In 1920 Laura Clay was a founder of the Democratic Women's Club of Kentucky. That same year, she served as a delegate at the 1920 Democratic National Convention held in San Francisco between 28 June and 6 July 1920. Laura Clay made American history as one of the first women (alongside fellow Kentucky delegate Cora Wilson Stewart) to be put forward as a candidate for the Presidential nomination of a major political party; and, thanks to the Kentucky delegates' chairman Augustus Owsley Stanley and Stewart were the first two women to receive a vote each for candidate for president. On the 44th ballot, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the assistant secretary of the Navy from New York, as his vice-presidential running mate. The Democratic Party's platform supported women's suffrage; after a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920. (It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.")