Photo credit - Bain Collection - Library of Congress

American suffrage leader and the co-founder and first president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association.

Laura Clay was born in White Hall, Kentucky. Her parents were abolitionists, and her mother, who supported women’s rights, insisted that her six children, including her four daughters, would receive a good education. During the Civil War, she attended a girls’ school in Lexington and Mrs. Sarah Hoffman’s Finishing School in NYC.

Afterward, she returned home and helped her mother run the estate. In 1878, her parents divorced, and her mother, who inherited White Hall, remained homeless since the law in Kentucky enabled men to claim all their wives’ property in case of a separation. It led Clay and her sisters to join the women’s rights movement. Clay also joined the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Club and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

In 1881, her sister Mary Barr Clay (who later served as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association – AWSA) and Lucy Stone, then president of the AWSA, appointed Clay, at 32, to chair the organization’s annual meeting in its first time to be held in Louisville, Kentucky. Following the convention, she co-founded the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association, the first suffrage organization in the South.

In 1888, Clay and her sisters founded the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) and served as its first president for 24 years. Under her leadership, the organization worked tirelessly to improve the legal status of women. Among its many achievements are protecting married women’s property, wages to women, joint guardianship of children, raising the age of marriage consent for girls from 12 to 16, establishing juvenile courts, requiring state women’s mental facilities to have female doctors on staff, persuading Central University and Transylvania University to admit women students, and inspiring the University of Kentucky to build its first women dormitory.

In the next decade, Clay became active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and worked alongside some of the movement’s most prominent figures, including Alice Stone Blackwell, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Alice Lloyd. She gave speeches throughout the country promoting women’s suffrage and founding suffrage societies in various states. Soon, she was appointed chair of NAWSA’s Southern Committee and, in 1896, was elected as its auditor. In 1903, she was elected chair of the organization’s new Increase of Membership Committee, serving there for 20 years.

Clay believed that the states should grant women voting rights, so in 1913, she left the KERA and the NAWSA, opposing Susan B. Anthony’s support of a federal amendment. In 1916, she was appointed vice-president-at-large of the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, which also supported the states’ rights approach over the federal amendment. She continued to be active in various women’s rights organizations, and in 1920, at 71, she established the Democratic Women’s Club of Kentucky.

In the last decade of her life, she left the public eye and focused on promoting women’s rights in her Episcopal church, where she worked on allowing women delegates to church councils. She died at the age of 92.

Share:

This post is also available in:
Español

“Suffrage is God's cause, and God leads our plans.”

Fun Facts

Her father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was a politician, military officer, and abolitionist who served as the United States ambassador to Russia. Her mother, Mary Jane Warfield Clay, was a socialite, suffragist, abolitionist, and political activist.
In 1920, She became one of the first two women, together with Cora Wilson Stewart, to be nominated for presidency at the convention of a major political party when Sen. A.O. Stanley nominated her as a representative of the Democratic party.
To achieve women's suffrage in the South, she needed the support of white supremacist politicians, and she promoted Henry Blackwell's Southern Strategy, which suggested maintaining white supremacy in return for allowing voting rights for educated women. By 1903, the NAWSA excluded black members from its New Orleans convention.
She was active at the Woman's Peace Party and served as the chairman of Kentucky's 7th Congressional District. However, during the outbreak of WWI, she left the party to support the war efforts.
The Laura Clay Award, given annually to extraordinary Kentucky Women in Agriculture, is named in her honor.
Her family home, White Hall, is a Historic site and museum.
A portrait of her, created in 1912 by Wallace Morgan, is on display at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.