Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby (1846-1916) was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, and died in Palo Alto, California. She was an internationally known suffragist leader, newspaper editor, and lecturer. Colby's family emigrated to Windsor, Wisconsin, in 1854. She entered the University of Wisconsin in 1865 and was the 1869 class valedictorian in the first class of women graduated from the school. She was then hired as an instructor of history and Latin there but left soon after over a dispute concerning gender pay equity. In 1872, she married Leonard Wright Colby, an American Civil War general, and moved to Beatrice, Nebraska, where she established Beatrice's free public library in 1873. In 1878, she invited suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to lecture in Beatrice. Colby then began traveling as a national women's suffrage speaker. 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 Woman's Tribune, a national suffrage newspaper that was the official publication of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1886 to 1889. In 1889, Colby received the first press correspondent's pass issued to a woman to cover the Spanish- American War. She moved to Oregon in 1904, and the Colbys divorced in 1906. 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). She passed away four years before the passage of the 19th Amendment establishing women's suffrage as law. Colby was a Congregationalist and also served an honorary leadership role in the International New Thought Alliance.

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