Mary Jane Warfield Clay (January 20, 1815 – April 29, 1900) was an American socialite, suffragist, abolitionist, and political activist.

Her experience and success as a farm manager included her acute business sense in the middle of the American Civil War.

Her most active work in the suffrage movement was to encourage and support her daughters, who would become the most well-known Kentucky suffragists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[6]Mary Jane Warfield Clay left the plantation in 1868,[7] soon after her husband returned from his ambassadorship in Russia (and a year-long stay in New York).

[5] After the Civil War, Mary Jane's sister, Anne Elizabeth Ryland, had offered her shelter at her house in Lexington.

She and her younger daughters, including Laura Clay who was attending school in Michigan, lived there until she purchased her own home on North Broadway in 1873.

Clay described in a letter to her daughters of her admiration of the work led by Matilda Joslyn Gage, editor of the suffrage journal The National Citizen and Ballot Box and former president of the NWSA.

This also served as a launch for Annie, who struck out on her own, writing a regular column on women's rights in the Kentucky Gazette.

[citation needed] In October 1888 Lucy Stone stayed with Mary Jane Warfield Clay in Lexington just before the AWSA convention that took place that year in Cincinnati.

Stone invited Laura Clay to give a speech at the convention, and they worked on how the state suffrage association could be revitalized.