Clodagh Finn: The Corkwoman who became top economic thinker in US

Leonora Barry criss-crossed America in the late 1880s gathering information about women’s appalling pay and work conditions and exposed the grim reality facing workers during America’s Gilded Age, the period from the 1870s to around 1900. Picture: Wikicommons

CORKWOMAN Leonora Barry was one of the most important economic thinkers of Gilded Age America. And is now one of the most forgotten.

At least that is how historian and author Dr Eli Cook frames it. And when you read his study of a woman who pioneered the use of statistics to highlight “the abuses to which our sex is subjected by unscrupulous employers”, as she put it, you can’t but agree with him. On both counts.