Mrs. Leonora Barry was a young widow with three children.  She had tried to earn a living for them in a hosiery mill at Amsterdam, New York.  For herself her endeavor to work as a mill hand was singularly unfortunate, for during her first week she earned but sixty-five cents.  But if she did not during that week master any of the processes concerned in the making of machine-made stockings, she learned a good deal more than this, a good deal more than she set out to learn.  She learned of the insults young girls were obliged to submit to on pain of losing their jobs, and a righteous wrath grew within her at the knowledge.  During this hard time also she heard first of the Knights of Labor, and having heard of them, she promptly joined.  As she was classified at the 1886 convention as a “machine hand,” it is probable that she had by this time taken up her original trade.

For four years Mrs. Barry did fine work.  She combined in a remarkable degree qualities rarely found in the same individual.  She followed in no one’s tracks, but planned out her own methods, and carried out a campaign in which she fulfilled the duties of investigator, organizer and public lecturer.  This at a time when the means of traveling were far more primitive than they are today; and not in one state alone, for she covered almost all the Eastern half of the country.  We know that she went as far west as Leadville, Colorado, because of the touching little story that is told of her visit there.  In that town she had founded the Martha Washington Assembly of the Knights of Labor, and when she left she was given a small parcel with the request that she would not open it until she reached home.  But, as she tells it herself,

My woman’s curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the package, and found therein a purse which had been carried for fifteen years by Brother Horgan, who was with us last year, and inside of that a little souvenir in the shape of five twenty-dollar gold pieces.  You say that I was the instrument through whose means the Martha Washington Assembly was organized.  This is partially true, but it is also true that the good and true Knights of Leadville are as much the founder as I am.

She possessed a social vision, and saw the problems of the wrongs of women in relation to the general industrial question, so that in her organizing work she was many-sided.  The disputes that she was forever settling, the apathy that she was forever encountering, she dealt with in the tolerant spirit of one to whom these were but incidents in the growth of the labor movement.  In dealing with the “little ones” in that movement we hear of her as only patient and helpful and offering words of encouragement, however small the visible results of her efforts might be.