>PARA 6PAR@ ` ╢TEXT ` ¿Barry, Leonora Marie Kearney
1849╨1930
╥Mother Lake,╙ labor leader and social reformer
Born on August 13, 1849, in Kearney, County Cork, Ireland, Leonora Kearney emigrated with her family to the United States in 1852, settling in St. Lawrence County, New York. After several years of teaching school she married W. E. Barry in November, 1871. He died ten years later; left with two children to support, she took a menial job in a clothing factory in Amsterdam, New York. Typically for the time, working conditions in the factory were poor and the pay was exceedingly low (Barry╒s wages for her first week were 65 cents), and in 1884 she joined a women╒s branch of the Knights of Labor. She rose rapidly to the post of master workman of the local branch, and in 1886, at the national convention of the Knights in Richmond, Virginia, she was elected to take charge of the newly created department of women╒s work. During four years in that post she worked tirelessly to improve wages and working conditions for women throughout the country, traveling widely to organize, inspire, and investigate. Her annual reports were detailed and vigorous indictments of the effects of the factory system on women and children, and they contributed greatly to the passage of a factory inspection law in Pennsylvania in 1889. She resigned from her position in April 1890 upon her marriage to O. R. Lake, but, from her new home in St. Louis, she continued to travel and speak on behalf of women╒s suffrage, temperance, and other movements. During this period and later, after moving to Minooka, Illinois, in 1916, she was active in the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union and the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America, and, as a popular lecturer on the Chautauqua and Redpath circuits until 1928, she roused much public support for Prohibition. Barry, sometimes known in later life as Mrs. Barry-Lake or Mother Lake, died in Minooka, Illinois, on July 15, 1930.
