-
Women first organized and collectively fought for suffrage at the national level in July of 1848.. Suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened a meeting of over 300 people in Seneca Falls, New York. In the following decades, women marched, protested, lobbied, and even went to jail.
-
Virginia Penny of Louisville became Vice President of the American Equal Rights Association in 1867. That same year, women in Glendale organized a local suffrage association, the first in the South.
-
Daughter of abolitionist Cassius M. Clay, Mary helped bring the AWSA Annual Convention to Louisville in 1881, the first national suffrage convention held south of the Mason-Dixon line. She served as AWSA president from 1883-84. Mary’s younger sister Laura Clay founded the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association which was the first state-wide suffrage organization in the South.
-
Laura was also involved in leadership in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Kentucky Equal Rights Association. The Clay sisters also joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) when the two national organizations united in 1890.
-
In 1913, Laura Clay became Vice President of the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference, founded by Kate Gordon, to coordinate efforts across the South to win the vote in the states.
-
On January 6, 1920, Kentucky voted to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Two months later, on March 29, 1920, the Kentucky legislature also passed a measure allowing women to vote in presidential elections. That law became unnecessary because on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th amendment, ensuring that in every state, the right to vote in any election could not be denied based on sex.