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A Woman of the Century: A Crowdsourcing Project of the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

Lucy Newhall Colman

“She then began to teach in Rochester, N.Y., “doing for $350 a year the work that a man received $800 for doing.” 

(A Woman of the Century, 196)

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Lucy Newhall Colman (1817-1906)

  • Lucy Newhall Colman, an Antislavery agitator and woman suffragist, was born in Sturbridge on July 26, 1817.

  • She married at eighteen and moved to Boston, but her husband died of consumption in 1841.

  • Two years later, she married again, becoming the mother of a daughter in 1845.

  • Colman began to advocate for equal rights of women and emancipation of the slaves in 1846.

  • Her second husband, an engineer on the Central Railroad, was killed in a railroad accident in 1852.

  • Next, she took over the “colored school” in Rochester to close it, encouraging parents to send their children to district schools.

  • Lucy was invited by Susan B. Anthony to read a paper at a State convention of teachers.

  • She urged the abolition of corporal punishment in the Rochester schools.

  • Colman lectured in several states about the causes she believed in.

  • Later, she served as matron in the National Colored Orphan Asylum in Washington, D.C. and was appointed teacher of a ”colored school” in Georgetown, DC.