Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby

• Dorothy Colby
• Born: August 5, 1846
• Died: September 7, 1916

Suffragist, was born in Gloucester, England, the eldest daughter and third of seven children of Thomas Bewick, a railway worker, and his first wife, Clara (Willingham) Bewick. The family emigrated to the United States in 1849, settling on a farm near Windsor, Wisconsin. Her mother died in 1855. Her father’s second wife bore at least two more children and came to the marriage with four children of her own.

Clara Bewick was educated at the local district school and privately at home. In 1865 she was one of the first woman students to enroll in the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but rather than enter the separate women’s program she took the men’s course in philosophy and Latin, graduating a member of Phi Beta Kappa and class valedictorian in 1869. She went on to postgraduate studies in French, Greek, and chemistry while teaching history and Latin at the university. She married, in June 1871, Leonard Wright Colby, a lawyer. The following year they moved to Beatrice, Nebraska. They adopted a three-year-old boy from New York City in 1885 and, in 1891, a Dakota Indian girl whose mother was killed in the massacre of the tribe at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Clara Colby became a leader of civic activities in Beatrice, helping to set up a free public library in 1873 and organizing a series of lectures that brought her into contact with some of America’s leading suffragists. An effective public speaker, she began lecturing and writing on women’s issues. Organizing the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association in 1881 (she was its president from 1885 to 1898), she worked actively at state suffrage conventions in the Midwest, especially in Kansas and Wisconsin. In 1883 she started the Woman’s Tribune, a newspaper that became the official voice of the National Woman Suffrage Association; it reached an audience of 12,500 during the conventions of the International Council of Women and the National Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, D.C., in 1888. That year the Colbys moved to Washington, D.C., where Leonard Colby became assistant attorney general in charge of Indian affairs and Clara Colby continued to publish the Woman’s Tribune.

Colby served as a mediator in the dispute between Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association and Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association, helping to arrange the merger of the two groups as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. In 1892 Colby chaired NAWSA’s Federal Suffrage Committee, and in 1902 she became corresponding secretary of Olympia Brown’s Federal Suffrage Association. Both groups sought a congressional resolution that would recognize women’s right to vote under the Constitution. Colby was particularly interested in attracting working women to the suffrage movement—a policy that many middle-class suffragists opposed. From 1900 to 1903 she headed NAWSA’s Committee on Industrial Problems Affecting Women and Children.

Colby was a Congregationalist, but was emphatic about pointing out the ways in which organized religion abets male supremacy. In 1885 the National Woman Suffrage Association defeated a resolution she introduced denouncing all such doctrines. Her disapproval of religion was as alienating of other suffragists—many of whom were motivated by religious faith—as her encouragement of cooperation between the suffrage and labor movements.

Colby and her husband separated in 1899 and were divorced by 1904, when she moved to Portland, Oregon. The Woman’s Tribune, which had been in financial difficulties since the 1890s, ceased publication in 1909. The last years of Colby’s life were spent working in state suffrage campaigns, traveling and lecturing in Europe, and serving as a delegate to major international conferences, including the Woman Suffrage Alliance Convention in Budapest and the International Peace Conference at The Hague (both 1913). She died of pneumonia and myocarditis at the age of seventy in Palo Alto, California. Her body was cremated, and her ashes were buried in Windsor, Wisconsin.

Clara Bewick Colby’s papers are in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The most useful source for a study of her life and career is O. Brown, ed., Democratic Ideals: A Memorial Sketch of Clara B. Colby (1917). Additional material may be found in E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 3 and 4 (1886-1902); I. H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 2 vols. (1898); A. Lutz, Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1940); Who Was Who in America, vol. 1 (1942); Woman’s Who’s Who of America (1914-15); andNotable Women of America (1971).