When Kentucky’s Equal Rights Association was founded in the 1880s, it was centered in small-town and rural areas and composed chiefly of a religiously and socially homogeneous group, the friends of Laura Clay. By 1918, a generation later, woman suffrage had gained the support of a much larger and more diverse constituency centered in the state’s only industrial city and headed by a coalition of progressive reformers. Louisville’s Jewish community—by far the state’s largest—played a key role in this transformation. The presentation will trace Jewish women’s reasons for supporting woman suffrage, the coalitions that they formed with their Christian colleagues, and their contributions to the movement’s diversity and to its success.
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