Mary Jane 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, like selling 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. Early life and family Mary Jane Warfield Clay was the daughter of Maria Barr and Dr. Elisha Warfield. She grew up on a thoroughbred horse farm, The Meadows, on the northeast side of Lexington, Kentucky and was part of an elite social scene based on slavery and the thoroughbred industry. Her family was socially and politically prominent in Kentucky and in Maryland. On February 26, 1833, she married the abolitionist orator and politician Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810–1903). According to her daughter, Mary Barr Clay, M.J. Warfield Clay became a strong advocate for emancipation of slaves after marriage, and supported her husband's political career even as he made many enemies and fell victim to pro-slavery mobs. They lived in Lexington from 1838 to 1850 in one of the most elegant residences in the state: the William "Lord" Morton house. In the course of her 45-year marriage, she had ten children,<ref name="Memoriam" six of whom lived to adulthood: Elisha Warfield Clay (1835–1851) Green Clay (1837–1883) Mary Barr Clay (aka Mrs. J. Frank Herrick) (1839–1924) Sarah "Sallie" Lewis Clay Bennett (1841–1935) Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. (1843–1843) Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. (1845–1857) Brutus Junius Clay (1847–1932) Laura Clay (1849–1941) Flora Clay (1851–1851) Anne Clay Crenshaw (1859–1945)