Shaw, Anna Howard, 1847-1919

Anna Howard Shaw, English-born Methodist minister, temperance lecturer, and woman suffrage leader, was vice-president (1892-1904) and president (1904-1915) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. For additional information, see Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (1971).

Anna Howard Shaw, English-born Methodist minister, temperance lecturer, and woman suffrage leader, was vice-president (1892-1904) and president (1904-1915) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. For additional biographical information, see Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (1971).

Anna Howard Shaw, English-born Methodist minister, temperance lecturer, and woman suffrage leader, was vice-president (1892-1904) and president (1904-1915) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Anna Howard Shaw was born February 14, 1847 at Newcastle upon Tyne, England. When she was four, her family moved to Massachusetts. In 1859 her father settled his wife and younger children in an unfinished cabin on Michigan's frontier while he returned east. Shaw's bitter recollections of the responsibilities that fell to her in the next decade make up the most powerful section of the memoirs she published as Story of a Pioneer (1915). Vowing to avoid dependency, Shaw prepared herself for the ministry. Educated at Albion College and Boston University Theological School, Shaw earned a diploma in 1878, and was licensed the same year by the Methodist Episcopal church. The Methodist Protestant church ordained her in 1880. While ministering at East Dennis, Massachusetts, Shaw earned an MD from Boston University Medical School in 1886. However, by the time Shaw acquired her credentials, she had lost interest in the professions they opened to her and instead desired to pursue her gift for oratory, lecturing for temperance and women's suffrage. Shaw chose Lucy E. Anthony, Susan B. Anthony's niece, as her companion for life and "Aunt Susan" sponsored Shaw's ascendancy in the National American Woman Suffrage Association as national lecturer in 1890 and vice president at large in 1892. When the United States entered World War I, Shaw interrupted her tours for suffrage to lead the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense. Congress awarded her the Distinguished Service Medal in May 1919. Shaw joined William Howard Taft and Abbott Lawrence Lowell on a national tour for the League to Enforce Peace in the late spring of 1919. At Springfield, Illinois, she collapsed with severe pneumonia and died July 2, 1919 at her home in Moylan, Pennsylvania.

Anna Howard Shaw, reformer, minister, and physician, became a lecturer for the Massachusetts State Suffrage Association in 1885. She worked closely with Susan B. Anthony and was vice-president-at-large of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1892-1904) and president (1904-1915). Upon retirement as president in 1915 she was named honorary president for life. For additional biographical information, see Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (Cambridge, Mass. 1971), which includes a list of additional sources.

There is related material at the Schlesinger Library; see Series X of the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, Anna Howard Shaw papers, 1863-1955 (M-133, reel A14-18; A-68).

Minister, physician, lecturer, and suffragist, Anna Howard Shaw was born on February 14, 1847, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, the sixth of seven surviving children of Thomas Shaw and Nicolas (Stott) Shaw. AHS described her family's move to America (first to Massachusetts and later to the Michigan wilderness), their hardships on the frontier, her determination to get an education, and her career shifts from teacher to minister to physician to social reformer in her autobiography, The Story of a Pioneer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1915).

An avid reader, AHS was largely self-taught before becoming a teacher at the age of 15. She later finished high school, and entered Albion College (Michigan) in 1873 at the age of 26. In 1878 she graduated from the divinity school of Boston University, the only woman in her class. In addition to performing various pastoral duties in the Methodist Protestant Church, AHS enrolled in Boston University's medical school in 1883, graduating with an M.D. in 1886. She became increasingly convinced that the problems she encountered in her ministry and as a physician could not be solved without major political and social reforms, and that obtaining the vote for women was a necessary first step.

Lecturing and organizing on behalf of the temperance and woman suffrage movements, AHS became one of the best-known women in the U.S. Her oratorical skills were legendary; in 1913 the National Anti- Suffrage Association forbade its members to engage in any further debate with her.

In addition to serving as vice president (1892-1904) and president (1904-1915) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, AHS was chairman of the Woman's Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense (1917-1919). For her extraordinary work and success in coordinating women's contributions to the war effort she was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the U.S. government in May 1919.

AHS died of pneumonia on July 2, 1919, in the middle of an exhausting speaking tour on behalf of the League to Enforce Peace, an organization formed to rally support for Woodrow Wilson's proposed peace treaty and League of Nations. Lucy Elmina Anthony (LEA), niece of Susan B. Anthony, was also an active suffragist. For thirty years she was friend and secretary to AHS; she shared a home in Moylan, Pa., with AHS from 1903 until the latter's death in 1919.

For additional biographical information, see The Story of A Pioneer (see above); Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Wilmer A. Linkugel, "The Speeches of Anna Howard Shaw" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1960; available from University Microfilms); and #352-368 in this series.