Anna Howard Shaw

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Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919), American suffragist leader, reformer, and feminist, was the fourth president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Anna Howard Shaw was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, on Feb. 14, 1847, but was raised near Big Rapids, Michigan. She studied at Alma College in Michigan and at Boston University's theological school, from which she graduated in 1878. Pastoral work grew tiresome, and at the age of 35 she entered Boston University's medical school, receiving her medical degree in 1886. The practice of medicine proved equally unsatisfying, and she abandoned it for lecturing and temperance activities. She rose to head the suffrage department of the Women's Christian Temperance Union before leaving for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Susan B. Anthony, then president of NAWSA, valued Dr. Shaw's oratorical talents highly and put them to frequent use. But when Anthony resigned in 1900, she chose Carrie Chapman Catt to succeed her. Four years later Catt resigned, and Dr. Shaw's loyalty was rewarded. Although she was president of NAWSA for 11 years, her tenure was not a success. NAWSA had become a large national organization that demanded diplomatic, political, and administrative talents that Dr. Shaw lacked. Moreover, she was a hot-tempered, pugnacious woman and offended both friends and enemies of woman's suffrage. An associate said that she was very witty, but always terribly down on men, and sometimes one really almost winced when she attacked them so vigorously that they got red in the face and looked ready to do murder."

By 1915 it was apparent that while support for women's suffrage was growing, Dr. Shaw was incapable of translating this into votes for women. Accordingly, she was replaced by Carrie Chapman Catt, who led NAWSA to victory in less than five years. Dr. Shaw accepted this demotion with good grace and distinguished herself as chairman of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, when the United States entered World War I. Though the Woman's Committee was only a symbol of the government's appreciation of women's eagerness to serve, it amounted to more than that, thanks largely to Dr. Shaw, whose stubborn energy compelled the government to give women more responsibility. She died in Moylan, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1919, only 16 months before she would have exercised the right to vote; the right for which she gave half her life to win.

Further Reading

Anna Howard Shaw's autobiography, The Story of a Pioneer (1915), is revealing. Much useful material on her is in Historyof Woman Suffragevol. 4, edited by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902), and vols. 5 and 6, edited by Ida Husted Harper (1922). William L. O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America (1969), discusses her work on the Woman's Committee.

Anna Howard Shaw

Anna Howard Shaw (February 14, 1847 – July 2, 1919) was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was also a physician and the first ordained female Methodist minister in the United States.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Legacy 3 References 4 External links

Biography

Shaw was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, but was brought to the United States as a small child. Her family initially lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but soon moved to the Michigan frontier where they lived in a floorless log cabin in the wilderness. After the Civil War, Shaw, now a teenager, moved in with her sister in Big Rapids, Michigan. Inspired by the sermons of a Unitarian minister, Marianna Thompson, Shaw decided to pursue a religious life. Shaw delivered her first sermon in 1870. Soon she was preaching in towns throughout the area.^[1]

Shaw entered Albion College, a Methodist school in Albion, Michigan, in 1873. From there she went on to Boston University School of Theology where she graduated in 1876. She was the only woman in her graduating class. She paid her own expenses through college and university by preaching and lecturing. After serving as a minister at Methodist churches in Hingham and East Dennis, Massachusetts, Shaw was ordained by the Methodist Protestant Church in 1880—the first ordination of a woman by that church.^[1] She received an M.D. from Boston University in 1886. During her time in medical school, Shaw became an outspoken advocate of political rights for women.^[1] She was also active in the temperance movement and served as national superintendent of franchise for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union from 1886 to 1892.

Shaw became a confidant of Susan B. Anthony in the woman's suffrage movement, leading the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1904 to 1915. During her tenure as president, the organization renewed efforts to lobby for a national constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. Due to growing factionalism within the organization, Shaw decided not to run for reelection in 1915.^[1] She was succeeded by Carrie Chapman Catt.

During World War I, Shaw was head of the Women's Committee of the United States Council of National Defense, for which she became the first woman to earn the Distinguished Service Medal.

Shaw died of pneumonia at her home in Moylan, Pennsylvania at the age of seventy-two, only a few months after Congress had approved the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.^[1]

Legacy

In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} Whitman, Alden, ed (1985). American Reformers. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. pp. 734–735. ISBN 082420705X. 

• Her autobiography: The Story of a Pioneer (New York 1915).
• Pellauer, Mary D. Toward a Tradition of Feminist Theology: the religious social thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Anna Howard Shaw. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1991.

External links

• Works by Anna Howard Shaw at Project Gutenberg
• Anna Howard Shaw at Flickr
• Finding Aid for the Anna Howard Shaw Papers

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