Clara Colby

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, most notable for translating the Bible into Chinese. Colby’s grandmother was Medhurst’s sister, so there’s a deeply personal connection to the subject matter.”