ons 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,[432] and their homes so remote from each other, that there
was little chance for cooeperation, 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 frien