God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made

The fierce words of Mary Harris Jones—Mother Jones—cut like fire into the hypocrisy of her age. God Almighty made women, strong and unadorned, equal in dignity to men. But the Rockefeller gang of thieves, and others of their kind, invented the false idol of the lady—a creature bound by luxury, frailty, and dependence, created to serve the vanity of wealth rather than the truth of humanity. Here is the heart of her saying: that woman’s natural power was diminished by the chains of class and greed, masked beneath silks and jewels, while her sisters in the mines and mills bent under the yoke of real suffering.

Mother Jones spoke in an era when the Rockefellers, captains of industry and lords of oil, grew fat upon the labor of the poor. She walked among the coal miners’ wives, whose hands were calloused and whose children coughed with blackened lungs, while society preached that a woman’s highest calling was to sit prettily and silent, a “lady” adorned but useless. The ladies of high society were a creation of wealth, designed to obscure the truth of exploitation: that real women labored, starved, and buried their children while others were gilded in false refinement.

One remembers the tragedy of the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, when miners in Colorado struck against Rockefeller-owned companies for fair wages and humane conditions. Among the slain were women and children, burned alive as tents were set aflame by hired guns and soldiers. These were not “ladies” but women—wives and mothers whose courage outshone the wealth of their oppressors. Their suffering gave living proof to Mother Jones’s words: that the soul of womanhood is forged in endurance and struggle, not in idle finery.

Thus, her declaration is both a denunciation and a call to truth. To be a woman is to be real, rooted in strength, in labor, in the enduring bond of family and community. To be made a lady by the Rockefellers is to be diminished into an ornament, severed from the soil of one’s people. The distinction is not of gender but of dignity—between the natural worth bestowed by God and the artificial role imposed by greed.

O children of the future, take heed of her wisdom: honor not the hollow image of respectability crafted by wealth, but the living truth of human strength and sacrifice. Women are not fragile dolls to be placed upon pedestals—they are the builders of homes, the healers of wounds, the keepers of memory, and the breakers of chains. Remember always that the nobility of humanity lies not in gilded titles, but in the courage to labor and to love, even in the face of injustice.