Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Harris Jones

A holy origin story, then a blunt class indictment: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones slices womanhood into two categories and dares you to notice who benefits. "God almighty made women" invokes the older, dignified idea of women as human beings with inherent worth. "The Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies" is the acid follow-up, turning "ladies" into a manufactured product - a social status stamped and sold by capital.

The phrasing is deliberately rough. Jones isn't admiring refinement; she's exposing it as a labor-saving device for the ruling class. If "women" are workers, organizers, mothers, and survivors, "ladies" are a costume and a code: respectability that politely disqualifies you from solidarity. The subtext is that elite femininity functions like a union-busting strategy, teaching some women to identify upward (with husbands, employers, benefactors) rather than sideways (with other workers). It's not anti-woman; it's anti-transaction, anti-performance, anti-theater-of-good-breeding that keeps exploitation looking tasteful.

The Rockefeller reference lands in a specific American moment, when industrialists were treated as near-monarchs while coal miners and their families were crushed by company towns, private security, and political capture. Jones fought in that world, including the Colorado coal wars shadowed by Rockefeller money. Calling them a "gang of thieves" refuses the era's polite vocabulary of "captains of industry". The line works because it weaponizes manners: it turns "ladies" from a compliment into evidence, a tell that the system has already paid you off.