Pauline Agassiz Shaw

Pauline Agassiz Shaw (February 6, 1841 – February 10, 1917) was an American philanthropist and social reformer who opened day nurseries, settlement houses, and other establishments in Boston to help new immigrants and the poor. She financed public kindergartens (one decade later this concept was adopted by the Boston Public Schools), and co-founded America's first trade school, the North Bennet Street School. She was also a vocal advocate for women's rights.

Biography Pauline Agassiz was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland on February 6, 1841. Her father was the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz. In 1850, she moved with her family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard University. It was in the United States, her father remarried Elizabeth Cabot Cary, co-founder of Radcliffe College. Her step-mother was a huge influence on Pauline's life.

In 1860, at the age of 19, Pauline married Quincy Adams Shaw. They had five children: Pauline, Marian, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Sr., Quincy Adams, and Robert Gould II.

Married to a wealthy investor from a well known Boston Brahmin family, Pauline Agassiz Shaw used her newfound wealth and social status to help Boston's poor. At the time, thousands of mostly Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants had moved to Boston's North End, many of them poor, unskilled, and non-fluent in English. To provide them with job training, she co-founded America's first trade school,

A strong advocate of women's rights, she served as president of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government for 16 years, and supported the Woman's Journal, a weekly suffrage newspaper. She and her husband also advocated for prison reform. She is memorialized at two different sites on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, one on the North End Walk and another on the Jamaica Plain walk. She is featured on two walks given by the Jamaica Plain Historical Society: The Monument Square tour which passes the plaque memorializing one of her first kindergartens and the Jamaica Pond tour which passes her home on the shores of the Pond. Plaque at Centre and Thomas Street, Jamaica Plain memorializing the site of one of Shaw's first kindergartens.