Laura Clay (February 9, 1849June 29, 1941), co-founder and first president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, was a leader of the American

women's suffrage Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the start of the 18th century, some people sought to change voting laws to allow women to vote. Liberal political parties would go on to grant women the right to vot ...

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

states' rights In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the ...

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, 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 Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways ...

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

White Hall White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White on ...

, near Richmond, Kentucky. 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 movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people. The British ...

. 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 ...

in Lexington, Kentucky, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman's Finishing School in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

, and the

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

. Clay's parents divorced in 1878, leaving

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 feminine given name (includes a list of people with the name) Religious contexts * New Testament people named Mary, overview article linking to many of those below * Mary, mother of Jesus, also calle ...

and Sarah "Sallie" Clay Bennett into joining the women's rights movement, as well as 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 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified ...

Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association

The 11th Annual Meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) held in

Louisville, Kentucky Louisville ( , , ) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 28th most-populous city in the United States. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, on the Indiana border ...

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

Mary Barr Clay Mary may refer to: People * Mary (name), a feminine given name (includes a list of people with the name) Religious contexts * New Testament people named Mary, overview article linking to many of those below * Mary, mother of Jesus, also calle ...

(who became AWSA president in 1883) met at the home of

in Lexington, Kentucky, and Stone convinced the younger sister Laura to present at the convention. The a post-convention gave birth to Kentucky's first suffrage organization (and the first in the South), the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association. While there was some individual projects undertaken by this new organization, Laura admitted herself 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 Kentucky Equal Rights Association (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. She 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, a ...

. 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. It was founded in 1780 and was the first university in Kentucky. It offers 46 major programs, as well as dual-degree engineering programs, and is accredited by the Southern ...

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 ...

and became a colleague of

Carrie Chapman Catt Carrie Chapman Catt (; January 9, 1859 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 the right to vote in 1920. Catt ...

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 only allowing educated women to vote. After being an ally with Blackwell, Clay convinced the NAWSA to adopt the Southern Strategy, which would lobby for only educated (primary white women) to vote. Clay understood that NAWSA would only gain support 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, and then 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 to 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 be able to demonstrate through growth in suffrage clubs' membership numbers that a significant number of women would identify themselves 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 collecting names and dues. Clay saw that in Kentucky it was difficult to maintain active interest in the rural areas for the movement, and she made membership dues optional as long as local groups would keep on file signed pledges for support. These numbers of pledges would count then 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 pacifist and feminist organization formally established in January 1915 in response to World War I. The organization is remembered as the first American peace organization to make use of direct acti ...

(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, 1860 May 21, 1935) was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage ...

, 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 (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

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 only 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, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the nation ...

. Clay opposed passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as she believed that it violated states' rights. 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, 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 Nineteen or 19 may refer to: * 19 (number), the natural number following 18 and preceding 20 * one of the years 19 BC, AD 19, 1919, 2019 Films * ''19'' (film), a 2001 Japanese film * ''Nineteen'' (film), a 1987 science fiction film Music ...

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; and, 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 ...

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 United S ...

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

Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...

, 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 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 alcohol ...

. 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 the 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 ...

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 https://web.archive.org/web/20060925215855/http://www.kdla.ky.gov/resources/kylauraclay.htm * "Chevy Chaser History: Those Clay Women," The Bluegrass Historian, Lexington History Museum, http://lexingtonhistory.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/chevy-chaser-history-those-clay-women
Laura Clay
entry in the National Women's History Museum's Education and Resources Biography Index * White Hall Historic Site, Kentucky State Parks https://web.archive.org/web/20101128230926/http://parks.ky.gov/findparks/histparks/wh/ * * Laura Clay in undergraduate student research journal entries, http://www.kywcrh.org/archives/tag/laura-clay, Kentucky Women in the Civil Rights Era, University of Kentucky * Laura Clay in th
Kentucky Woman Suffrage Project
databases, https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/search/Laura%2520Clay {{DEFAULTSORT:Clay, Laura 1849 births 1941 deaths Green Clay family Sayre School alumni American suffragists University of Michigan alumni University of Kentucky alumni People from Kentucky American political activists American Episcopalians Women's International League for Peace and Freedom people Women in Kentucky politics Kentucky women activists