Shaw, Anna Howard, 1847-1919

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 one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers in the United States.

Born in northern England in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1847, her family left England and immigrated to the United States. In their new country, the Shaws made several moves. After settling in the bustling port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, they uprooted again, this time to the industrial city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. A few years later, the family at last settled on a farm in rural Michigan.

In her mid-twenties, Shaw enrolled in Albion College in Albion, Michigan. She then returned to Massachusetts and enrolled in the School of Theology at Boston University. After becoming a Methodist minister, Shaw worked at the Dennis Union Church in Dennis, Massachusetts. But she was not content to stay out of the city of Boston. She started commuting back in from the Cape Cod area and pursued a medical degree at Boston University while continuing her ministry. She was only the second woman to graduate from BU’s School of Theology and the first to be ordained as a Methodist minister. She received her medical degree in 1886. Still, Shaw did not spend much time working in either field. Called to do more overtly political work, Shaw decided not to minister or heal one-on-one and left to speak to a larger base.

By the mid-1880s, Shaw was establishing herself as an advocate for temperance, a cause she took in part because of her time doing medical work in Boston. She first worked as a paid lecturer with the Massachusetts Women Suffrage Association, a position she secured through her connections with the prominent suffragist Lucy Stone. Moving up the ranks, Shaw was subsequently hired to work with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, a national organization working against the consumption of alcohol. For Shaw, temperance and women’s suffrage were not mutually exclusive causes. As Chair of the Franchise Department of the WCTU, Shaw traveled extensively to promote women’s voting rights. The WCTU believed that, with access to the ballot, women would vote for candidates who supported temperance. As she rose to prominence on the lecture circuit, Shaw was elected president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1904.

In her final years, Shaw focused on another form of national service, becoming part of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defence during World War I. This would earn her widespread acclaim and praise from President Woodrow Wilson. Still, contemporaries more likely knew her for her speeches on suffrage and temperance: Shaw is estimated to have delivered over 10,000 in her career. In July 1919, less than a month after the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification, Shaw died. She did not live to see it become law. At her bedside when she died was Lucy Elmina Anthony, Shaw’s partner of 30 years and niece of Susan B. Anthony.