Laura Clay (February 9, 1849 – June 29, 1941), co-founder and first president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, was a leader of the American women's suffrage movement.

The youngest of four daughters, Laura was raised largely by her mother, due to her father's long absences as he pursued his political career and activities as an abolitionist.

At age 15, Laura started to question the inferior status of women in society by confiding in her diary that “I think I have a mind superior to that of many boys my age.”[1] Clay was educated at Sayre School in Lexington, Kentucky, Mrs. Sarah Hoffman's Finishing School in New York City,[2] the University of Michigan, and the University of Kentucky.

[citation needed] The 11th Annual Meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was held in Louisville, Kentucky on October 26 and 27, 1881.

[4] After the AWSA convention in Cincinnati in 1888, the Clay sisters and a group of other women, including Josephine K. Henry, founded the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA).

After being an ally of Blackwell, Clay convinced the NAWSA to adopt the Southern Strategy, which would lobby for only educated (primarily white women) to vote.

Known as one of "Aunt Susan's Girls," Laura Clay took on a national leadership role as chair of NAWSA's Southern Committee; in 1896 she was elected auditor.

This fit neatly into the NAWSA strategies of producing statistics and quantification through graphics explaining the need for - and the progress toward - women gaining the right to vote.

To get those higher numbers of membership rolls, Clay recommended that local clubs hold only one meeting per year, and that one only for the purpose of collecting names and dues.

She believed that enfranchising a large number of “inexperienced voters,” code language for black women, was not such a good idea.

Clay wanted the KERA to campaign separately for suffrage and not resort to a national amendment and extend its supremacy over the states.

[15] Laura Clay made American history as one of the first women (alongside fellow Kentucky delegate Cora Wilson Stewart) to be put forward as a candidate for the Presidential nomination of a major political party.

Thanks to the Kentucky delegates' chairman Augustus Owsley Stanley, Clay and Stewart were the first two women to receive a vote each for candidate for president.

[16] On the 44th ballot, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the assistant secretary of the Navy from New York, as his vice-presidential running mate.

The Democratic Party's platform supported women's suffrage; after a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920.