Laura Clay

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Laura Clay (February 9, 1849-June 29, 1941), was a leader of the American women’s suffrage movement.

1 Family and Early Life
2 A Life of Advocacy
3 Later Years
4 See Also
5 Sources and External Links

[edit] Family and Early Life

A daughter of Cassius Marcellus Clay and his wife Mary Jane Warfield, Clay was born at their estate, White Hall, near Richmond, Kentucky. She was raised largely by her mother, due to her father’s long absences as he pursued his political activities. Clay was educated at Sayre School, in Lexington, Kentucky, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman’s Finishing School in New York City, the University of Michigan, and the University of Kentucky.

[edit] A Life of Advocacy

Clay’s parents divorced in 1878, leaving Mary Jane homeless after she had managed Whitehall for 45 years. This inequality galvanized Clay’s sisters, Mary Barr Clay, Annie Clay, and Sallie Clay into joining the women’s rights movement. Clay soon followed. In 1888 she and Josephine K. Henry founded the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, of which Clay served as president until 1912, when she was succeeded by her cousin Madeline McDowell Breckinridge. 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 and Central University to admit women students, raising the age of consent for girls to 16 from 12, and establishing juvenile courts. They also inspired the University of Kentucky’s first women’s dormitory. During the 1890s she became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association and grew to be a colleague of Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Stone Blackwell, Catherine Waugh McCulloch, 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. A devout Episcopalian, Clay also worked for decades to gain open lay leadership of the Episcopal Church to women.

Clay joined the Women’s Peace Party (a forerunner of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom), which had been founded in 1915 by Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, and others. Clay served as the party’s chairman in Kentucky’s Seventh Congressional District. However, she left the party when the United States entered World War I and actively supported the war effort.

Clay also was an ardent advocate of states’ rights. In 1916 she was elected vice-president-at-large of the Southern States Women Suffrage Association which opposed obtaining suffrage through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Clay steadfastly opposed passage of the Nineteenth Amendment believing that it violated states’ rights.

[edit] Later Years

In 1920 Clay was a founder of the Democratic Women’s Club of Kentucky. In 1928 she actively supported the presidential candidacy of Alfred E. Smith and opposed Prohibition. In fact, in 1933, she served as Temporary Chairman of the Kentucky Convention to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment. Clay slipped from the public eye during the 1930s. She is interred at Lexington Cemetery.