Anna Howard Shaw
| Anna Howard Shaw | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
February 14, 1847 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England |
| Died | July 2, 1919 (aged 72) Moylan, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Alma mater |
Albion College, 1875 Boston University School of Theology, 1880 Boston University School of Medicine, 1886 |
| Occupation | Women's suffrage and temperance movement activist, minister and physician |
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.
Shaw was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom 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 [a] 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 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 actually a “forlorn and desolate” log cabin “in what was then a wilderness, 40 miles from a post office and 100 miles from a railroad.” Here the family faced the dangers of living on the frontier. Shaw became very active during this period, helping her siblings refurbish their home and supporting her mother in her time of shock and despair. Shaw took on several physical tasks such as "digging of a well, chopp[ing] wood for the big fireplace, [and] fell[ing] trees"
Seeing her mother's emotional suffering, Shaw blamed her irresponsible father for "ha[ving] g[iven] no thought to the manner in which [their family was] to make the struggle and survive the hardships [now laid] before [them]." While her invalid mother was overburdened with household chores", her father in Lawrence could freely dedicate "much time to the Abolition cause and big public movements of his day."
The family's misfortunes grew worse over the years. During the Civil War, her sister Eleanor died giving birth, and her brother Tom was wounded. When Shaw was fifteen, she became a school teacher and, after her older brothers and father joined the war effort, she used her earnings to help support her family. Yet with "every month of [the family's] effort, the gulf between [their] income and [their] expenses grew wider.”
As Shaw matured, her drive to attend college became firmer. After the Civil War, she abandoned her teaching job and moved in with her married sister Mary in Big Rapids, Michigan. While she would have preferred the more lucrative work of digging ditches, she was forced to pick up the "dreaded needle," and become a seamstress.
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