Laura Clay


Laura Clay, co-founder and first president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, was a leader of the American women's suffrage movement. She was one of the most important suffragists in the South, favoring the states' rights 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, 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, 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. 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 in Lexington, Kentucky, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman's Finishing School in New York City, the University of Michigan, and the University of Kentucky.
Clay's parents divorced in 1878, leaving Mary Jane Warfield Clay 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 and Sarah "Sallie" Clay Bennett into joining the women's rights movement, as well as Laura and her younger sister, Annie.

Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association

The 11th Annual Meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association held in Louisville, Kentucky 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 met at the home of Mary Jane Warfield Clay 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, 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. 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. 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 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 and became 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. 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 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, which had been founded in 1915 by Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, 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 and actively supported the war effort.

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

Clay also was an advocate of states' rights. After organized the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference 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 Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, which opposed obtaining suffrage through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 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 held in San Francisco between 28 June and 6 July 1920. Laura Clay made American history as one of the first women 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 and Stewart were the first two women to receive a vote each for candidate for president. On the 44th ballot, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president with Franklin D. Roosevelt, 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.
In 1928 Clay actively supported the presidential candidacy of Governor Al Smith of New York and opposed Prohibition. 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.
Clay slipped from the public life in her last decade. After her death in 1941, she was interred at Lexington Cemetery.

Key speeches