Laura Clay (February 9, 1849June 29, 1941), co-founder and first president of the

Kentucky Equal Rights Association Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) was the first permanent statewide women's rights organization in Kentucky. Founded in November 1888, the KERA voted in 1920 to transmute itself into thKentucky League of Women Votersto continue its many and ...

, was a leader of the American

women's suffrage Women's suffrage is the women's rights, right of women to Suffrage, vote in elections. Several instances occurred in recent centuries where women were selectively given, then stripped of, the right to vote. In Sweden, conditional women's suffra ...

movement. She was one of the most important suffragists in the South, favoring the

states' rights In United States, American politics of the United States, political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments of the United States, state governments rather than the federal government of the United States, ...

approach to suffrage. A powerful orator, she was active in the Democratic Party and had important leadership roles in local, state and national politics. In 1920 at the

Democratic National Convention The Democratic National Convention (DNC) is a series of presidential nominating conventions held every four years since 1832 by the United States Democratic Party. They have been administered by the Democratic National Committee since the 18 ...

, she was one of two women, alongside

Cora Wilson Stewart Cora Wilson Stewart (January 17, 1875 – December 2, 1958) was an American Progressive Era social reformer and educator who is well known for her work to eliminate adult illiteracy. In 1911, Stewart was the first woman to be elected to the positi ...

, to be the first women to have their names placed into nomination for the presidency at the convention of a major political party.

Family and early life

A daughter of

Cassius Marcellus Clay Major general (United States), Major General Cassius Marcellus Clay (October 9, 1810 – July 22, 1903) was an American planter, politician, military officer and abolitionist who served as the List of ambassadors of the United States to Russia, ...

and his wife Mary Jane Warfield, Clay was born at their estate, White Hall, near

Richmond, Kentucky Richmond is a home rule-class city in Madison County, Kentucky, United States. The population was 34,585 as of the 2020 census, making it the state's seventh-largest city. It is the principal city of the Richmond–Berea micropolitan area, wh ...

. The youngest of four daughters, Laura was raised largely by her mother, due to her father's long absences as he pursued his political career and activities as an

abolitionist Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the political movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved individuals around the world. The first country to fully outlaw slavery was Kingdom of France, France in 1315, but it was later used ...

. At age 15, Laura started to question the inferior status of women in society by confiding in her diary that “I think I have a mind superior to that of many boys my age.” Clay was educated at

Sayre School Sayre School is an independent, private, co-educational school in Lexington, Kentucky, US. The school enrolls 610 students from age two through twelfth grade. It has 68 full-time faculty members. History David A. Sayre, a New Jersey silversmith ...

Lexington, Kentucky Lexington is a Consolidated city-county, consolidated city coterminous with and the county seat of Fayette County, Kentucky, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census the city's population was 322,570, making it the List of ...

, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman's Finishing School in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

, the

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

, and the

University of Kentucky The University of Kentucky (UK, UKY, or U of K) is a Public University, public Land-grant University, land-grant research university in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. Founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical ...

. Clay's parents divorced in 1878, leaving her mother

Mary Jane Warfield Clay Mary Jane Warfield Clay (January 20, 1815 – April 29, 1900) was an American socialite, suffragist, abolitionist, and political activist. An early leader in the suffrage movement in Kentucky, she began by forming a suffrage club at her home in 18 ...

homeless after she had managed White Hall for 45 years. After the divorce, Clay became aware of the equities between married men and women and their property rights. This inequality galvanized Clay's older sisters,

Mary Mary may refer to: People * Mary (name), a female given name (includes a list of people with the name) Religion * New Testament people named Mary, overview article linking to many of those below * Mary, mother of Jesus, also called the Blesse ...

and Sarah "Sallie" Clay Bennett to join the women's rights movement, as did Laura and her younger sister, Annie (later Mrs. Dabney Crenshaw, a co-founder of the

Equal Suffrage League of Virginia The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia was founded in 1909 in Richmond, Virginia. Like many similar organizations in other states, the league's goal was to secure voting rights for women. When the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constituti ...

Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association

The 11th Annual Meeting of the

American Woman Suffrage Association The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was a single-issue national organization formed in 1869 to work for women's suffrage in the United States. The AWSA lobbied state governments to enact laws granting or expanding women's right to vot ...

(AWSA) was held in

Louisville, Kentucky Louisville is the List of cities in Kentucky, most populous city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, sixth-most populous city in the Southeastern United States, Southeast, and the list of United States cities by population, 27th-most-populous city ...

on October 26 and 27, 1881. This was the first time Louisville hosted a national suffrage event - and it was the first such event in the South. AWSA President

Lucy Stone Lucy Stone (August 13, 1818 – October 18, 1893) was an American orator, Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist and Suffrage, suffragist who was a vocal advocate for and organizer of promoting Women's rights, rights for women. In 1847, ...

and Mary Barr Clay (who became AWSA president in 1883) met at the home of Clay's mother

. Stone convinced the younger sister Laura Clay to make a presentation at the convention. The post-convention saw the founding of Kentucky's first suffrage organization, the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association, which was the first in the South. While there were some individual projects undertaken by this new organization, Laura admitted later in life that she was not up to the task. She kept copies of the original constitution, which included a list of charter members.

The Kentucky Equal Rights Association

After the AWSA convention in Cincinnati in 1888, the Clay sisters and a group of other women, including Josephine K. Henry, founded the

(KERA). Laura Clay was again elected president and served until 1912. One of the missions of the KERA was to improve the legal status of women in Kentucky and increase educational opportunities. Clay was succeeded by her distant cousin

Madeline McDowell Breckinridge Madeline (Madge) McDowell Breckinridge (May 20, 1872 – November 25, 1920) was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky. She married Desha Breckinridge, editor of the ''Lexington Herald'', which advocated women's rights, ...

. The organization lobbied successfully for a range of legislative reforms, such as protecting married women's wages and property, requiring state women's mental hospitals to have female doctors on staff, inducing

Transylvania University Transylvania University is a private university in Lexington, Kentucky, United States. It was founded in 1780 and is the oldest university in Kentucky. It offers 46 major programs, as well as dual-degree engineering programs, and is Higher educ ...

and Central University to admit women students, raising the age of marriage consent for girls to 16 from 12, and establishing juvenile courts. They also inspired the University of Kentucky to build its first dormitory for women.

Involvement with the National American Woman Suffrage Association

During the 1890s, Clay became active in the

National American Woman Suffrage Association The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an organization formed on February 18, 1890, to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. It was created by the merger of two existing organizations, the National Woma ...

and became a colleague of

Carrie Chapman Catt Carrie Chapman Catt (born Carrie Clinton Lane; January 9, 1859#Fowler, Fowler, p. 3 – March 9, 1947) was an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women t ...

Alice Stone Blackwell Alice Stone Blackwell (September 14, 1857 – March 15, 1950) was an American feminist, suffragist, journalist, radical socialist, and human rights advocate. Early life and education Blackwell was born in East Orange, New Jersey to Henry Browne ...

Catherine Waugh McCulloch Catharine Gouger Waugh McCulloch (June 4, 1862 – April 20, 1945) was an American lawyer, suffragist, and reformer. She actively lobbied for women's suffrage at the local, state, and national levels as a leader in the Illinois Equal Suffrage As ...

, Alice Lloyd, and other national leaders of the women's rights movement. She traveled nationally speaking on behalf of women's suffrage and established suffrage societies in nine states. She worked closely with Henry Blackwell, who proposed the Southern Strategy. He wanted to convince southern legislators that they could maintain their white supremacy by allowing only educated women to vote. After being an ally of Blackwell, Clay convinced the NAWSA to adopt the Southern Strategy, which would lobby for only educated (primarily white women) to vote. Clay understood that NAWSA would gain male support only if they accepted the white supremacist politics, so she was eventually able to convince Anthony to accept this racist strategy. By 1903, NAWSA excluded black members from their New Orleans convention.

The Kentucky Plan

Known as one of "Aunt Susan's Girls," Laura Clay took on a national leadership role as chair of NAWSA's Southern Committee; in 1896 she was elected auditor. She had much influence on the NAWSA Business Committee that set the national organization's priorities. In 1903 Clay was elected as chair of NAWSA's new Increase of Membership Committee and served in that role for twenty years. She developed a new approach to gaining members that came to be known as "The Kentucky Plan." Her idea was to demonstrate through growth in suffrage clubs' membership numbers, that a significant number of women would identify as wanting the right to vote. This fit neatly into the NAWSA strategies of producing statistics and quantification through graphics explaining the need for - and the progress toward - women gaining the right to vote. To get those higher numbers of membership rolls, Clay recommended that local clubs hold only one meeting per year, and that one only for the purpose of collecting names and dues. Clay saw that in Kentucky it was difficult to maintain active interest in the rural areas for the movement. She made membership dues optional as long as local groups would keep on file signed pledges for support. These numbers of pledges would count as membership numbers. However, this method did not build enough enthusiasm to gain supporters needed at the local levels to convince male legislators of the need for change.

Woman's Peace Party

Clay joined the

Woman's Peace Party The Woman's Peace Party (WPP) was an American Pacifism, pacifist and First-wave feminism, feminist organization formally established in January 1915 in response to World War I. The organization is remembered as the first American peace organizatio ...

(a forerunner of the

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is a non-profit non-governmental organization working "to bring together women of different political views and philosophical and religious backgrounds determined to study and make kno ...

), which had been founded in 1915 by

Jane Addams Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860May 21, 1935) was an American Settlement movement, settlement activist, Social reform, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was a leader in the history of s ...

, and others. Clay served as the party's chairman in Kentucky's 7th Congressional District. She left the party when the United States entered

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

and actively supported the war effort.

From NAWSA's Southern Strategy to Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference

Clay also was an advocate of

. Afte
Kate M. Gordon
organized the

Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference The Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference (also known as the Southern States Woman Suffrage Association) was a group dedicated to winning voting rights for white women. The group consisted mainly of highly educated, middle and upper class whit ...

to lobby state legislatures for laws to enfranchise white women, Clay advocated rejection of a federal solution for women's voting rights. In 1916 she was elected vice-president-at-large of the

, which opposed obtaining suffrage through an amendment to the

U.S. Constitution The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, on March 4, 1789. Originally including seven articles, the Constituti ...

. Clay opposed passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as she believed that it violated states' rights (and the ability of states to restrict extended franchise only to white women). To see a detailed argument by Clay on this subject, read the "Debate before the Woman’s Club of Central Kentucky, October 18th, 1919. Won by the Negative - Miss Clay."

Opposition to federal amendment for woman suffrage

In 1913, Clay broke from the KERA and the NAWSA because of her opposition to the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. The tension between Clay and Catt increased when Catt decided that all state action should be put off, instead focusing on the national amendment. Since Clay was a Democrat and favored states’ rights, she aligned closely with President Wilson's stance on the issue: suffrage should be up to each individual state, and there should be no national amendment. She believed that enfranchising a large number of “inexperienced voters,” code language for black women, was not such a good idea. She furthered her opposition to the federal amendment by saying that the amendment was just the national government supervising state elections, and thus infringing on states’ choices in the matter. Clay wanted the KERA to campaign separately for suffrage and not resort to a national amendment and extend its supremacy over the states. Clay believed that the Enforcing Clause of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the resulting supervision of state elections, would lead to tyranny and centralized power in Washington, D.C. Although many claimed that Clay opposed the national amendment on racial grounds, she denied that was the case, insisting that the amendment infringed on states’ rights.

Later years

A devout

Episcopalian Anglicanism, also known as Episcopalianism in some countries, is a Western Christian tradition which developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protes ...

, Clay also worked for decades to open lay leadership of the Episcopal Church to women. In 1920 Laura Clay was a founder of the Democratic Women's Club of Kentucky. That same year, she served as a delegate at the

1920 Democratic National Convention The 1920 Democratic National Convention was held at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California from June 28 to July 6, 1920. It resulted in the nomination of Governor James M. Cox of Ohio for president and Assistant Secretary of the Na ...

held in San Francisco between 28 June and 6 July 1920. Laura Clay made American history as one of the first women (alongside fellow Kentucky delegate

) to be put forward as a candidate for the Presidential nomination of a major political party. Thanks to the Kentucky delegates' chairman

Augustus Owsley Stanley Augustus Owsley Stanley I (May 21, 1867 – August 12, 1958) was an American politician from Kentucky. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 38th governor of Kentucky and also represented the state in both the U.S. House of Repre ...

, Clay and Stewart were the first two women to receive a vote each for candidate for president. On the 44th ballot, Governor

James M. Cox James Middleton Cox (March 31, 1870 July 15, 1957) was an American businessman and politician who served as the 46th and 48th governor of Ohio, and a two-term U.S. Representative from Ohio. As the Democratic nominee for President of the Unite ...

of Ohio was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president with

Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), also known as FDR, was the 32nd president of the United States, serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving U.S. president, and the only one to have served ...

, the assistant secretary of the Navy from New York, as his vice-presidential running mate. The Democratic Party's platform supported women's suffrage; after a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920. (It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.") In 1928 Clay actively supported the presidential candidacy of Governor

Al Smith Alfred Emanuel Smith (December 30, 1873 – October 4, 1944) was the 42nd governor of New York, serving from 1919 to 1920 and again from 1923 to 1928. He was the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party's presidential nominee in the 1 ...

of New York and opposed

Prohibition Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic b ...

. In 1933, she served as temporary chairman of the Kentucky Convention to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment, which was ratified on December 5, 1933, and repealed the Eighteenth Amendment (that had introduced Prohibition when ratified on January 16, 1919).Fuller, ''Laura Clay'', pp. 162-169. Clay slipped from public life in her last decade. At the age of 92, she died on June 29, 1941, and was interred at

Lexington Cemetery Lexington Cemetery is a private, non-profit rural cemetery and arboretum located at 833 W. Main Street, Lexington, Kentucky. The Lexington Cemetery was established in 1848 as a place of beauty and a public cemetery, in part to deal w ...

Key speeches

* "The Race Question Again," ''Kentucky Gazette'', April 1890. Box 17, Scrapbook
Laura Clay Papers
Special Collections, University of Kentucky (hereafter LCP). * "Elections." December 12, 1890. ''Proceedings and Debates in the Convention Assembled at Frankfort, on the eighth day of September, 1890, to adopt, amend or change the Constitution of the State of Kentucky''. 2:2090-2093. Frankfort, Ky.: E. Polk Johnson, 1890. * "Speech on Partial Suffrage (Kentucky Constitutional Convention, December 12, 1890
WikiSource
* "Argument from Bible Teachings." Address, 1894 NAWSA Convention. ''Woman's Tribune'' (February 20, 1894). Box 17, Scrapbook, LCP. * "A New Tool." Address, WCTU Banquet. Lexington, Kentucky. February 11, 1913. Box 16, LCP. * "Women and the Ballot." February 1919, Box 11, LCP. * "The Citizens Committee for a State Suffrage Amendment: Open Letter to the Public." June 12, 1919. Box 11, LCP. * "Why I Am a Democrat." ''Democratic Woman's Journal''. December 1929. Box 12, LCP.

References

Bibliography

Paul E. Fuller, ''Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement'' Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1975. John M. Murphy, "Laura Clay (1894–1941), a Southern Voice for Woman's Rights," pp. 99–111 in ''Women Public Speakers in the United States, 1800–1925: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook''. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ed. ABC-CLIO, 1993. Mary Jane Smith, "Laura Clay (1849-1941): States' Rights and Southern Suffrage Reform," pp. 119–139 in ''Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times''. Melissa A. McEuen and Thomas H. Appleton Jr., eds. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2015.

External links

Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives

"Chevy Chaser History: Those Clay Women," The Bluegrass Historian, Lexington History Museum

Laura Clay
entry in the National Women's History Museum's Education and Resources Biography Index
White Hall Historic Site, Kentucky State Parks
*
Kentucky Women in the Civil Rights Era, University of Kentucky Laura Clay in undergraduate student research journal entries
* Laura Clay in th
Kentucky Woman Suffrage Project
databases
KWSP website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Clay, Laura 1849 births 1941 deaths Green Clay family Sayre School alumni Suffragists from Kentucky University of Michigan alumni University of Kentucky alumni American Episcopalians Women's International League for Peace and Freedom people Women in Kentucky politics Burials at Lexington Cemetery