Laura Clay was the daughter of Mary Jane Warfield Clay, herself a suffragist, and Cassius M. Clay, the Kentucky state representative, minister to Russia, and abolitionist.  She was born and raised at Whitehall, which can be visited today.

  Clay was one of the South’s most well-known suffragists, but it must be remembered that she and other suffragists worked to secure a range of rights for women, including property rights for married women, women’s rights to guardianship of their children, and the entrance of women into male-only colleges.

  Clay served as the first president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) from 1888-1912.  During the 1890s, she became affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).  She corresponded with some of the most prominent suffragists of the era, and in the south was responsible for establishing suffrage societies in nine states and traveling around the country on behalf of the cause.  In 1916, she was elected vide-president-at-large of the newly formed Southern States Women Suffrage Association, which appealed more to her firmly-held states’ right belief.  Near the end of the fight for suffrage Clay actively campaigned against passage of the Nineteenth Amendment because of her belief that each state should have the right to enact its own laws.

Read “Woman Under Kentucky Law,” written by Laura Clay and published in the Kentucky Law Journal, v. 2, July 1882.

Read a synopsis of Laura Clay’s remarks, on Woman's Suffrage in 1916 .

To view Laura Clay's Photo Album click on the cover:

Learn more about the Suffrage Movement in Kentucky.