"It’s all completely de-identified and anonymized data — nobody in the company can ever see anyone’s Facebook profile. It was to protect the user and to protect us. The guiding principle is transparency. There is no open ended generative conversation — everything is scripted. We want to launch an app to have more privacy."

"We use AWS Lambda and NodeJS. Our app will have an animated Woebot tied to NLP that can respond to verbal language with animation. We do our analytics in house as we move to HIPAA compliance for our apps. We don’t want a 3rd party looking at data. We built a dashboard over the summer. It’s hard to find really good data scientists and AI people, and Android engineers."

"We are planning an iOS and Android app so people have extra privacy and to be HIPAA-compliant. There’s a good reason to keep it with text and to NOT do it in voice. You cannot see a negative thought in voice, but in a text chatbot you write it out and this externalization helps you overcome it. Messenger was a great launch platform — they make it easy to create and launch a bot. Users loved our prototypes there and we decided to launch there as it was easy."

"I really like ParentSpark — it helps parents with parenting. Their storytelling is great. It’s a mom coaching her kids and they help you as a parent. I also like Jeyant for medical screening; they have over a million users and screen for Zika and other diseases. PullString has done some nice character-based chatbots like Dr. Who. The Mabu chatbot, with eyes that follow you, is neat and I think IDEO designed it."

"The story of Margaret Haughery is one of the sweetest ever told. Her life is a lesson of love in charity which this age needs to learn. While philanthropists and social workers vainly talk about problems, she solved them; for she met those problems with the wisdom that came from the love of her big Irish heart. In her simple life we read again the lesson that there is but one way to become great in the Kingdom of God. And because she found that way, Margaret Haughery, the "Mother of the Orphans," is entitled to a high place among the great wives and mothers who have brought glory to the Catholic Church."

"Much obscurity attaches to her history, and it is not easy to disentangle the actual facts of her history from the network of legend which medieval writers interwove with her acts. However, her fame, apart from her relationship to Ireland's national apostle, stands secure as not only a great saint but as the mother of many saints."