Kentucky Equal Rights Association

Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA)

Minutes of the 1894 annual convention of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association.
Founded	1888
Founder	suffragists from Fayette and Kenton counties, including Laura Clay and Henrietta Chenault
Focus	Women's rights, married women's property rights, feminism, school suffrage, temperance, admitting women to higher education, juvenile defense rights, raising the age of consent
Location	Lexington, Kentucky
Key people	Mary Barr Clay, Laura Clay, Madeline McDowell Breckinridge

Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) was the first permanent statewide women's rights organization in Kentucky. Founded in November 1888, the KERA voted in 1920 to transmute itself into the Kentucky League of Women Voters to continue its many and diverse progressive efforts on behalf of women's rights.

Inspired by Lucy Stone during the national meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Louisville in 1881,^[1] a group of suffragists formed the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association, the first statewide suffrage organization in the South. Laura Clay served as president with affiliate groups in Louisville, Lexington and Richmond. Laura's older sister, Mary Barr Clay (vice-president for both Elizabeth Cady Stanton's National Woman Suffrage Association as well as of Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association) hosted Susan B. Anthony in Richmond in 1879 to speak on the need for economic protections for women. She then founded the Madison County Equal Rights Association, the state's first permanent women's rights association. Soon afterward, Mary B. Clay invited Lucy Stone to stay at her mother Mary Jane Warfield Clay's house in Lexington, and Stone mentored the creation of the Fayette County Equal Suffrage Association (later the Fayette County Equal Rights Association^[2]).

In November 1888, Lucy Stone invited Laura Clay to present a paper at the AWSA convention in Cincinnati. Clay agreed and invited all the Kentucky suffragists to join her there to organize a new statewide association. On November 22, 1888, delegates from Fayette and Kenton counties joined the four daughters of the former abolitionist Cassius M. Clay – Anne, Sally, Mary and Laura – to create the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA). Though Cassius Clay strongly condemned the woman suffrage movement on moral, political and scientific grounds, his daughters led the movement for women's right to vote as well as for legal, educational and industrial rights for women.

The KERA adopted the Fayette County Equal Rights Association's broad platform of reform rather than focusing only on women's voting rights. The founding officers were: president, Laura Clay; vice presidents, Ellen Battelle Dietrick and Mary Barr Clay; corresponding secretary, Eugenia B. Farmer; recording secretary, Anna M. Deane; and treasurer. Isabella H. Shepard. They adopted the slogan "If ye abide in my word....ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free."^[3] The leadership with only 66 members quickly organized campaigns with lectures and lobbying, writing petitions, newspaper columns and pamphlets, as well as organizing affiliate chapters around the state. They also encouraged women to enroll in institutions of higher education, hoping to achieve absolute equality in every profession. In 1890 a KERA petition presented to the Kentucky legislature was supported by 10,000 signatures, and by 1895 KERA membership rose to 400 members.