Citizens Committee for State Suffrage Amendment is formed

Randolph Hollingsworth's picture
Description: 

On Wednesday, June 8, 1910, Laura Clay, Elizabeth Dunster Gibson (Mrs. H.G.) Foster, Alice Bronston Oldham, and Elizabeth Burgess McQuaid for the Citizens Committee for State Suffrage Amendment. Led by Clay, who resigned as president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, the Citizens Committee set up headquarters at 130 North Upper Street in Lexington. The other three women resigned from the Fayette County Equal Rights Association. Their primary argument was that, since 1870 with the adoption of the 15th Amendment, federal overreach would be continued with a constitutional amendment to protect women's right to vote. They believed that a new federal amendment for women's voting rights would "take from the states not only their right to prescribe who shall vote in state elections, but give to Congress some power to legislate upon state elections - a power unknown in our National government until 1870, and one which jeopardizes the security of states that their legislatures will represent the interests or their own states and not those of the dominant party in Congress."

"To Make Fight for State Act," Lexington Herald (12 June 1910).