02/10/2022
Sometimes divorce brings out the best in people and gives them the opportunity to shine that they never had in a bad marriage.
Cassius Marcellus Clay was a brawling eccentric politician, a hot-headed and ill-tempered man--a controversial abolitionist in slave-state Kentucky. He was also a philandering and neglectful husband. So much so that after 45 years of turbulent marriage, his wife Mary Jane left him, and Clay divorced her on the grounds of abandonment.
Despite having kept their home faithfully for all those years, usually with her husband absent, the divorce left Mary Jane homeless and impoverished. Seeing how unfairly the property laws of Kentucky treated their mother caused all four of her daughters—Mary Barr Clay, Annie Clay, Sallie Clay, and Laura Clay—to become activists for women’s rights and suffrage. At first Laura Clay was less active in the movement than her sisters, but by 1888 she had taken a leading role and would become one of the most remarkable women of her time.
In 1888 Laura founded the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA), serving as its president for the next 24 years. Under her leadership the KERA successfully lobbied for laws granting women the right to control their own property, wages and estates, the right to be legal guardians of children, and the right to attend state universities. She was also instrumental in obtaining passage of a law raising the age of consent from 12 to 16, and a law requiring female physicians in female insane asylums. Laura tirelessly campaigned for women’s suffrage and founded suffrage societies in nine states. A devoted Episcopalian, she also helped win the right of women to hold leadership positions in the church.
At the 1920 Democratic Party National Convention, to which she was a delegate, Laura Clay became the first woman to ever have her name placed in nomination for president of the United States by a major political party.
Interestingly, despite decades of dedicated effort as a suffragist and as a leader in the Temperance movement, Clay’s consistent and strongly held belief in states’ rights caused her to oppose both the 19th Amendment and national prohibition, as she believed suffrage and prohibition should be accomplished by amendments to state constitutions, rather than by federal law.
In her old age Laura withdrew from political life. She died at her home in Lexington in 1941, at age 92.
Laura Clay was born on February 9, 1849, one hundred seventy-three years ago today.
