Leonora Barry

Leonora's father was an Irish farmer who relocated his family to the rural community of Pierrepont, New York, in 1852 to escape the Great Famine.

After moving out of the house to escape the tension between herself and her father's new wife, she took the initiative to contact the head of a girls' school in nearby Colton, New York, from whom she received private instruction for six weeks.

The family moved frequently, including to Haydensville, Massachusetts, and Amsterdam, New York, and she gave birth to two sons, William Standish in 1875 and Charles Joseph in 1880.

When her husband died of a lung disease, and her daughter shortly afterward, Barry began to work as a seamstress but found the job too tiring.

[5] She then took a job in an Amsterdam hosiery factory where she and her fellow working women faced harsh conditions, long hours, and low pay.

[15] Barry, however, found herself unable to build a solid following due to the apathy of working women, divisions within the Knights of Labor, and difficulties faced by a woman attempting to organize men in a male-dominated society.

As Barry remarked, some women had a "habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no ray of hope.

"[9] Given her self-described goal to liberate "from the remorseless grasp of tyranny and greed the thousands of underpaid women and girls in our large cities, who, suffering the pangs of hunger, cold and privation, ofttimes yield and fall into the yawning chasm of immorality," one can understand the motivation and passion that drove her in her cause.

Upon her marriage to Obadiah Read Lake in 1890, Barry resigned from her position within the Knights of Labor, bringing an end to the Department of Woman's Work.

[13] At her resignation from the Knights, she seemed to backtrack on her entire mission by stating, "If it were possible, I wish that it were not necessary for women to learn any trade but that of domestic duties, as I believe it was intended that man should be the bread-winner".

While such a sentiment appears contrary to her entire cause, she went on to qualify her statement by adding, "But as that is impossible under present conditions, I believe women should have every opportunity to become proficient in whatever vocation they choose or find themselves best fitted for.

Barry served primarily as a public speaker on issues of reform, as illustrated by her 1893 speech before the World's Representative Congress of Women at the Columbian exposition in Chicago on "The Dignity of Labor.