Leonora Marie Kearney Barry

• Leonora Marie Kearney Barry
• Born: August 13, 1849
• Died: July 15, 1930

Lecturer and labor organizer, was born in Kearney, County Cork, Ireland, the only child of John Kearney and Honor Granger (Brown) Kearney. The Kearneys emigrated to the United States in 1852, settling in the farming community of Pierrepont, New York. Leonora Kearney was educated at the local district school and was privately tutored by the principal of a girls’ school in Colton, New York. After her mother’s death, her father remarried, in 1864, and Leonora decided to follow a teaching career. At the age of sixteen she obtained a certificate, and for the next few years she taught in a rural school.

In November 1871 she married William E. Barry, an Irishman who had first emigrated to Canada and then to upstate New York. He was a painter who gave cornet lessons in his spare time. The couple first set up residence in Potsdam, New York, where their daughter Marion Frances was born in 1873. They later moved to Haydenville, Massachusetts, and then to Amsterdam, New York. Two sons—William Standish, born in 1875, and Charles Joseph, in 1880—were added to the family. William Barry died of lung disease in 1881, and a few months later their daughter died. Leonora Barry found herself alone with two small children to support, and with very limited training. She became a seamstress, but found the work a strain on her eyes and finally took a job as an unskilled laborer in a hosiery mill in Amsterdam.

The experience was to shape Barry’s life. Horrified the long working hours, poor conditions of employment, and low pay—approximately eleven cents a day—she joined the Knights of Labor in the spring of 1884. This group had originally been founded as a secret organization by garment workers in Philadelphia in 1869. The Knights admitted women, starting in 1881, and became an open association organized into local and district assemblies whose prime objective was to mold the labor movement into a single disciplined army. Barry quickly rose through its ranks, first as president, “master workman,” of her local assembly, and then as leader of District Assembly 65, with a membership of over 9,000. She was sent as a delegate to the district’s convention in Albany in 1886 and then was selected as one of the district’s representatives to the national convention in Richmond, Virginia, that year—the apogee of the Knights’ membership.

Recognizing the increasing number of women within its ranks, the Knights set up a committee in 1885 to gather information on the status of women in industry. The results of the study led to the creation in 1886 of a Department of Women’s Work, the first of its kind in the United States, and Barry was appointed general investigator (in effect, head) of the new division. With limited experience, she suddenly found herself working as a national organizer and troubleshooter, a job that required extensive national travel. For the next four years she placed her children in private boarding schools or with relatives and toured the country speaking on at least 500 occasions on behalf of working women. She organized new locals of the Knights and helped to attract new members, both male and female, to existing assemblies.

At the same time she examined firsthand the working conditions of American women. Barry’s investigations were often hampered by employers who would not allow her onto their premises and by women themselves who were either indifferent or feared the loss of their jobs or wages if they spoke freely to her. Nevertheless, the reports she sent back to the General Assembly of the Knights in 1887, 1888, and 1889 were detailed accounts of the appalling working conditions in American sweatshops and factories, conditions that included numerous abuses suffered by women and children. In addition, in her travels she collected extensive statistical data, and she was the first person to gather national statistics on working women.

Despite her dedication to her job, Barry was not able to establish a permanent organization to assist women workers. Friction within the Knights, especially the opposition of many male members to her work, weakened her efforts to recruit more women and to improve their conditions of employment. Increasingly, the Knights proved it could not unite on a given issue or course of action, and by the early 1890s it had disintegrated. The poor leadership of Terence V. Powderly was a factor in its decline; as was the founding of Samuel Gompers’s new craft union organization, the American Federation of Labor. Barry, however, managed to establish several short-lived factory cooperatives and a benefit fund for women. Her main achievement was the enactment of Pennsylvania’s first factory inspection act in 1889. She had worked diligently within labor’s ranks for such measures but had refused to lobby state legislatures because she deemed such action unfeminine.

Leonora Barry was the conscience of the working women’s sector of the labor movement. The Knights became the first labor organization in America to open membership to women on a wide scale, and Barry was one of the pioneer women leaders in the American labor movement. She was a gifted orator who could hold the public’s attention as she condemned the dismal conditions under which most women were employed. She also used the lecture platform during these years to speak for the temperance and woman suffrage movements.

In 1889, discouraged over her inability to help unionize more women, she suggested that the Knights’ Department of Women’s Work be abolished; this recommendation was rejected by the General Assembly. Economic necessity had driven her into the labor market, but she held the belief that women should not work outside the home for financial considerations. She therefore resigned her post in the Knights when she married Obadiah Read Lake in 1890. Lake was a printer and editor with The St. Louis Globe-Democrat and a member of the Knights of Labor. With her resignation came the end of attempts to organize women in the Knights, and her position was left unfilled.

After her marriage she turned to temperance work, become a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and a member of the executive board of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America. As Mrs. Barry-Lake, or Mother Lake, she continued to work for the woman suffrage movement, specifically taking an active role in the successful Colorado state suffrage campaign in 1893. She also participated in several Catholic charity organizations and lectured on the Chautauqua circuit and for the Redpath and Slayton agencies.

After her husband’s retirement in 1916, the couple moved to Minooka, Illinois. She died at the age of eighty of mouth cancer and was buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Minooka.

Some of Barry’s papers are in the Terence V. Powderly Papers at Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. There is no full-length biography. Her life must be pieced together from various materials. The best modern sketch can be found in Notable American Women (1971). See also P. S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (1979); J. J. Kenneally, Women and American Trade Unions (1978); J. B. Andrews and W. D. Bliss, History of Women in Trade Unions, vol. 9 (1911); Who’s Who in America, 1914-1915; Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1914-1915, and E. Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959). An obituary appeared in the Joliet, Illinois, Herald-News, July 16, 1930.