Clara Colby
The International Suffragist
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
On 18th August 2020, the United States and the world will celebrate 100 years since the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which secured women’s right to vote. It’s in large part thanks to the work of suffragist Clara Colby, whose life, adversities, and achievements are now unraveled in a fascinating new book.
‘Clara Colby: The International Suffragist’, by John Holliday, looks at the life of this British-American maverick as it’s never been told before
The book is the story about a leader in the cause, which one hundred years ago, gave American women the right to vote. Clara Colby was born in England, graduated as valedictorian of the first woman’s class at the University of Wisconsin, and became a writer, publisher, teacher, public speaker, and friend of many leading figures of her day. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the founders of the suffrage movement in America, became Clara Colby’s mentors. Her journey is an epic saga of untiring and heroic endeavor, sometimes under the most adverse circumstances, across the United States, and her native England. She suffered great injustice, but she never complained, and her accomplishments contributed significantly to the successful introduction of the Nineteenth Amendment.
“When I learned about Clara’s life, I knew this had to be my next book,” explains the author, whose previous release, ‘Mission to China: How an Englishman Brought the West to the Orient’, was a biography of his great-great-grandfather. “His name was Walter Medhurst, and he was a famous missionary to China. Colby’s grandmother was Medhurst’s sister, so there’s a deeply personal connection to the subject matter.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Holliday (Mission to China) offers a workmanlike biography of suffragist Clara Colby (1846 1916). Born in England, Clara suffered an early bout of cholera that meant she couldn't immigrate with her family to Wisconsin in 1849. Raised as a beloved only grandchild in London, Colby had a solid emotional and intellectual foundation by the time she arrived at the Wisconsin frontier in 1855, which sustained her through a jam-packed and often stressful life. Straightforwardly and somewhat clunkily, Holliday describes how she became valedictorian for the first class of women to graduate from the University of Wisconsin, endured a dysfunctional marriage to a scandal-plagued politician, and enjoyed a career as a prominent suffragist and newspaper editor. Colby, a friend to Susan B. Anthony, also became a reluctant if loving parent to a Native American baby, Zintka Lanuni, who was orphaned in the Wounded Knee massacre. The book's strength is in showing how Colby's life intersected with the era's politics, including as an invited participant in the British suffragist movement from 1910 to 1913. Though somewhat stolid and lacking in authorial voice, Holliday's "just-the-facts" approach has the advantage of providing readers a wide berth to draw their own conclusions about Colby's life. (Self-published)
