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 one of the first women to be ordained as a Methodist minister in the United States.

Early life

Shaw was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1847. When she was four, she and her family emigrated to the United States and settled in Lawrence, Massachusetts. When Shaw was twelve years old, her father took "up claim of three hundred and sixty acres of land in the wilderness" of northern Michigan "and sent [her] mother and five young children to live there alone." Her mother had envisioned their Reed City, Michigan home to be "an English farm" with "deep meadows, sunny skies and daisies," but was devastated upon their arrival to discover that it was a "forlorn and desolate" log cabin "in what was then a wilderness, 40 miles from a post office and 100 miles from a railroad."

Struggles during college years In 1873, Shaw entered Albion College, a Methodist school in Albion, Michigan. Since her family frowned upon her career path, they refused financial support. At that point, Shaw had been a licensed preacher for three years and earned her wages by lecturing on temperance.

After Albion College, Shaw attended Boston University School of Theology in 1876. She was the only woman in her class of forty-two men, and she always felt "the abysmal conviction that [she] was not really wanted there."

Following her ordination, Shaw received an MD from Boston University in 1886. During her time in medical school, she became an outspoken advocate of political rights for women.

Role in the women's suffrage movement 1896 photograph of Susan B. Anthony (center) and other women's rights leaders. Shaw sits to Anthony's immediate right. Suffrage Alliance Congress with Millicent Fawcett presiding, London 1909. Top row from left: Thora Daugaard (Denmark), Louise Qvam (Norway), Aletta Jacobs (Netherlands), Annie Furuhjelm (Finland), Madame Mirowitch (Russia), Käthe Schirmacher (Germany), Madame Honneger, unidentified. Bottom left: Unidentified, Anna Bugge (Sweden), Anna Howard Shaw (USA), Millicent Fawcett (Presiding, England), Carrie Chapman Catt (USA), F. M. Qvam (Norway), Anita Augspurg (Germany).

Joint effort with Susan B. Anthony Beginning in 1886, Shaw served as the chair of the Franchise Department of Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Her task was "to work for woman suffrage and then to use the ballot to gain 'home protection' and temperance legislation." However, her focus on temperance subsided as she became more heavily involved in the suffrage movement by lecturing for the Massachusetts Suffrage Association and later the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).

Shaw first met Susan B. Anthony in 1887. In 1888, Shaw attended the first meeting of the International Council of Women.

She was a speaker at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching, presenting women's suffrage as a step against lynching.

Shaw died of pneumonia at her home in Moylan, Pennsylvania at the age of 72, only a few months before Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Lucy and Anna were together for thirty years, and she was by her bedside when she died. Sarah Gertrude Banks was also close friends with Shaw.

Legacy The suffragist anthem "Votes for Women: Suffrage Rallying Song" (1915) by married couple Edward M. and Marie Zimmerman was dedicated to Shaw.

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

The Anna Howard Shaw Women's Center at Albion College.

The Anna Howard Shaw Center at Boston University School of Theology. Ten years after its founding in 1978, the Shaw Center was designated the women's center for the Northeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church."

The Anna Howard Shaw Junior High School, built in 1922–1924 in Southwest Schuylkill, Philadelphia, is named for her.

A statue of Anna Howard Shaw was erected next to the Community Library in Big Rapids, Michigan, in 1988.