Laura Clay

Laura Clay
Born February 9, 1849
White Hall (Richmond, Kentucky)
Died June 29, 1941 (aged 92)
Kentucky
Occupation Suffragist, orator, politician
Political party Democratic

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. 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 the first woman to have her name 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. Clay was educated at Sayre School in Lexington, Kentucky, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman's Finishing School in New York City,[1] the University of Michigan, and the University of Kentucky.

A life of advocacy

Clay's parents divorced in 1878, leaving Mary Jane Clay homeless after she had managed Whitehall for 45 years. This inequality galvanized Clay's older sisters, Mary, Annie, and Sallie into joining the women's rights movement, and Laura followed.

In 1888 Clay and Josephine K. Henry founded the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, of which Clay served as president until 1912. 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 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.

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. A devout Episcopalian, Clay also worked for decades to open lay leadership of the Episcopal Church to women.[2]

Clay joined the Woman'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. She left the party when the United States entered World War I and actively supported the war effort.[3]

Clay also was an advocate of states' rights. After Kate M. Gordon 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 Association, 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.[4]

Later years

In 1920 Laura Clay was a founder of the Democratic Women's Club of Kentucky. That same year, at the 1920 Democratic National Convention held in San Francisco between 28 June and 6 July 1920, Laura Clay made American history as the first woman to be put forward as a candidate for the Presidential nomination of a major political party. Annette Abbott Adams, the first female Assistant Attorney-General, was also put forward as a candidate. Along with 14 others of the 23 candidates from the 23rd ballot, neither woman's candidacy attracted a single vote. 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.")

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 5 December 1933 and repealed the Eighteenth Amendment (that had introduced Prohibition when ratified on 16 January 1919) .[5]

Clay slipped from the public life in her last decade. After her death in 1941, she was interred at Lexington Cemetery.[6]

Key speeches

See also

References

  1. ↑ Fuller, Laura Clay, pp. 7-11.
  2. ↑ Fuller, Laura Clay, pp. 30-50.
  3. ↑ Fuller, Laura Clay, pp. 51-72.
  4. ↑ Fuller, Laura Clay, pp. 145-161.
  5. ↑ Fuller, Laura Clay, pp. 162-169.
  6. ↑ Fuller, Laura Clay, pp. 162-169.

Bibliography

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

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