Josephine Henry

Josephine Kirby Henry (February 22, 1846 – January 8, 1928) was an American Progressive Era women's rights leader, suffragist, social reformer, and writer from Versailles, Kentucky in the United States.

Henry lobbied hard for the adoption of the Kentucky 1894 Married Woman's Property Act, and is credited for being instrumental in its passage.

The Association fought for Progressive Era social reform including women's rights to vote in all local, state and national elections; a married women's right to own her own property or make a will or a contract in her own legal standing, and have control over her wages or earnings from her own business.

[6] By the last decade of the nineteenth century, Kentucky was the only state in which marriage effectively denied women of their basic human and civil rights.

[7] The Married Woman's Property Act, also called the Husband and Wife Bill during the years under debate when the draft was castigated as anti-family and infringing on cultural norms about women's honor as ladies, passed in 1894.

Henry saw this as critical for the establishment of women's economic independence and the self-efficacy needed for an informed citizenry to vote in a constructive way.

[9] Henry was the Prohibition Party candidate for clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1890 and 1894, and was the first woman in the South to run in a public campaign for a state office.

The New York Times picked up the story out of Versailles, Kentucky and listed her platform's main ideas: The brief article ended abruptly with the most caustic of statements: "Mrs. Henry is an agnostic.