By Maury Searcy, Camby, Indiana
Kentucky women actively participated in the struggle for women’s voting rights during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Clay family, including the daughters of Cassius Marcellus Clay of White Hall in Madison County, worked for female suffrage and other gender issues. Mary Barr Clay convinced Susan B. Anthony to speak in Richmond in 1879. In 1881, Mary’s sister, Laura, convinced Anthony to help lead the suffrage movement. Mary became the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association when it met in Louisville.
Mary gave a brief but memorable speech to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on March 8, 1884. She called for an end to the social and political subjugation of women. While Providence bestowed women with the same inalienable rights and freedom as men, the denial of the right to vote and to serve on juries transfigured females into domestic servants without citizenship. Any protection afforded them served as a seal to their subjugation.
Mary stated: “We are told that men protect us …Gentlemen, if your protectors were women and they took all your property and your children and paid you half as much for your work—though as well or better done than your own—would you think much of the chivalry that permitted you to sit in street cars and picked up their pocket handkerchief?”
It seemed clear that all of society needed the counsel and reasoning skills of women to maintain a stable community, as well as their protection against abuse, injustice in the courts of law, impoverishment and political slavery. The subjugation of women also undermined societal structures for men.
A lesser-known Clay sister spoke out for their voting rights. Sarah Lewis “Sallie” Clay, who married James Bennett on June 2, 1869, established and served as the first president of the Madison County Equal Rights Association. She commenced this after hearing Anthony speak in Richmond in 1879. After the 1916 call for a national amendment granting female suffrage, the Clay sisters left the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Bennett concurred with her sisters by leaving the national association to form the states’ rights-oriented Kentucky Equal Rights Association. This latter organization opposed a national amendment granting female voting rights in favor of one on the state level that secured Kentucky’s power to govern itself with a minimum of federal oversight.
Despite this parting of ways, Bennett published a circular regarding Anthony in the Feb. 21, 1917, issue of the Climax-Madisonian, a Madison County newspaper. The letter called for support of a resolution to petition the United States Congress urging passage of legislation protecting their voting privileges from state interference. The 14th Amendment represented the nucleus of her thesis with its declaration: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” which did not exclude women. Nevertheless, in the 1875 Minor v. Happersett case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the word “male” was not omitted, so legislation depriving females of suffrage was not inherently illegal.
The court maintained that since the Constitution does not afford the right of suffrage to any specific group, laws denying the vote to women did not violate the 14th Amendment. Likewise, in the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases, the Supreme Court decided that only rights that owed its existence to the federal government via its Constitution, laws or “character” were protected against any encroachment. Thus, the federal judiciary seemed to look askance at women’s full citizenship.
Yet to Bennett, who was well versed in constitutional law, the issue was not so clear cut. The first part of the Minor case affirmed the rights of all citizens to vote. The 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of U.S. Senate members, said nothing that prohibited females’ right to vote in congressional elections. Bennett took this to mean the 14th Amendment did, in fact, annul the word male. Thus, the National American Woman Suffrage Association petition to the U.S. Congress for legislation protecting both genders’ suffrage was legally sound. Furthermore, the 1884 Ex parte Yarbrough decision decreed that voting rights in congressional elections did owe their existence to the federal government. Ergo, women did have the inalienable right of suffrage. Despite these efforts at legal interpretation, it took the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 to guarantee female suffrage.
Bennett was devout in her religious convictions. She utilized Biblical stories in her call for a better womanly life. Yet paralleling the mindset of most whites in the South, her solemnity for social change and Christian charity did not include justice toward African Americans. Dr. Melanie Beals Goan from the University of Kentucky Department of History wrote that Bennett became aligned with the racist views of most Southern whites from the Jim Crow Era.
From 1875-1900, according to Lowell Harrison and James Klotter in their 1997 A New History of Kentucky, there were 166 lynchings in our Commonwealth with two-thirds of the victims Black. The iconic Kentucky historian Dr. George C. Wright, in his 1996 book Racial Violence in Kentucky 1865-1940, put a much higher number of lynchings in Kentucky from 1875-1940.
Thus, it appears that even great heroes and heroines, such as Bennett, in all their creativity and courage, may fall into the web of society’s dark side within a given historical setting. Despite any disappointments the modern student may encounter, Bennett was an intellectual and social icon in Kentucky history.