Redress." That she repeated in some of the suburban towns. While waiting for her husband to be relieved from service, after the close of the war, she taught the Freedmen where Colonel Stearns
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SARAH BURGER STEARNS.
was stationed. She was always busy. Even after going to housekeeping in Rochester. Minn., she found time to lecture before the institutes upon primary teaching, moral instruction in the schools, and kindred subjects, and was fond of writing for the press upon educational topics. She helped to promote benevolent work, by her lectures upon "Woman and Home," "Woman and the Republic," and other subjects. Colonel and Mrs. Stearns moved to Duluth, Minn., in the spring of 1872, since which time she has indulged less her fondness for study and literary- work, and has become known as a woman of varied philanthropies. For three Sears she served as a member of the Duluth school board. She was for several years vice-president for Minnesota of the Association for the Advancement of Women. She served four years as president of a society for the maintenance of a
temporary home for needy women and children. As a white-ribboner and a suffragist she was often a delegate to their State annual meetings. She was for many years vice-president for Minnesota of
the National Woman Suffrage Association, and she helped to organize the state society and some local ones. She was for two years president of the State society, and is now president of the Duluth Suffrage Circle.
STEBBINS, Mrs. Catharine A. F. reformer, born in Farmington, near Canandaigua. N.Y., 17th August. 1823. Her father, Benjamin Fish, and her mother, Sarah D. Bills, were of the Society of Friends, the former of Rhode Island and the latter of New Jersey Both families removed to western New York about 1816. They were farmers. When Catharine was live years old, her family went to Rochester, N.Y. Her parents helped to form the earliest anti-slavery societies. Their moral and intellectual life was devoted to emancipation, total abstinence and moral reforms.
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CATHARINE A. F. STEBBINS.
Catharine was educated for the most part in the select schools of Rochester, but enjoyed the advantages of an excellent Friends' boarding-school in a near town for six months of her fifteenth year. She afterwards taught her brothers and several neighbors' children in her home. She was requested to go before the board of examiners, that the people of the neighborhood might draw the school moneys to educate their children. Receiving a certificate, she took charge of the first public school in the ninth ward of Rochester. Her first reform work was in gathering names to anti-slavery petitions, between her twelfth and fifteenth years. For several years before and after marriage she was secretary of a woman's anti-slavery society. When she was fifteen years of age, Pollard and Wright, from Baltimore, total abstinence Washingtonians, held meetings and circulated the pledge in Rochester, and from that date her mother banished all wines from her house. A few years later Miss Fish and her sister kept on the parlor table an anti-tobacco pledge, to which they secured the names of young men. She became the wife of Giles B. Stebbins in August, 1846. She attended the first woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, N. Y., in 1848. She spoke a few words in the convention and contributed a resolution in honor of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. The resolution was passed the next week in Rochester. She was one of the secretaries of the Rochester convention. While in Milwaukee, Wis., in 1849 and 1850, she
published her first letter, in the "Free Democrat." in protest against the subordinate position of women. The letter was much discussed. In the early part of the Rebellion she wrote for the Rochester dailies a number of short letters on the conduct of war-meetings and of the war, criticising men and methods, and urging that more stress be
