Laura Clay (1849-1941), Kentucky Suffragist and Voice of the South
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
H-Kentucky Laura Clay (1849-1941), Kentucky Suffragist and Voice of the South Discussion published by Randolph Hollingsworth on Saturday, January 13, 2018 Laura Clay (February 9, 1849 — June 29, 1941) grew up in a large family of activists at afarm in Madison County. Her father, Cassius Clay, was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and ambassador to Russia. Her mother, Mary Jane Warfield Clay, and her sisters all supported the woman suffrage movement, and farming kept them economically independent as they went on in life, whether divorced or married. Laura's older sisters (Mary Barr, Sallie and Annie) began working for the national suffrage movements, both the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), and their mother would mail newspapers to her daughter Laura at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to keep her informed. Laura attended the 1881 AWSA convention in Louisville (the first national convention for suffrage held in the South). After that very successful convention, she joined in with a group of twenty-five members who founded the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association - the first state suffrage club in the South. Laura Clay was elected President and Col. John H. Ward of Louisville was elected Vice-President. Not much evidence is currently available to analyze what happened with this early version of the state-wide suffrage association. While her older sisters were already widely known for their suffrage activities, Laura does not really hit her stride for this work until after she began her partnerships with Henrietta B. Chenault of Lexington (wife of the Asylum Director Dr. R.C. Chenault) and an educator/activist from Versailles, Josephine Henry. These important collaborations served the state's suffrage movement very well. In 1888 Lucy Stone stayed with Mary Jane Warfield Clay in Lexington (see the Kentucky "Votes for Women Trail" digital map entry here) just before the AWSA convention that took place that year in Cincinnati. Stone invited Laura to present at the convention, and they worked on how the state suffrage association could be revitalized. Laura was soon thereafter elected president of the new Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA), for which she served as president until 1912. Because she also held leadership roles in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs, she was able to convince members of many women's clubs to join the KERA and participate in collaborative efforts. Laura's speech on woman suffrage at the Kentucky Constitutional Convention on December 12, 1890, (transcribed and available online on WikiSource) is a wonderful study of her political ideology at this time. By the mid-1890s KERA lobbying had won a number of legislative and educational victories, including protection of married women's property and wages, a requirement that there be women physicians in state female insane asylums, and the admission of women to a number of all-male colleges. KERA went on through the followng decade to convince the legislature to provide for a women's dormitory at the University of Kentucky, establish juvenile courts and detention homes, and raised the age of sexual consent for girls from twelve to sixteen years. See a photo of Miss Clay's delegate badge from Lexington for the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, saved in the Laura Clay collection, University Special Collections and Research Center: Citation: Randolph Hollingsworth. Laura Clay (1849-1941), Kentucky Suffragist and Voice of the South. H-Kentucky. 01-13-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/discussions/1251910/laura-clay-1849-1941-kentucky-suffragist-and-voice-south Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Kentucky ribbon.jpg Citation: Randolph Hollingsworth. Laura Clay (1849-1941), Kentucky Suffragist and Voice of the South. H-Kentucky. 01-13-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/discussions/1251910/laura-clay-1849-1941-kentucky-suffragist-and-voice-south Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Kentucky Citation: Randolph Hollingsworth. Laura Clay (1849-1941), Kentucky Suffragist and Voice of the South. H-Kentucky. 01-13-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/discussions/1251910/laura-clay-1849-1941-kentucky-suffragist-and-voice-south Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Kentucky The years spanning 1890-96 were important times for the national efforts for woman suffrage: the leaders of the two organizations had agreed to reunite in one major association, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Laura Clay became the leading Southern voice in NAWSA meetings, gaining a strong position under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony. Laura's efforts were largely responsible for the establishment of suffrage societies in nine of the former Confederate states. Clay addressed constitutional conventions in Mississippi and Louisiana, and she managed a NAWSA effort to add woman suffrage to the South Carolina constitution of 1895 (which was unsuccessful). With the death of Lucy Stone and the NAWSA's emphasis on meeting the needs of conservative white women's groups in the South, white suffragists began to turn their backs on African American women and their activism - just as their own clubs were getting organized at the national level. In January 1896 at the convention in Washington D.C. Laura Clay was elected auditor of the NAWSA, a post she held for fifteen years. She maintained an important position of moderation and conciliation on the NAWSA board in conflicts over both race and personality. She also spoke on behalf of Southern suffragists - and the NAWSA's Southern Strategy: "I wish to speak in regard to the prejudice and ridicule with which Woman Suffrage is said to meet in the South. The opposition to Woman Suffrage in the South is wholly a matter of conservatism and ignorance. Southern women are no less intelligent, progressive and open- minded than the women of any other section, but they have had other things to do. They have had the whole weight of a social problem upon their hands, and they have had to bear the burdens left by the war. They have not had time to think much about the "new woman," but they have *been* new women. The opposition of Southern ministers is largely due to their belief that the Bible is against it. Whenever our women will go to them learned in the Scriptures as Priscilla was, they can soon convert the ministers. One of our Kentucky delegates now present in this convention has converted Methodist ministers by the score. I believe the South is just as hopeful a field as the West. (57,Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Convention of the ... National American Woman Suffrage Association. Washington, D.C., January 23rd to 28th, 1896). She continued: "I still regard the South as the strategic point, and as our most hopeful field after the West, where we seem to be on the brink of immediate succes. The next great political movement in this country will probably be a coalition between the South and West. The West is ready to put woman suffrage into its program if it is not hindered by fear of the solid South; but no political party will antagonize the solid South for the sake of woman suffrage. What we must do is to break the solid South on this question. The fundamental principles of our government are not wholly ridiculed and despised in the South, whatever they may be elsewhere. When we go through the South advocating woman suffrage, without attaching to it dress reform, or bicycling, or anything else, but asking the simple question why the principles of our forefathers should not be applied to women, we shall win. The South is ready for woman suffrage, but it must be woman suffrage and nothing else. (76)" She continued to work on behalf of KERA's efforts as they continued to lobby the Kentucky legislature for reform of public works and women's rights. See below a flyer for her presentation before the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1898 together with Josephine Henry and Eugenia Farmer - find the original broadside in the Laura Clay collection in the University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center: Citation: Randolph Hollingsworth. Laura Clay (1849-1941), Kentucky Suffragist and Voice of the South. H-Kentucky. 01-13-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/discussions/1251910/laura-clay-1849-1941-kentucky-suffragist-and-voice-south Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4 H-Kentucky broadside.jpg Citation: Randolph Hollingsworth. Laura Clay (1849-1941), Kentucky Suffragist and Voice of the South. H-Kentucky. 01-13-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/discussions/1251910/laura-clay-1849-1941-kentucky-suffragist-and-voice-south Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 5 H-Kentucky As an unpaid NAWSA field worker, she also directed suffrage campaigns in Oregon, Oklahoma, and Arizona. While chair of the association's membership committee, she introduced recruiting innovations that almost tripled the number of members, from 17,000 in 1905 to 45,501 in 1907. At the NAWSA convention late in 1911 Laura Clay failed to win reelection as auditor to the board. She complained to friends about the concentration of power at the New York headquarters. Despite her removal from the board of the NAWSA, Clay continued to chair association committees, contributed to fund drives, and work in numerous state suffrage campaigns. With the Kentucky legislature's grant of school suffrage in 1912, KERA won a partial victory in their quest for full enfranchisement.