Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890-1920
Biography of Josephine Henry, 1842-1928
By Aloma Williams Dew, former adjunct in history at Kentucky Wesleyan College, Owensboro, Kentucky
"Yours for Liberty and Justice...." is how Josephine Henry signed a letter to Laura Clay, and it typifies her life-long struggle for those ideals. Josephine Kirby Williamson Henry, raised in Newport, Kentucky, believed that women are equal to men, and she spent her entire adult life questioning and fighting patriarchal dominance. Henry was born in 1842 into a society primed for reform movements. In the antebellum period, the clash between two ways of life - that of the industrial north and that of the slave-owning south - came to a head. Many women first felt the reform spirit by working to abolish slavery, but often they were led to question their own lack of rights, a pattern that Henry would follow. Josephine was the eldest of six children born to Euclid Williamson and Mary Kirby Williamson. Euclid was a steamboat captain and co-owner of the Paul Jones out of the port of Cincinnati. Both Newport and Cincinnati were bustling river towns, positioned on the border that separated slave Kentucky from free Ohio.
When she was sixteen, Josephine moved to Versailles and began teaching music at the Versailles Academy for Young Ladies. She married Captain William Henry when she was eighteen. He taught school until the Civil War when he enlisted in the regiment of General Simon Buckner and fought for the Confederacy. After the war he opened an academy for boys and taught there until his death. Josephine bragged that her husband was "an uncompromising suffragist." He supported her by providing editorial space in The Clarion (Versailles), for which he served as editor, and he publicly declared his support for the cause in its editorial pages. The Henrys had one son, Frederick. His death at the age of twenty-three, the outcome of a train wreck blamed on a drunken switch man, left his mother devastated. She threw herself into working for temperance and to writing poetry as ways to cope. She also became an enthusiastic suffragist.
Along with Laura Clay and Eugenia Farmer, Henry was one of the first and most active members of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA), which formed in 1888. The following year, she was appointed chair of KERA's legislative committee, charged with lobbying the Kentucky General Assembly and the Constitutional Convention for laws benefitting women. Henry leveraged the right of petitioning, one of the few rights available to women to convince lawmakers to support her causes. She arrived at the 1890 legislative session with over 10,0000 signatures in hand. Henry and her colleagues fought to ensure that state institutions each employed at least one female physician. She worked to raise the age of consent, the age at which girls could marry without parental permission, from twelve to sixteen and to ensure that mothers had guardianship rights over their children equal to those of fathers. KERA's first big victories came in 1894 when a married woman's property law passed and when women in Kentucky's second-class cities were granted school suffrage. The Married Woman's Property Act, also known as the Husband and Wife Property Bill, is Henry's greatest achievement and her legacy. She saw this as a first step toward full suffrage.
Henry was active in state suffrage work, and she also held important roles on the national level, beginning in 1891 when she was elected to serve as a member of NAWSA's executive committee, representing Kentucky. She later served as a member of its Committee on Organization and its Committee on Legislative Advice, in recognition of her superior expertise in that area. Her article, "New Woman of the New South," published in Arena magazine received a lot of attention for the suffrage cause. In 1920, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt awarded Henry a "Pioneer Distinguished Service" certificate for her national contributions.
Besides being a talented lobbyist and writer, Henry was also widely acclaimed for her speaking ability. Her speeches delivered at national conventions in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Grand Rapids, Michigan and others drew great praise.
Henry was the first woman in Kentucky and possibly in the South to run for a state office. She was the 1890 Prohibition Party candidate for clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals. She received 4,460 votes even though some election clerks refused to put her name on the ballots. In 1894, she was nominated by the Prohibition Party for state superintendent of public instruction. She was suggested as the Party's candidate for President of the United States in 1900. Though she did not receive its nomination, her candidacy received coverage in The New York Times.
Ultimately after all their work together, Clay and Henry's friendship disintegrated due to Henry's unorthodox views on religion and her contributions to Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible, published in 1895. Henry did not see the Bible as God's sacred word, but rather as a tool of oppression. She served on the revising committee of the Woman's Bible, and she wrote two articles for it, leading to her expulsion from the Kentucky Equal Rights Association in 1897 as "an undesirable member." Stanton, Henry, and other participants in the project later found themselves written out of the history of the suffrage movement. Clay and Henry's close friendship never recovered.
By 1899, Henry had largely withdrawn from suffrage work. She became more involved with the Free Thought movement, with American Secular Union, and with the Freethought Federation of America. She remained intellectually active as a frequent contributor to The Blue Grass Blade, an unconventional central Kentucky publication, and other Free Thought journals. She was elected in 1904 to serve as president of the American Freethought Association, the renamed National Liberal party. Henry once said, "I pride myself more in my Freethought work than all else I have tried to do."
Henry became increasingly outspoken and radical as she aged. She confronted topics such as women's health, clothing reform, birth control, capital punishment, domestic abuse, divorce, and keeping one's maiden name when married. A declared agnostic, she continued to denounce organized religion and relentlessly questioned commonly held views. She authored a number of booklets including Woman and the Bible (1905), Marriage and Divorce (1907), and a book of poetry, Musings in Life's Evening (n.d.). Writing in the Blue Grass Blade in 1902, she concluded "I am but a straggler marching a hundred years in advance of the age in which I live."
Henry is buried in the Versailles Cemetery. By the time she died of a stroke in 1928, she was blind, lonely, and largely forgotten. In 1997, a memorial marker was unveiled and dedicated to her memory outside the cemetery. Recent work is helping to restore her to her rightful place in historical memory. Her life can be summed up in her own words: "What I have written I have written, and if one thought I have expressed will start a rill of thought in the minds of men and women, who love their fellows, and desire justice and happiness for them, and will nerve their hearts to help right these wrongs, my reward will be great indeed..."
Sources:
Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Library of Congress
Laura Clay Papers, University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center
Woodford Sun, April 15, 1920
Blue Grass Blade, February 16, 1902
Josephine K. Henry, "The New Woman of the New South," The Arena II:3 (February 1895)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible, parts I and II, 1895, 1898, http://www.sacred-texts.com/wmn/wb/
Ellen Carol DuBois. Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
The History of Woman Suffrage
KERA Minutes of the Third Annual Convention, 1890, 7, University of Kentucky Special Collections, Lexington, Kentucky.
NAWSA, Proceedings of the Convention, 1891, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.rslfc6;view=1up;seq=57
Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1894