She was the first female faculty member and third woman hired as an instructor at Illinois State Normal University, and was a supporter of the Suffragist movement.

She was born on June 4, 1856, in Cherry Valley, Ohio,[1] second daughter and the fourth of five children of Lewis Colby and his wife Celestia Rice.

[4] She left for further education at the Harvard Annex, now called Radcliffe College, then transferred back to the University of Michigan where she received an A.M.

As an outspoken feminist,[9] she supported the Suffragist movement and was a member of the Normal Equal Suffrage Association, organized in 1911.

One of the goals of the Sapphonian Society was to combat the spreading idea of the “feminization of education,” which asserted that the reason why young men strayed away from education was due to the concentration of women and their influence within schools, or that being the reason for their becoming "effeminized.”[4] Colby manipulated the increasingly masculine academic environment through the society in her use of “discreet rhetoric,” as opposed to overt resistance to the idea.

However, the Sapphonians wanted to go beyond simply being an all-female counterpart, but rather an entity with complete separation and autonomy from the male debate team.

These women then went even further to establish their own mode of conversation, as opposed to Cicero’s strict debate format, to instead focus on literature and discussion.

At this time, ISNU’s president was David Felmley, who repeatedly contended that women were less intelligent than men and promoted the masculinization of education, thus emphasizing the Sapphonian’s on-campus obstacles.

One effort to combat these increasingly popular ideas was the society’s invite extension to all women, students and faculty alike, to attend their meetings.

[4] Despite Colby’s silent activism approach, she came to write “Some Often Forgotten Aspects of the Relation of Women to the Industrial World” for ISNU’s newspaper, The Vidette, which was likely purposed as rebuttal to the ideas put forth by Felmley.