Laura Clay
Laura Clay (February 9, 1849 – June 29, 1941), 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.
Laura Clay
February 9, 1849
June 29, 1941 (aged 92)
Suffragist, orator, politician
Family and early life[edit]
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.”[1] Clay was educated at Sayre School in Lexington, Kentucky, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman's Finishing School in New York City,[2] 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.[1] 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 (later Mrs. Dabney Crenshaw, a co-founder of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia).
Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association[edit]
The 11th Annual Meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) 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 (who became AWSA president in 1883) 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 (and the first in the South), the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association.[3] 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.[4]
Opposition to federal amendment for woman suffrage[edit]
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.[9] 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.[9] 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.[10] 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[edit]
A devout Episcopalian, Clay also worked for decades to open lay leadership of the Episcopal Church to women.[11]
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.[12] Laura Clay made American history as one of the first women (alongside fellow Kentucky delegate Cora Wilson Stewart) 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.[13] 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. (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.")[14]
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 (that had introduced Prohibition when ratified on January 16, 1919).[15]
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.[15]
Bibliography[edit]
Paul E. Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1975. ISBN 978-0-8131-1299-2
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. ISBN 0-313-27533-5
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. ISBN 978-0-8203-4452-2