Noted suffragist, journalist, and newspaper editor Clara Bewick Colby was born in 1846 in Gloucester, England to Thomas and Clara Willingham Bewick. In 1849 the family immigrated to the U.S. and settled on a farm near Windsor, Wisconsin. In 1865 Clara moved to the home of her maternal grandparents in Madison, Wisconsin, in order to attend the University of Wisconsin. She graduated in 1869, valedictorian of the first University class to admit women. She then taught Latin and history, while taking graduate courses in French, Greek, and chemistry.
In 1871 Clara Bewick married Leonard Wright Colby, a Civil War veteran and graduate of the Law School of the University of Wisconsin. In 1872 the Colbys moved to Beatrice, Nebraska, where he practiced law, served as a general in the Nebraska state militia, and was twice elected to the state senate. In 1885 they adopted a three-year-old orphan from New York, Clarence, who died as a young man. During the Battle of Wounded Knee in l891 Colby reportedly found a Sioux Indian baby on the battlefield in the arms of her dead mother. The Colbys adopted the girl, Zitkala-noni (or Zintka Lanuni, meaning Lost Bird), who eventually pursued a varied theatrical career in the United States and Mexico. The Colbys were divorced in 1906 following a lengthy separation.
While living in Nebraska, Clara Colby joined the women's suffrage movement, and she worked closely with Susan B. Anthony to organize the state's campaign for a suffrage amendment in 1882. She also helped form the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association and served as president from 1885 to 1898. In 1883 she founded the Woman's Tribune, a newspaper which discussed a wide variety of topics of interest to women in addition to covering state and national suffrage campaigns. From 1886 to 1889 the Tribune was considered the official organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The high point of Colby's newspaper career came in 1888 when she moved the Tribune to Washington, D.C. in order to publish a daily edition during the conventions of the International Council of Women and NWSA. Following the merger of NWSA and the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1889, the Tribune was succeeded as official suffrage paper by Alice Stone Blackwell's Woman's Journal. This decision was probably due to the fact that the Blackwell family, which published the Journal, also dominated the AWSA, and both organizations sought compromises in order to overcome their longstanding rivalry. Despite the loss of official recognition, Colby continued to work closely with Stanton, and she published Stanton's essays and opinions in the Tribune until Stanton's death in 1902. In 1904 Colby moved the paper from Washington, D.C. to Portland, Oregon, to help the suffrage movement there. However, declining circulation and increasing financial difficulties related to her marital separation led to the suspension of publication in 1909.
During her career as editor and publisher, Clara Colby also served as vice president of the Women's Press Association, and during the Spanish-American War was the first woman to be issued a war correspondent's pass.
In the early 1890s, Colby became interested in the suffrage strategy advocated by Francis Minor, a St. Louis lawyer who argued that, under the U.S. Constitution, women as “people,” were entitled to elect members of the House of Representatives. Colby served on the National-American Woman Suffrage Association Committee on Federal Suffrage, and she joined Olympia Brown's Federal Woman's Equality Association (later the Federal Suffrage Association) to lobby for this form of the franchise. Colby served as corresponding secretary and head of the association's congressional work until her death in 1916. In 1915 she organized the Congress of the Federal Suffrage Association, which was held in conjunction with the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. In addition, she participated in statewide suffrage campaigns in Oregon, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Colby was also involved with suffrage issues abroad. In 1899 she served as delegate to the International Congress of Women in London. In 1908 and 1913, she was delegate to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Amsterdam and Budapest, and in 1910 she travelled to England to assist the suffrage movement there. In 1913 she was delegate to the International Peace Congress at The Hague. Colby was also honorary vice president of the International New Thought Alliance, vice president of the League for World Peace, and member of the International Woman's Franchise Club.
Financial difficulties compelled Colby to try to make a living as a freelance writer and lecturer. She lectured extensively in the United States and Europe on a wide range of topics including women's suffrage, dress reform, world peace, civic reform, Walt Whitman, literature, history, philosophy and New Thought, a religious movement which Colby described as “the philosophy which recognizes man's inherent divinity.” She also spent over a year lecturing before suffrage clubs and writing about England for American papers.
Clara B. Colby died September 7, 1916, in California.
