Josephine Kirby Williamson Henry, born in Newport and later a longtime resident of Versailles, was a leading advocate for Kentucky women in the 1880's and 1890's. Working through the Kentucky Equal Rights Association and the National Women's Suffrage Association, she pressed for equal rights for women, especially suffrage, property rights, protection of minors, and co-guardianship for mothers. A prolific writer, powerful speaker, and determined lobbyist, she appealed to the Constitutional Convention of 1890 and later legislatures, and her greatest achievement was the passage of the Married Women's Property Act, known as the Husband and Wife bill, in 1894. After moving to Versailles at age 16, she taught at Versailles Academy for Young Ladies and married Capt. William Henry, whom she called an uncompromising suffragist for supporting her causes. She worked alongside Laura Clay, who praised her exceptional study and attention to the legal and political status of Kentucky women. After her only child, Frederick, died in a train crash, she devoted herself even more fully to reform work, producing tracts, articles, editorials, poetry, and two small books. An agnostic active in the Free Thought Movement, she wrote for the Lexington Blue Grass Blade and other freethought publications, argued views considered radical in her time in Marriage and Divorce and Women and the Bible, and served on the revising committee for Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Women's Bible, contributing two commentaries. Henry also became the first woman in Kentucky and the South to run for state office, standing as the 1890 Prohibitionist candidate for Clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals and receiving nearly 5,000 votes; she was later nominated in 1894 for State Superintendent of Public Instruction and was discussed as a possible presidential candidate in 1900. She died in 1928 at age 85.