Epilogue

The epilogue summarizes the books arguments, emphasizing the importance of looking past categories like farmer or laborer or union and nonunion. Doing so provides a clearer picture of worker fluidity in the Gilded Age that allowed workers to seamlessly change occupations and fall in and out of union ranks. It also causes unofficial contributions of individuals such as miner wives and Mother Jones’s early organizing career to be overlooked in historical records because they were not official members of the organizations they helped. Closely examining the workers’ worlds and their relationships to each other, their families, and their neighbors, can lend greater understanding to how they interacted with the various organizations and ideas they encountered. Looking closely at the miners’ relationships with their communities indicates that even though union leaders did not always understand their reasoning, workers were continuously guided by their desires to look after their own interests.