Mary Jane Warfield Clay
Mary Jane Warfield Clay | |
|---|---|
Portrait, c. 1863 | |
| Born | Mary Jane Warfield January 20, 1815 |
| Died | April 29, 1900 (aged 85) Lexington, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Resting place | Lexington Cemetery |
| Occupations |
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| Spouse | |
| Children | 10, including Mary, Brutus, and Laura |
| Father | Elisha Warfield |
Mary Jane Warfield Clay (January 20, 1815 – April 29, 1900) was an American socialite, suffragist, abolitionist, and political activist. An early leader in the suffrage movement in Kentucky, she began by forming a suffrage club at her home in 1879. Her experience and success as a farm manager included her acute business sense in the middle of the American Civil War. She sold supplies from her farm to both Union and Confederate forces when they each occupied the Commonwealth.
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.