of 1885 it was voted, on the motion of Miss Mary Hannafin, a
saleswoman of Philadelphia, that a committee to collect statistics on
women's work be appointed. This committee consisted of Miss Hannafin
and Miss Mary Stirling, also of Philadelphia, and Mrs. Lizzie H.
Shute, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who were the only women delegates
to the Convention.

At the next convention, held in 1886 in Richmond, Virginia, there were
sixteen women delegates, out of a total of six hundred. Mr. Terence
V. Powderly, Grand Master Workman, appointed the sixteen women as
a committee to receive and consider the report of this previously
appointed special committee of three. The result of their
deliberations was sufficiently remarkable. They set an example to
their sex in taking the free and independent stand they did. For they
announced that they had "formed a permanent organization, the object
of which will be to investigate the abuses to which our sex is
subjected by unscrupulous employers, to agitate the principle which
our order teaches of equal pay for equal work and abolition of child
labor." They also recommended that the expenses of this new woman's
department and the expenses of a woman investigator should be borne by
the order. The report was adopted and the memorable Woman's Department
of the Knights of Labor was created. Memorable for the purpose and
the plan that underlay its foundation, it was also memorable for the
character and achievements of the brilliant, able and devoted woman
who was chosen as general investigator.

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