Anna Howard Shaw

English-born American social reformer

• Born: February 14, 1847
• Birthplace: Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, England
• Died: July 2, 1919
• Place of death: Moylan, Pennsylvania

The first American woman to hold divinity and medical degrees simultaneously, Shaw was a central figure in the crusades for political equality and women’s rights.

Early Life

As the sixth child of a fragile and despondent mother and a restless and irresponsible father, Anna Howard Shaw was not a likely prospect for fame or fortune. At the age of four, she moved with her family to the United States, settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Shortly before the Civil War, the Shaw family moved to the Michigan frontier. Anna spent her early teens cutting firewood, digging wells, caring for her sickly mother, and generally overseeing the Shaw household while her father and older brothers were away at war.

Anna pitied her mother, viewing her as a weak, lonely woman, overburdened with meaningless household chores, embittered by her plight yet unwilling or unable to escape her oppression. As a youth, Anna dreamed that she would be different. After years of indecision, Anna marshaled the courage to defy family tradition and pursue a formal education. At the age of twenty-four, despite the protests of her father, she left home to attend a high school in Big Rapids.

While in Big Rapids, Shaw met the Reverend Marianna Thompson. Inspired by this new and unusual role model, Shaw decided that she also would prepare for the ministry. Embarrassed at her decision, yet knowing that his disapproval would not stop her, her father attempted to dissuade Anna by offering to send her to the University of Michigan if she agreed to abandon her ministerial ambitions. By now a young woman with growing self-confidence, Shaw rejected her father’s offer, secured a Methodist preaching license, and enrolled at Albion College, a Methodist school in southern Michigan.

Without financial or emotional backing from her family, Shaw supported herself during her two years at Albion with occasional preaching and public temperance speaking. Buoyed by her success, Shaw left Michigan for the School of Theology of Boston University, becoming only the second female to enroll at the institution. After being graduated in 1878, she secured a pastorate in East Dennis, Massachusetts. In 1880, Shaw pursued full ordination within the Methodist Episcopal Church. Denied such ordination, she entered into fellowship with the smaller Methodist Protestant denomination, and, amid great controversy, she was ordained as an elder in October of 1880.

Having successfully entered one profession dominated by men, Shaw embarked in 1883 on a second “for men only” profession. Without giving up her pastorate, Shaw began part-time work toward a medical degree. After completing her studies in 1886, Shaw became the first American woman to hold divinity and medical degrees simultaneously.

Despite her accomplishments, Shaw during the 1880’s was undergoing a midlife crisis. Sympathetic from her youth to the plight of the disadvantaged, Shaw had entered the ministry in hopes of elevating the discouraged from their spiritual poverty. Convinced later that she must do more to relieve human suffering, she returned to medical school, and, after her graduation, requested a temporary leave from the pastoral ministry in order to serve as a paramedic in the slums of South Boston. While ministering to the emotional and physical needs of women prostitutes, Shaw concluded that the solutions to many of their problems were political. Ministers and physicians could treat the symptoms, but legislatures responding to the demands of an enlightened electorate were needed to eliminate the root causes of social injustice, poverty, and sickness.

Life’s Work

At the age of thirty-nine, Anna Howard Shaw left the preaching and healing ministry for another career. Joining first the Massachusetts Suffrage Association and later the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), Shaw became a full-time organizer and lecturer for the causes of suffrage and temperance. At the urging of Frances Willard, a fellow Methodist preacher and president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Shaw accepted the chair of the Franchise Department of the WCTU. Her task was to work for woman suffrage and then to use the ballot to gain “home protection” and temperance legislation.

In 1888, Shaw was selected as a delegate to represent both the WCTU and the AWSA at the first meeting of the International Council of Women. While at the gathering in Washington, D.C., Shaw met Susan B. Anthony, the renowned leader of the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Anthony, who at this time was looking for recruits to groom for leadership within the NWSA, was immediately impressed with Shaw’s potential. As a sturdy, spunky young woman, Shaw had the stamina for travel; as a single person, Shaw had total control of her time; as an extemporaneous preacher, Shaw had impressive oratorical skills; and as a respected religious figure, Shaw had a reputation that would soften the NWSA’s “irreligious and radical” public image.

During the convention, Anthony made Shaw her special project, flattering her and reprimanding her for not efficiently using her gifts for the cause. Unlike Willard and other “social feminists,” Anthony viewed suffrage less as a means to an end than as a fundamental right that must not be denied. As a single-issue woman, Anthony challenged Shaw not to waste her talents on temperance, but to commit herself totally to full suffrage. In response to Anthony’s challenge, Shaw shifted her allegiance from the AWSA to the NWSA and promised Anthony that suffrage would become her consuming goal.

The emerging Anthony-Shaw friendship had a profound impact on the suffrage movement. In 1889, Shaw helped to persuade the AWSA to merge with Anthony’s and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s NWSA, creating for the first time in two decades a semblance of organizational unity within the movement. Three years later, Anthony accepted the presidency of the unified National-American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and secured for Shaw the vice presidency.

The Anthony-Shaw tandem was inseparable—collaborating, traveling, even living together. An odd-looking couple, good-naturedly called by friends “the ruler and the rubber-ball,” Anthony and Shaw were strikingly different in appearance, style, and talent: Anthony was tall and thin, an unconventional, religious agnostic and organizational genius; Shaw, a roly-poly Methodist preacher with a quick wit and golden tongue. Despite, or perhaps because of their differences, they were able to extend each other’s outreach and effectiveness.

Exploiting her religious reputation and church contacts, Shaw introduced Anthony into mainline Protestant circles previous closed to Anthony and “her girls.” Anthony, in return, taught the inexperienced Shaw how to devise and execute a strategy for suffrage victory. Grooming Shaw for executive leadership, Anthony prodded Shaw to follow a strategy of moderate agitation, always pressing forward the cause of suffrage, yet never alienating the masses with unnecessary conflict. More traditional than Anthony, Shaw accepted her master teacher’s pragmatism. By the time of Anthony’s death in 1906, Shaw had learned her lessons well.

Between 1904 and 1915, Shaw served as president of the NAWSA. During this era, the organization grew from 17,000 to 200,000 members and superintended suffrage victories in eight additional states. As the organization grew, however, it also became more divided. The success of the militant suffragettes in England pressured Shaw to abandon the methods she had learned under Anthony for more militant tactics such as campaigning against the political party in power rather than individual candidates unfriendly to suffrage, picketing the White House, calling hunger strikes, and pressing for immediate suffrage elections, even if there was no prospect for victory. Although Shaw grew to accept “passive resistance,” she refused to abandon her mentor’s game plan. “I am, and always have been,” Shaw asserted in 1914, “unalterably opposed to militancy, believing that nothing of permanent value has ever been secured by it that could not have been more easily obtained by peaceful methods.”

Although Shaw’s policy of moderation raised her stature among the rank and file of the NAWSA, it also cost her respect among the more aggressive members within her executive committee. In December, 1915, at the age of 68, Shaw stepped down as president of the NAWSA, a position she had held longer than any other woman, and accepted the lifetime honorary position of president emeritus. Although official NAWSA publications attempted to cover up the internal feud, and most members never realized the depth of the disharmony, Shaw’s resignation was not voluntary. Leaving the administrative details to the returning president, Carrie Chapman Catt, Shaw began working full-time at what she did best—traveling, lecturing, and evangelizing for the suffrage cause.

In May, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Shaw to head the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense. Always an American patriot, and, like Wilson, mesmerized by the prospect of making the world safe for democracy, Shaw left the suffrage circuit to accept the appointment. For two years, she worked to mobilize American women to contribute to the war effort. Following victory in Europe, Shaw resigned as chair of the Woman’s Committee. In appreciation for her war service, President Wilson awarded her the Distinguished Service Medal of Honor, an award never before bestowed upon an American woman.

Shaw’s retirement from public service, however, was short-lived, for soon she returned to the lecture circuit—this time to win support for the League of Nations. Although her spirit was willing, the ailing Shaw was unable to withstand the strain of another campaign. Succumbing to pneumonia, Shaw died in her home in Moylan, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1919.

Significance

A Methodist clergywoman who was persuaded that Jesus Christ embodied the best attributes of both man and woman, that in Christ there was neither male nor female, and that full suffrage would adorn the coming millennial Kingdom, Anna Howard Shaw was an eternal optimist who never doubted that suffrage victory would be won. Claiming the motto Truth loses many battles, but always wins the war, Shaw spoke and acted as if the impossible was already a reality. For Shaw, full suffrage, like the coming Kingdom, could be delayed but not denied.

Shaw’s religious reputation and noted nonmilitancy made her an ideal candidate to lead the counterattack against those who opposed suffrage rights for women. In virtually every address, Shaw hammered at the “ridiculous” arguments of those who insisted that woman suffrage would destroy the home, the church, and the nation. Early in the campaign, her opponents often challenged Shaw to public debates. By 1913, however, the National Anti-Suffrage Association adopted a policy of prohibiting any of its speakers from debating Shaw. Their cause, they believed, was better served by ignoring rather than challenging the Methodist suffrage evangelist.

Following her death, newspaper editors, regardless of their stand on the woman question, united in their testimonials to Shaw. The New Haven Register eulogized Shaw as “the best beloved and most versatile of the suffrage leaders”; The Nation labeled her as “the ideal type of reformer [to represent] the despair of the anti-suffragists because she was so normal and sane, so sound and so effective”; the Philadelphia Press praised the “sense, moderation and dignity in her methods which won and held respect even of those who opposed her cause”; and the more conservative Atlanta Constitution characterized Shaw as follows: “Though an ardent suffragist, her sense of justice was so impressed upon her records that anti-suffragists and suffragists alike trusted her.” Such tributes from both suffrage friends and foes suggest that the woman widely known as the “Demosthenes of the suffrage movement” had become by the time of her death a national heroine. Despite these accolades, however, Shaw has been largely neglected by historians, and she remains the only central leader of the suffrage movement without a full-length biography.

Bibliography

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1975. A revision of an original 1959 publication, this overview remains the standard textbook on the women’s rights movement.

Linkugel, Wil A. Anna Howard Shaw: Suffrage Orator and Social Reformer. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. This introduction to Shaw includes a collection of her speeches and is an extension of Linkugel’s 1960 doctoral dissertation “The Speeches of Anna Howard Shaw.”

Pellauer, Mary D. Toward a Tradition of Feminist Theology: The Religious Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Anna H. Shaw. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1991. A monograph within the Chicago Studies in the History of American Women series, this volume analyzes Shaw’s feminist theology and compares it with the theologies of other leading feminists of the period.

Shaw, Anna Howard. The Story of a Pioneer. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915. In the absence of a full-length biography, this readable autobiography remains the best general introduction to the life of this suffrage crusader.

Spencer, Ralph W. “Anna Howard Shaw.” Methodist History 13, no. 2 (January, 1975). This article, which is derived from Spencer’s 1972 doctoral dissertation, sketches Shaw’s career, emphasizing her Methodist contacts and experiences.

Zink-Sawyer, Beverly Ann. From Preachers to Suffragists: Woman’s Rights and Religious Conviction in the Lives of Three Nineteenth-Century American Clergywomen. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Examines the lives of Shaw and two other clergywomen—Olympia Brown and Antoinette Louise Brown Blackwell—whose involvement in the women’s rights movement was an extension of their call to the ministry.