Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/709

650 the Young Ladies' Seminary at Monroe and lecturing for the benefit of the Soldiers' Aid Societies.

The war over, they removed to Minnesota in 1866, where by lectures, newspaper articles, petitions and appeals to the legislature, Mrs. Stearns has done very much to stir the women of the State to thought and action upon the question of woman's enfranchisement. She has been the leading spirit of the State Suffrage Association, as well as of the local societies of Rochester and Duluth, the two cities in which she has resided, and also vice-president of the National Association since 1876. As a member of the school-board, she has wrought beneficent changes in the schools of Duluth. She is now at the head of a movement for the establishment of a home for women needing a place of rest and training for self-help and self-protection. Mrs. Stearns has the full sympathy of her husband and family, as she had that of her mother, Mrs. Susan C. Burger, whose last years were passed in the home of her daughter at Duluth. Mrs. Stearns writes:

The advocates of suffrage in Minnesota were so few in the early days, and their homes so remote from each other, that there was little chance for coöperation, hence the history of the movement in this State consists more of personal efforts than of conventions, legislative hearings and judicial decisions. The first name worthy of note is that of Harriet E. Bishop. She was invited by Rev. Thomas Williamson, M. D., a missionary among the Dakotas, to come to his mission home and share in his labors in 1847, where she was introduced to the leading citizens of St. Paul. She was the first teacher of a public school in that settlement. She lectured on temperance, wrote for the daily papers, and preached as a regular pastor in a Baptist pulpit. She published several books, was one of the organizers of the State Suffrage Association in 1881, and in 1883 rested from her labors on earth.

The first lecture in the State on the "Rights and Wrongs of Woman," was by Mrs. Mary J. Colburn, in the village of Champlin, in 1858, the same year that Minnesota was admitted to the Union. In 1864, the State officers promised two prizes for the first and second best essays on "Minnesota as a Home for Emigrants," reserving to the examining committee the right to reject all manuscripts offered if found unworthy. The first prize was accorded to Mrs. Colburn. Most of the other competitors were men, some of them members of the learned professions. Mrs. Colburn says, in writing to a friend, "I am doing but little now on the suffrage question, for I will not stoop longer to ask of any congress or legislature for that which I know to be mine by the divine law of nature."

In 1857, Mrs. Jane Grey Swisshelm settled at St. Cloud, where she lived until 1863, editing the St. Cloud Democrat, the organ of the Republican party, and making a heroic fight for freedom and equality. In 1860 she