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Clara Bewick Colby, Nebraska's most prominent suffragist, was a newspaper editor and lecturer whose personal commitment to equal rights resulted in a national career and an international reputation. Born in England on August 5, 1846, she emigrated to Wisconsin in 1854. She entered the University of Wisconsin in 1865 and studied coursework previously offered only to men. Initially denied the right to graduate, she was subsequently recognized as the 1869 class valedictorian and hired as an instructor by the University of Wisconsin. She later left that position over a dispute concerning gender pay equity. In 1872 she married Leonard Wright Colby and moved to Beatrice, Nebraska. The couple adopted a three-yearold boy, Clarence, from an orphan train in 1885. Leonard later (1891) returned from the Wounded Knee Massacre with a Sioux child named Zintkala Nuni (Lost Bird) and adopted her himself while Clara was away lecturing on suffrage issues. Clara and Leonard Colby were formally divorced in 1906.
Colby strove to bring culture to her Plains hometown by establishing a public library and a community theater. In 1878 she invited suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to lecture in Beatrice. She then began traveling as a national women's suffrage speaker. Colby was one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "girls" or "lieutenants." In 1881 she was one of the organizers of the Women's State Suffrage Association in Nebraska and served as its president from 1885 to 1898. In 1883 she became the editor and publisher of the
In the last years of her life, Colby lectured in Britain and other European locations and served as a delegate to the International Moral Education Congress (London, 1908); International Women Suffrage Alliance (Amsterdam, 1908); International Races Congress (London, 1911); International Woman Suffrage Convention (Budapest, 1913); and the International Peace Conference (The Hague, 1913). Clara Bewick Colby died September 7, 1916, in Palo Alto, California, four years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment establishing women's suffrage as law.