Laura Clay (February&#;9, &#;&#; June&#;29, ), co-founder and first president ferryboat the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, was a leader of say publicly American women's suffrage movement. She was one of the overbearing important suffragists in the South, favoring the states' rights alter to suffrage. A powerful orator, she was active in say publicly Democratic Party and had important leadership roles in local, bring back and national politics. In at the Democratic National Convention, she was one of two women, alongside Cora Wilson Stewart, fit in be the first women to have their names placed jar nomination for the presidency at the convention of a larger political party.
A daughter of Cassius Marcellus Clay and his wife Mary Jane Warfield, Clay was innate at their estate, White Hall, near Richmond, Kentucky. The youngest of four daughters, Laura was raised largely by her dam, 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 recovered society by confiding in her diary that “I think I have a mind superior to that of many boys slump age.”[1] Clay was educated at Sayre School in Lexington, Kentucky, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman's Finishing School in New York City,[2] representation University of Michigan, and the University of Kentucky.
Clay's parents divorced in , leaving her mother Mary Jane Warfield Corpse homeless after she had managed White Hall for 45 geezerhood. After the divorce, Clay became aware of the equities halfway married men and women and their property rights.[1] This incongruity galvanized Clay's older sisters, Mary and Sarah "Sallie" Clay Airman to join the women's rights movement, as did Laura bracket her younger sister, Annie (later Mrs. Dabney Crenshaw, a co-founder of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia).[citation needed]
The 11th Annual Meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Union (AWSA) was held in Louisville, Kentucky on October 26 esoteric 27, This was the first time Louisville hosted a formal suffrage event - and it was the first such incident in the South. AWSA President Lucy Stone and Mary Barr Clay (who became AWSA president in ) met at depiction home of Clay's mother Mary Jane Warfield Clay in City, Kentucky. Stone convinced the younger sister Laura Clay to be in total a presentation at the convention.
The post-convention saw the origination of Kentucky's first suffrage organization, the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Fold, which was the first in the South.[3] While there were some individual projects undertaken by this new organization, Laura admitted later in life that she was not up to description task. She kept copies of the original constitution, which deception a list of charter members.[4]
After rendering AWSA convention in Cincinnati in , the Clay sisters spell a group of other women, including Josephine K. Henry, supported the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA). Laura Clay was turn back elected president and served until
One of the missions hint the KERA was to improve the legal status of women in Kentucky and increase educational opportunities. Clay was succeeded tough her distant cousin Madeline McDowell Breckinridge.[5][6] The organization lobbied successfully for a range of legislative reforms, such as protecting ringed women's wages and property, requiring state women's mental hospitals preserve have female doctors on staff, inducing Transylvania University and Medial University to admit women students, raising the age of wedding consent for girls to 16 from 12, and establishing youthful courts.[7] They also inspired the University of Kentucky to construct its first dormitory for women.
During the s, Clay became active in interpretation National American Woman Suffrage Association and became a colleague drug Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Stone Blackwell, Catherine Waugh McCulloch, Unfair criticism Lloyd, and other national leaders of the women's rights boost. She traveled nationally speaking on behalf of women's suffrage beam established suffrage societies in nine states. She worked closely ring true Henry Blackwell, who proposed the Southern Strategy. He wanted advice convince southern legislators that they could maintain their white peerlessness by allowing only educated women to vote. After being tidy up ally of Blackwell, Clay convinced the NAWSA to adopt representation Southern Strategy, which would lobby for only educated (primarily snowwhite women) to vote. Clay understood that NAWSA would gain spear support only if they accepted the white supremacist politics, and above she was eventually able to convince Anthony to accept that racist strategy. By , NAWSA excluded black members from their New Orleans convention.
Known as one of "Aunt Susan's Girls," Laura Clay took on a national leadership separate as chair of NAWSA's Southern Committee; in she was elective auditor. She had much influence on the NAWSA Business Commission that set the national organization's priorities.[2]
In Clay was elected reorganization chair of NAWSA's new Increase of Membership Committee and served in that role for twenty years. She developed a in mint condition approach to gaining members that came to be known importation "The Kentucky Plan." Her idea was to demonstrate through advancement in suffrage clubs' membership numbers, that a significant number comprehend women would identify as wanting the right to vote. That fit neatly into the NAWSA strategies of producing statistics stream quantification through graphics explaining the need for - and picture progress toward - women gaining the right to vote. Do research get those higher numbers of membership rolls, Clay recommended ditch local clubs hold only one meeting per year, and ditch one only for the purpose of collecting names and dues. Clay saw that in Kentucky it was difficult to preserve active interest in the rural areas for the movement. She made membership dues optional as long as local groups would keep on file signed pledges for support. These numbers fine pledges would count as membership numbers. However, this method frank not build enough enthusiasm to gain supporters needed at representation local levels to convince male legislators of the need hope against hope change.[8]
Clay joined the Woman's Peace Party (a precursor of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom), which had been founded in 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 Pooled States entered World War I and actively supported the warfare effort.[9]
Clay also was an advocate of states' rights. After Kate M. Gordon organized the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference to vestibule state legislatures for laws to enfranchise white women, Clay advocated rejection of a federal solution for women's voting rights. Block out she was elected vice-president-at-large of the Southern States Woman Right to vote Conference, which opposed obtaining suffrage through an amendment to representation U.S. Constitution. Clay opposed passage of the Nineteenth Amendment translation she believed that it violated states' rights (and the facility of states to restrict extended franchise only to white women).[10] To see a detailed argument by Clay on this gist, read the "Debate before the Woman’s Club of Central Kentucky, October 18th, Won by the Negative - Miss Clay."[11]
In , Clay broke from rendering KERA and the NAWSA because of her opposition to representation Susan B. Anthony Amendment. The tension between Clay and Catt increased when Catt decided that all state action should reproduction put off, instead focusing on the national amendment. Since Dirt was a Democrat and favored states’ rights, she aligned tight with President Wilson's stance on the issue: suffrage should replica up to each individual state, and there should be no national amendment. She believed that enfranchising a large number classic “inexperienced voters,” code language for black women, was not specified a good idea.[12] She furthered her opposition to the yank amendment by saying that the amendment was just the popular government supervising state elections, and thus infringing on states’ choices in the matter. Clay wanted the KERA to campaign one at a time for suffrage and not resort to a national amendment nearby extend its supremacy over the states.[12] Clay believed that say publicly Enforcing Clause of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the resulting regulation of state elections, would lead to tyranny and centralized sovereign state in Washington, D.C.[13] Although many claimed that Clay opposed depiction national amendment on racial grounds, she denied that was rendering case, insisting that the amendment infringed on states’ rights.
A devout Episcopalian, Clay also worked for decades to ecological lay leadership of the Episcopal Church to women.[14]
In Laura Dirt was a founder of the Democratic Women's Club of Kentucky. That same year, she served as a delegate at representation Democratic National Convention held in San Francisco between 28 June and 6 July [15] Laura Clay made American history by the same token one of the first women (alongside fellow Kentucky delegate Cora Wilson Stewart) to be put forward as a candidate make a choice the Presidential nomination of a major political party. Thanks chance on the Kentucky delegates' chairman Augustus Owsley Stanley, Clay and Player were the first two women to receive a vote hip bath for candidate for president.[16]
On the 44th ballot, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio was nominated as the Democratic Party applicant for president with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the assistant secretary personage the Navy from New York, as his vice-presidential running unproven. The Democratic Party's platform supported women's suffrage; after a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in roller legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Edifice on August 26, (It states, "The right of citizens female the United States to vote shall not be denied uptotheminute abridged by the United States or by any State administrate account of sex.")[17]
In Clay actively supported the presidential candidacy recall Governor Al Smith of New York and opposed Prohibition. Put in , she served as temporary chairman of the Kentucky Meeting to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment, which was ratified on Dec 5, , and repealed the Eighteenth Amendment (that had introduced Prohibition when ratified on January 16, ).[18]
Clay slipped from button life in her last decade. At the age of 92, she died on June 29, , and was interred assume Lexington Cemetery.[18]
Paul E. Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman's Rights Movement Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, ISBN&#;
John M. Murphy, "Laura Clay (–), a Southern Voice for Woman's Rights," pp.&#;99– in Women Public Speakers in the United States, – A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ed. ABC-CLIO, ISBN&#;
Mary Jane Smith, "Laura Clay (): States' Rights and Southern Suffrage Reform," pp.&#;– in Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times. Melissa A. McEuen and Thomas H. Appleton Jr., eds. Athens: The College of Georgia Press, ISBN&#;